WASHINGTON, US
Jordan called off the president’s planned summit in Amman with Arab leaders after a deadly explosion at a Gaza hospital killed hundreds. Biden now will visit only Israel and will postpone his travel to Jordan, a White House official says.
President Joe Biden’s efforts
to tamp down tensions in the escalating war between Israel and Hamas faced
massive setbacks even before he departed for the Middle East on Tuesday, as
Jordan called off the president's planned summit with Arab leaders after a deadly
explosion at a Gaza hospital killed hundreds.
Biden now will visit only
Israel and will postpone his travel to Jordan, a White House official said as
Biden departed.
The postponement of the Amman
summit comes after Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas withdrew from the scheduled
meetings in protest of the attacks, which the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza
blamed on an Israeli airstrike. The Israeli military said it had no involvement
and pinned the blame on a misfired Palestinian rocket.
“This war and this aggression
are pushing the region to the brink,” Ayman Safadi, Jordan’s foreign minister,
told al-Mamlaka TV, a state-run network. He said Jordan would only host the summit
when all participants agreed on its purpose, which would be to “stop the war,
respect the humanity of the Palestinians, and deliver the aid they deserve.”
The cancellation reflects an
increasingly volatile situation that will test the limits of American influence
in the region as Biden visits Wednesday.
Biden’s decision to put
himself in a conflict zone — the same year he made a surprise visit to Ukraine
— demonstrates his willingness to take personal and political risks as he
becomes heavily invested in another intractable foreign conflict with no clear
end game and plenty of opportunity for things to spiral out of control.
The high-stakes presidential
trip is emblematic of Biden’s belief that the United States should not turn
back from its central role on the global stage and his faith that personal
diplomacy can play a decisive role.
“This is how Joe Biden
believes politics works and history is made,” said Jon Alterman, a senior vice
president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who worked on
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while Biden was a member.
There's been no water, fuel or
food delivered to Gaza since the brutal Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that killed more
than 1,400 Israelis and triggered the unfolding war. Mediators have been
struggling to break a deadlock over providing supplies to desperate civilians,
aid groups and hospitals.
As the humanitarian crisis
grows, so too does the concern of a spiraling conflict that stretches beyond
the borders of Gaza. There have already been skirmishes on Israel’s northern
border with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed group that’s based in
Southern Lebanon.
“There’s a lot that can go
wrong on this trip,” Alterman said.
Biden's travels will be rife
with security concerns, and visits by other U.S. officials have been disrupted
by rocket launches into Israel. Additional Israeli airstrikes in Gaza could
also prompt more condemnation at a time when Biden is intending to demonstrate
solidarity with the United States' closest ally in the region.
The U.S. has subtly shifted
its message over the past week, maintaining full-throated support for Israel
while slowly turning up the diplomatic volume on the need for humanitarian
assistance in Gaza, as Biden and aides have heard increasingly dire predictions
about the potential for images of suffering Palestinians to ignite protests and
broader unrest throughout the Middle East.
U.S. officials said it has
become clear that already limited Arab tolerance of Israel’s military
operations would evaporate entirely if conditions in Gaza worsened.
Their analysis projected that
outright condemnation of Israel by Arab leaders would not only be a boon to
Hamas but would likely encourage Iran to step up its anti-Israel activity,
adding to fears that a regional conflagration might erupt, according to four
officials who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to
discuss internal administration thinking.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony
Blinken, bouncing back and forth between Arab and Israeli leadership ahead of
Biden's visit, spent seven and a half hours meeting Monday in Tel Aviv in an
effort to broker some kind of aid agreement and emerged with a green light to
create a plan on how aid can enter Gaza and be distributed to civilians.
It was on the surface a modest
accomplishment, but U.S. officials stressed that it represented a significant
change in Israel’s position going in — that Gaza would remain cut off from
fuel, electricity, water and other essential supplies.
Biden has a long track record
of showing public support for Israel while expressing concerns privately to the
Israelis about their behavior.
“He believes the only way to
get inside the Israelis’ heads is to demonstrate profound empathy, but also to
be there,” Alterman said.
In the U.S., Biden has won
rare praise from Republicans over his leadership on Israel, but prospects for
providing additional aid are uncertain. The administration has said it would
ask for more than $2 billion in aid for both Israel and Ukraine, though House
Republicans remain in disarray.
Still, Biden is committed to
both Ukraine and Israel.
“We’re the United States of
America, for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in the history of the world,”
he said this week on CBS' “60 Minutes” when asked whether the wars in Israel
and Ukraine were more than the U.S. can take on at once. “We have the capacity
to do this and we have an obligation to. ... And if we don’t, who does?”
In Israel, Biden was expected
to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials. His
plans to then meet in Jordan with King Abdullah II, Egyptian President Abdel
Fattah el-Sissi and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas were scrapped.
The Israel-Palestinian
conflict has been ongoing for decades, and to a large extent, it's involved the
same cadre of men. Netanyahu is the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli
history. Abbas has been Palestinian president for nearly 20 years. Abdullah II
has been king since 1999 — Biden has called the Jordanian king a loyal ally in
a “tough neighborhood." El-Sissi is the newest leader, president since
2014.
It's important for these
leaders, too, to avoid a prolonged and engulfing regional escalation, particularly
as Egypt and Jordan face growing economic tumult.
In September, the
International Monetary Fund issued a report saying that Egypt and Jordan are
among the countries in the region that “stand at the brink of a debt crisis.”
Egypt in particular is struggling with high inflation.
Neither nation wants to absorb
refugees. Jordan already has a large Palestinian population, and the country is
coping with hundreds of thousands of refugees from neighboring Syria, Iraq and
elsewhere.
With tens of thousands of
troops massed along the Israel-Gaza border, Israel has been expected to launch
a ground invasion — but plans remain uncertain. U.S. officials have refused to
say whether the Israelis were holding off in order for Biden to visit.
“We are preparing for the next
stages of war,” Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Richard Hecht said. “We
haven’t said what they will be. Everybody’s talking about a ground offensive.
It might be something different.”
Meanwhile, the death toll is
mounting even without the war's next stage. Israeli strikes on Gaza have killed
at least 2,700 people and wounded more than 9,700, according to the Gaza Health
Ministry. Nearly two-thirds of those killed were children, a ministry official
said.
Another 1,200 people across
Gaza are believed to be buried under the rubble, alive or dead. More than 1
million Palestinians have fled their homes — roughly half of Gaza’s population
— and 60% are now in the approximately 8-mile-long (14-kilometer-long) area
south of the evacuation zone, according to the United Nations.
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