New York: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday he remained hopeful of reaching a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and promised to use his remaining month in office to achieve it.
Blinken, however, declined to predict success after repeated disappointments in his government’s efforts to end 14 months of brutal war in the Palestinian territory.
“Look, I’m hopeful. You have to be. We’re going to use every minute of every day of every week that we have left to try to get this done,” said Blinken, who leaves office on January 20.
“But I don’t want to hazard a guess as to what the probability is,” he said at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“It should happen. It needs to happen. We need to get people home,” he said, referring to the release of hostages under a ceasefire deal.
Blinken, repeating an assessment made last week when he paid his 12th visit to the Middle East since the war began, said that Hamas was showing more flexibility due to losses inflicted on its patron Iran.
US President Joe Biden has faced criticism from the left of his Democratic Party for not exerting greater leverage on Israel, such as withholding more of the billions of dollars in US weapons on which it relies.
Blinken repeated his insistence that ending the war was in Israel’s interest and that there needed to be an agreement on post-war governance, rejecting Israeli hawks who back a longer-term presence in Gaza.
“If they wind up holding the bag, they’ll be dealing with an insurgency for years. That’s not in their interest,” he said of Israel.
“So Gaza has to be translated into something different that ensures that Hamas is not in any way in charge, that Israel doesn’t have to be, and that there’s something coherent that follows,” he said.
US President-elect Donald Trump has vowed unstinting support for Israel but has also voiced eagerness to secure a deal.
The war was sparked by an unprecedented Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive in Gaza has killed at least 45,097 people, a majority of them civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.
It has also reduced much of the Palestinian enclave to rubble, leaving more than 1.9 million Palestinians - about 90 percent of Gaza’s population - displaced, according to United Nations figures.
