As the war in the Gaza Strip ended its third month Sunday, with top diplomats touring the region to try to stop the conflict from spreading, Israel said it had broken up Hamas’ command structure in northern Gaza and signaled that it would not change its objective of dismantling the group’s capabilities across the ravaged territory.
“The war must not be stopped until we achieve all of its goals — eliminating Hamas, returning all of our hostages and ensuring that Gaza will never again constitute a threat to Israel,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the start of his weekly Cabinet meeting. His message, he said, was intended for “both our enemies and our friends.”
Fears of a wider war have added urgency to visits to the region by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell Fontelles.
Early Sunday, even as diplomats were working to stop the fighting from spreading more broadly, a spike in violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank left about a dozen people dead, among them nine Palestinians, including a young child, an Israeli border police officer and a man from east Jerusalem, officials said. Cross-border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon, has also become a point of increasing concern.
“We have intense focus on preventing this conflict from spreading,” Blinken told reporters Saturday, a day before meeting in Jordan with King Abdullah II. The king said he had warned Blinken about “catastrophic ramifications” if the war continues.
Of growing concern are clashes with Iran’s proxies: skirmishes with Hezbollah along the northern border with Lebanon and attacks on ships and missiles launched at Israel by Houthis in the Red Sea. In recent days, the United States has conducted strikes on militants in Iraq and Israel is presumed to have carried out targeted assassinations in Syria and Lebanon.
Israel is under great pressure from its allies, neighbors and world leaders to curtail the fighting in Gaza, where more than 22,000 people have been reported killed in the weeks since Oct. 7, when a Hamas-led attack on Israel killed an estimated 1,200 people and set off the war. As the conflict reached its three-month mark, the United Nations’ emergency relief coordinator issued a plea for peace.
The Biden administration has been pressing Israel to allow more aid into Gaza.