US to push for Gaza ceasefire despite assassination setback
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A Palestinian mother holds the body of her baby girl, who was killed in an Israeli air strike on a refugee camp in Khan Younis on July 28.
PHOTO: EPA-EFE
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US officials are still pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza but concede it is harder than ever after a suspected Israeli strike killed a top Hamas leader in Tehran, according to people familiar with the Biden administration’s thinking.
The viability of the months-long US effort to secure a pause in the Israel-Hamas war and free Israeli hostages was thrown into question after an attack in Tehran early on July 31 killed Ismail Haniyeh,
“This attack, while justified, will be a setback for talks,” said Ms Emily Harding, a former director for Iran on the US National Security Council who is now an expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
“Israel has been under tremendous pressure to bring home the remaining hostages, so they must have calculated that the operational benefit of killing Haniyeh was greater than the prospect of successful hostage exchange.”
Key Arab nations involved in the ceasefire talks also said the killing complicates efforts to secure a truce between Israel and Hamas, which the US has designated a terrorist organisation.
Egypt, which has acted as a mediator, said the timing and lack of progress on the talks indicate “the absence of Israeli political will to calm the situation”.
Qatar’s Prime Minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, posted on X: “How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?”
Israel has not officially claimed responsibility for the killing of Haniyeh, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has vowed to eliminate every Hamas official since the Oct 7 attack that triggered the war in Gaza.
Pursuing a ceasefire deal has been the Biden administration’s policy for months, and the administration does not appear to have an alternative path.
“I can tell you that the imperative of getting a ceasefire – the importance that that has for everyone – remains,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in an interview with CNA on July 31, adding that the US was not informed of the strike in advance. “We will continue to labour at that for as long as it takes to get there.”
Mr John Kirby, a spokesman for the US National Security Council, told reporters that “we are obviously concerned about escalation”, although “we don’t believe that an escalation is inevitable, and there is no sign that an escalation is imminent”.
“It is too soon to know what any of these reported events could mean for the ceasefire deal,” he said, adding that it “doesn’t mean we are going to stop working on it”.
The administration’s position “will be fundamentally unchanged”, said Mr Jonathan Lord, a former Pentagon official and director of the Middle East security programme at the Centre for a New American Security. “It is going to doggedly pursue a deal, continue to tactically limit any escalatory response from Iran and its proxies and partners, and support Israel’s ability to defend itself.”
Limiting the risks of wider escalation will be a challenge. The killing came just hours after an Israeli strike that killed one of Hezbollah’s top leaders in Beirut, increasing the prospect of a wider war in the Middle East.
On July 31, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, spoke of retaliation, vowing that Israel has “prepared the ground for its severe punishment”.
Talks ‘frozen’
The talks between Israel and Hamas will probably be “frozen for the time being” as the militant group will wait “to see what happens with Iran and Hezbollah first”, Mr Ryan Bohl, a Middle East and North Africa analyst at Rane, a risk consultancy for investors, said to Bloomberg Television.
In April, after Israel killed two Iranian generals in the Syrian capital Damascus, Tehran fired some 300 missiles and drones at Israel, its first direct attack. Israel and its allies, including the US, blocked most of the incoming fire.
The latest assassinations are likely to further fuel criticism in the US and elsewhere that Israel’s leaders are avoiding a truce for domestic political reasons.
“The assassination of Haniyeh is likely to put an end to the current state of negotiations,” said Mr Dan Mouton, a former National Security Council official and a fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative.
“Ending negotiations may be politically advantageous for some inside Israel who do not want to grapple with the need to form a post-conflict government or the inevitable independent investigation into the Oct 7 attack,” he said. BLOOMBERG
