Washington: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken Sunday said there is intense fighting going on in the Gaza area and the focus right now is on helping Israel recover the territory that has been taken by Hamas militant group, noting that the issue of intelligence failure would be probed into a bit later.
Israel witnessed a surprise and unprecedented multifront attack – by air, land, and sea – by Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, in its southern parts Saturday morning.
More than 600 people, including soldiers, have been killed so far and more than 2,000 injured in Israel — the deadliest day for the country in at least 50 years. In the Gaza Strip, there are more than 300 deaths and about 1,500 wounded in Israel’s counterattack, media reports said Sunday.
“The challenge for Israel and the challenge for all who support Israel and oppose horrific acts of terrorism is again to take measures that provide for accountability for that’s happened and also to do our best to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. That is likely to take some time. It’s fraught with very difficult decisions for the Israelis to make,” Blinken told ABC News in an interview.
This is the worst attack on Israel since the Yom Kippur War in 1973, 50 years ago, he told CNN in another interview.
“I don’t want to speculate, get into hypotheticals, …this is our 24-hour or so into this. As I said, there remains intense fighting in the Gaza area. And the focus has to be on helping Israel recover the territory that has been taken briefly by Hamas, protecting its citizens and taking whatever measures are necessary to avoid this repeating itself,” Blinken said, a day after Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on Israel.
“This is a massive terrorist attack that is gunning down Israeli civilians in their towns, in their homes, and as we’ve seen so graphically, literally dragging people across the – the border with Gaza, including a Holocaust survivor in a wheelchair, women and children. So, you can imagine the impact this is having throughout Israel. And the world should be revolted at what it’s seen,” he said.
The United States, he said, has immediately engaged its Israeli partners and allies. President Joe Biden was on the phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a day earlier Saturday to assure him of full American support.
“I was on the phone with the Israeli president, the foreign minister. The entire government has been engaged throughout the region and well beyond, both to build support for Israel and to make sure that every country was using whatever means it has, whatever influence it has, to pull Hamas back and also to make sure that we don’t see conflict erupt in other areas. The president sent a very clear message that no one should try to take advantage of this elsewhere,” he said.
When asked about the intelligence failure, Blinken said that there will be time to look at that and to make determinations about what may have been missed. “Right now, the focus has to be on the effort to repel the aggression by the Hamas terrorists to – to push them back and to put Israel in a position where this doesn’t happen again,” he said.
“We have a very close relationship with Israeli intelligence, as well as with the Israeli military, as well as with Israel more broadly. This is something that they and we will be looking at. But the effort right now has to be in dealing with the aggression from Hamas with these attacks,” Blinken said.
There remains intense fighting around Gaza, he said, adding that the intensity of the fighting is real. About 1,000 Hamas militants have infiltrated Israel. Most of them seem to have either been killed or have gone back into Gaza. But intense fighting remains, said the top US diplomat.
Responding to a question, Blinken told CNN that there’s a long relationship between Iran and Hamas. “In fact, Hamas wouldn’t be around in the way that it is without the support that it’s received from Iran over the years. In this specific instance, we have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there’s certainly a long relationship,” he said.
“It’s one of the reasons why we have been resolutely taking action against Iran and its support for terrorists and terrorist proxies and other groups over the last few years of this administration. We’ve sanctioned more than 400 Iranian individuals and entities, precisely because of their support for things like Hamas,” Blinken said.
PTI
