US more passive than usual in Middle East

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration is taking a more hands-off approach than usual during a week of dramatic escalation between Israel and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, with top U.S. officials refraining from full-scale crisis diplomacy for fear of escalating the situation.

The public restriction follows the explosions of militant groups' pagers and walkie-talkies and an Israeli airstrike targeting a senior Hezbollah official in Beirut that threaten to spark all-out war between Israel and its Middle East foes and doom already faltering negotiations for a ceasefire in the Hamas conflict in Gaza.

The escalation came even as two Biden administration officials visited the region this week to call for calm. It reinforces the impression that the far-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is paying increasingly less attention to its main ally’s mediation efforts, despite its reliance on the United States for arms supplies and military support.

The United States is like a deer caught in the headlights, said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow on U.S. foreign policy at the Middle East Institute think tank in Washington. In terms of words, deeds and actions … they are not drivers of events, but reactions to events.

Since senior White House official Amos Hochstein visited Israel on Monday to warn of escalation, the United States has not had any public contact with Mr. Netanyahu. The first wave of explosions, widely blamed on Israel, occurred the following day, but Israel has not acknowledged responsibility.

The Gaza cease-fire negotiations were at such a delicate point that Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited only Egypt during a trip to the region this week because traveling to Israel to support a deal could prompt Netanyahu to say something that undermines the U.S.-led mediation, U.S. officials said.

Asked whether the United States still had hope for a Gaza deal, which the administration sees as crucial to easing the regional conflict, President Joe Biden said Friday that he still did and that his team was pushing for it.

“If I ever said it wasn’t realistic, we might as well walk away,” Biden told reporters. “A lot of things don’t seem realistic until we do them. We have to persevere.”

Meanwhile, the White House and the State Department have declined to comment publicly on the Hezbollah devices that exploded Tuesday and Wednesday, killing at least 37 people and wounding thousands more, including civilians, in what analysts say was a highly sophisticated Israeli intelligence operation.

They also did not provide an assessment of Friday's airstrike in a densely populated area of ​​Beirut, the deadliest such strike on the Lebanese capital in years, which killed a Hezbollah commander. The Israeli military said 15 other members were also killed. Lebanon's Health Ministry said Saturday that the strike killed at least 31 people, including seven women and three children.

Netanyahu and Hamas have followed previous rounds of direct U.S. diplomatic contacts with fiery rhetoric or surprise attacks that the United States sees as an obstacle to efforts toward a truce.

Blinken appeared to cite pager explosions as the latest example.

“When the mediators appear to be making progress on a Gaza deal, there is often an incident, something that makes the process more difficult, that threatens to slow it down, to stop it, to derail it,” Blinken said in Egypt, responding to reporters' questions about the pager attacks.

U.S. officials familiar with the discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the Netanyahu administration’s strategy may still have high-level contacts with him when he travels to New York for next week’s U.N. General Assembly meeting. But the officials also acknowledge that the situation has become so precarious that taking a public stance, either in support of Israel or in criticism of it, would likely do more harm than good.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said no when asked whether the Biden administration's months of visits to the Middle East without a cease-fire agreement were making Blinken and other officials look like fools in regional capitals.

“So far, we've been successful in preventing this from turning into an open regional war,” Miller said. He credited U.S. messages sometimes passed through proxies to Iran, its allied militias in the region and Israel.

The Biden administration said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had been in contact this week with his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant. Gallant's position, however, is reportedly under threat.

Critics accuse the administration of trying to push through a Gaza deal that has repeatedly failed to win buy-in from the warring parties and has been overtaken by the worsening conflict. The administration could do more diplomatically, including by stepping up efforts to rally Middle Eastern countries to step up pressure on Israel, Iran and its proxies to stop fighting, said Katulis, an analyst at the Middle East Institute.

U.S. officials have rejected claims that they have given up on a ceasefire in Gaza or preventing the conflict from spreading to all-out war in Lebanon.

“We would be the first to acknowledge that we are no closer to achieving that than we were a week or two ago,” national security spokesman John Kirby said Friday.

But nobody is giving up, Kirby said, reiterating that the United States was working with fellow mediators Qatar and Egypt to develop a final proposal on Gaza to present to Israel and Hamas. We're going to continue to work hard. We're going to continue to try to make progress.

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Associated Press journalist Aamer Madhani contributed to this report.

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