Palestinians huddling under bombardment in Gaza said on Monday they hoped a visit to the region by the U.S. secretary of state would finally deliver a truce, in time to head off a threatened new Israeli assault on the last refuge at the enclave’s edge.
Antony Blinken arrived in Riyadh at the start of his first Middle East trip since Washington brokered an offer, with Israeli input, for the first extended ceasefire of the war.
The offer, delivered to Hamas last week by Qatari and Egyptian mediators, awaits a reply from militants who say they want more guarantees it will bring an end to the four-month-old war in the Gaza Strip.
“Impossible to say if we’ll get a breakthrough, when we’ll get a breakthrough,” a senior U.S. official told reporters during the flight to the Saudi capital. “The ball right now is in Hamas’ court.”
Beyond the truce itself, Blinken aims to win backing for U.S. plans for what would follow: rebuilding and running Gaza, and ultimately for a Palestinian state – which Israel now rejects – and for Arab countries to normalise ties with Israel.
“If we get a humanitarian pause, we want to be in a position to move as quickly as possible on the various pieces of ‘day after’,” the U.S. official said.
Washington also seeks to prevent further escalation elsewhere in the Middle East, after days of U.S. air strikes against pro-Iranian armed groups across the region.
British defence minister Grant Shapps told parliament on Monday that the air strikes had depleted the ability of Yemen’s Houthis’ to target Red Sea shipping but the threat was “not fully diminished”.
Israel has pressed on with its offensive and threatened a new ground assault on Rafah, a small city where over half Gaza’s 2.3 million people are now penned against the enclave’s southern border with Egypt.