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VIDEO | Gaza hospital explosion: both Israel and Palestinian Islamic Jihad deny responsibility – Baltic News Network

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On Tuesday, the 17th of October, a bomb ripped through the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza City, killing hundreds of people. Palestinian officials blamed the blast on an Israeli air strike, but the Israeli military says it was caused by a failed rocket attack by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which the militant group denies, reports the BBC.

Gaza’s health ministry said 500 people had been killed and hundreds more are feared trapped under the rubble.

First footages after the shelling of a hospital in the Gaza Strip. pic.twitter.com/ToLQqgTb5n

— NEXTA (@nexta_tv) October 17, 2023

The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) initially insisted it had not targeted hospitals and warned against “unverified claims”. Later, the IDF’s chief spokesman, Vice Admiral Daniel Hagari, said in a video message that “following additional checks of operational and intelligence systems, the IDF did not attack a hospital in Gaza”. He explained that the attack on the hospital was related to a rocket fired unsuccessfully by the Islamic Jihad terrorist organisation.

He said that 450 of the thousands of rockets fired at Israel since the start of the war had landed in Gaza, endangering civilians.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad denied any use of its rockets and said it had not carried out any operations in the Gaza City area during this period.

The International Committee of the Red Cross expressed shock and horror at the reports, stressing that hospitals should be places of refuge to preserve human life and calling for their protection in accordance with international humanitarian law.

“No patient should be killed in a hospital bed. No doctor should lose their life trying to save others,”

the Red Cross said in a statement.

The World Health Organization (WHO) called for the immediate protection of civilians and health facilities, while urging the Israeli army to lift evacuation orders for 20 hospitals in northern Gaza due to ongoing insecurity and the critical condition of patients.

First pictures in daylight of the Al-Ahly hospital.

It looks like the parking lot in front of the hospital took the main hit. pic.twitter.com/xyS02vblbG

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 18, 2023

The hospital bombing threatens efforts to resolve the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Jordan cancelled a meeting scheduled for Wednesday, the 18th of October, with US President Joe Biden, King Abdullah and the Palestinian and Egyptian leaders.

Biden is still on his way to Tel Aviv to reiterate his country’s “solidarity with Israel” and “firm commitment to its security”.

Read also: Biden to visit Israel and Jordan to address the ground offensive and humanitarian crisis

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In deadly day for Gaza, hospital strike kills hundreds | Reuters

GAZA, Oct 17 (Reuters) – Gaza’s health ministry spokesman said an Israeli air strike on Tuesday killed hundreds of people at a hospital in the Palestinian enclave, but Israel said a Palestinian barrage had caused the blast.

The death toll was by far the highest of any single incident in Gaza during the current violence, triggering protests in the occupied West Bank, Istanbul and Amman.

The Palestinian Authority’s health minister, Mai Alkaila, accused Israel of “a massacre” at Al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital. The strike killed hundreds of people and occurred during Israel’s intense 11-day bombing campaign in Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said “barbaric terrorists” in Gaza had attacked the hospital, not Israel’s military.

The health ministry spokesman, Ashraf Al-Qudra, said early on Wednesday that hundreds were killed and that rescue workers were still removing bodies from the rubble. In the first hours after the blast, a Gaza civil defence chief said 300 people were killed, while health ministry sources put the figure at 500.

Israeli Military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters rockets fired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group passed by the hospital at the time of the strike, which he said hit the facility’s parking lot.

Another spokesman, Lieutenant-Colonel Jonathan Conricus, told CNN the military intercepted a conversation in which militants acknowledged a misfire. He said the military would release a recording of the conversation.

Islamic Jihad denied that any of its rockets were involved in the hospital blast, saying it did not have any activity in or around Gaza City at that time. Iran-backed Islamic Jihad took part in the Hamas-led assault on Israel on Oct. 7 and, like Hamas, has fired numerous salvoes of rockets into Israel.

News of the hospital strike and high death toll prompted condemnation from many countries on the eve of U.S. President Joseph Biden’s visit to Israel. Russia and the United Arab Emirates demanded a U.N. Security Council meeting and clashes erupted in the West Bank.

Earlier on Tuesday the United Nations said an Israeli strike had hit one of its schools where at least 4,000 people were sheltering. The agency said six people were killed and dozens injured by the strike. Israel’s military said it was looking into that report.

While briefing reporters, Hagari cast doubt on the Palestinian death count in the hospital strike and claimed there was no direct hit on the facility. He said military drone footage showed “a kind of hit in the parking lot.”

[1/4]An injured person is assisted at Shifa Hospital after hundreds of Palestinians were killed in a blast at Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza that Israeli and Palestinian officials blamed on each other in Gaza City, Gaza Strip, October 17, 2023. REUTERS/Mohammed Al-Masri Acquire Licensing Rights

He said the military did have an Israeli air force operation in the area around the time of the hospital blast, “but it was with a different kind of ammunition that does not … fit the footage that we have (of) the hospital.”

On the death count, Hagari said: “I don’t know how many people (were) hit here, even. Nobody can verify it yet.”

STRIKE DRAWS CONDEMNATION

Biden said he was “outraged and deeply saddened by the explosion” at the hospital and loss of life. In a statement, he said he spoke with the leaders of Jordan and Israel and “directed my national security team to continue gathering information about what exactly happened.”

Health authorities in Gaza said prior to Tuesday’s incident at least 3,000 people had been killed in Israel’s 11 days of bombing since Hamas militants rampaged into Israeli towns on Oct. 7, killing more than 1,300 soldiers and civilians.

Displaced people fleeing the Israeli bombardment have flocked to hospitals, seeking refuge around them in hopes they will be safer.

Last week Israel ordered all people living in the northern half of the Gaza Strip, which is only 45 km (25 miles) long and home to 2.3 million people, to leave their homes and go south.

However, the air strikes have pounded targets throughout the enclave and despite expectations of an Israeli ground offensive, some displaced people have started returning north.

The World Health Organisation said the attack on the hospital was “unprecedented in its scale”. It said earlier on Tuesday there had been 115 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza and the majority of its hospitals were not functioning.

Israel has cut off all power, water, food, fuel and medicine supplies into Gaza since the Hamas attack, intensifying an existing blockade of the enclave.

Countries including Canada, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan and Qatar condemned the strike on the hospital.

In the West Bank, where the internationally recognised Palestinian Authority operates, Palestinian protesters clashed with Palestinian security forces, who fired tear gas to disperse them. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas cancelled a meeting with Biden.

  • Aftermath of hospital blast in Gaza City

  • German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visits Israel

  • Aftermath of hospital blast in Gaza City

  • Aftermath of hospital blast in Gaza City

Reporting By Moaz Abd-Alaziz, Nidal al Mughrabi and Ali Sawafta; Additional reporting by Emily Rose; Writing by Angus McDowall; Editing by Cynthia Osterman

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

A senior correspondent with nearly 25 years’ experience covering the Palestinian-Israeli conflict including several wars and the signing of the first historic peace accord between the two sides.

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Biden says Gaza hospital blast ‘appears as though it was done by the other team’ and not Israel

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TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — President Joe Biden vowed to show the world that the U.S. stands in solidarity with Israelis during his visit there Wednesday, and offered an assessment that the deadly explosion at a Gaza Strip hospital apparently was not carried out by the Israeli military.

“Based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you,” Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a meeting. But Biden said there were “a lot of people out there” who weren’t sure what caused the blast.

Biden didn’t offer details on why he believed the blast was not caused by the Israelis. The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said an Israeli airstrike caused the destruction and hundreds of deaths. The Israeli military denied involvement and blamed a misfired rocket from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another militant group. However, that organization also rejected responsibility.

Biden had been scheduled to visit Jordan after the stop in Israel, but meetings there with Arab leaders were called off after the hospital explosion. And his remarks spoke both of the horrors the Israelis had endured, but also the growing humanitarian crisis for Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

He told Netanyahu he was “deeply saddened and outraged” by the hospital explosion. He stressed that “Hamas does not represent all the Palestinian people. and it has brought them only suffering.”

Biden spoke of the need to find ways of “encouraging life-saving capacity to help the Palestinians who are innocent, caught in the middle of this.”

But he also said Hamas had “slaughtered” Israelis in the Oct. 7 attack that killed 1,400 people. Biden described at length the horror of the killing of innocent Israelis, including children.

“Americans are grieving, they really are,” Biden said. “Americans are worried.”

Netanyahu thanked Biden for coming to Israel, telling him the visit was “deeply, deeply moving.”

“I know I speak for all the people of Israel when I say thank you Mr. President, thank you for standing with Israel today, tomorrow and always.”

Netanyahu said Biden had rightly drawn a clear line between the “forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism,” saying Israel was united in its resolve to defeat Hamas.

“The civilized world must unite to defeat Hamas,” he said.

Biden also planned to meet Israeli first responders and the families of victims and hostages. Netanyahu met Biden at Ben Gurion Airport and the two embraced. It was almost exactly a month ago that they sat together at the United Nations General Assembly, where Netanyahu marveled that a “historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia” seemed within reach.

The possibility of improved relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors appears to be dimming; Israel has been preparing for a potential ground invasion of Gaza in response to Hamas’ attacks.

Roughly 2,800 Palestinians have been reported killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza. Another 1,200 people are believed to be buried under the rubble, alive or dead, health authorities said.

Those numbers predate the explosion at the Al-Ahli hospital on Tuesday. No clear cause has been established for the blast.

Protests swept through the region after the blast at the hospital, which had been treating wounded Palestinians and sheltering many more who were seeking a refuge from the fighting.

Hundreds of Palestinians flooded the streets of major West Bank cities including Ramallah. More people joined protests that erupted in Beirut, Lebanon and Amman, Jordan, where an angry crowd gathered outside the Israeli Embassy.

Outrage scuttled Biden’s plans to visit Jordan, where King Abdullah II was to host meetings with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi. But Abbas withdrew in protest, and the summit was subsequently canceled outright.

Jordan declared three days of mourning after the hospital explosion. Kirby said Biden understood the move was part of a “mutual” decision to call off the Jordan portion of his trip. He said Biden would speak to the Arab leaders by phone as he returned to Washington.

Ayman Safadi, Jordan’s foreign minister, told a state-run television network that the war is “pushing the region to the brink.”

Even without the Jordan summit, it’s possible Biden could make headway toward de-escalating the conflict. Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian U.N. ambassador, said Tuesday that Biden was “capable of telling Israel, Enough is enough.”

“You have to stop this carnage against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. Let this stop. Let humanitarian assistance take place,” he said. “Do not displace two million Palestinians and push them in the direction of Jordan and then let’s begin a political horizon.”

There are also fears that a new front could erupt along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah operates. The Iran-backed organization has been skirmishing with Israeli forces.

Always a believer in the power of personal diplomacy, Biden’s trip will test the limits of U.S. influence in the Middle East at a volatile time. It’s his second trip to a conflict zone this year, after visiting Ukraine in February to show solidarity with the country as it battles a Russian invasion.

The visit to Israel coincides with rising humanitarian concerns in Gaza, where Israel has cut off the flow of food, fuel and water. Mediators have been struggling to break a deadlock over providing supplies to desperate civilians, aid groups and hospitals.

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 develop a plan on how aid can enter Gaza and be distributed to civilians.

Although only a modest accomplishment on the surface, U.S. officials stressed that Blinken’s talks led to a significant change in Israel’s position going in — that Gaza would remain cut off from fuel, electricity, water and other essential supplies.

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.

___

Long reported from Washington. AP Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Associated Press writers Chris Megerian, Will Weissert and Darlene Superville in Washington and Edith M. Lederer in New York contributed to this report.

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An Invasion of Gaza Would Be a Disaster for Israel

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In the early morning of October 13, the Israeli military issued a warning to the 1.2 million Palestinians of northern Gaza: they must evacuate within 24 hours, in advance of a probable ground invasion. Such an Israeli assault would have the avowed goal of ending Hamas as an organization in retaliation for its shocking October 7 surprise attack into southern Israel, where it massacred over 1,000 Israeli citizens and seized over a hundred hostages.

An Israeli ground campaign has seemed inevitable from the moment Hamas breached the security perimeter surrounding the Gaza Strip. Washington has fully backed Israeli plans, notably refraining from urging restraint. In an overheated political environment, the loudest voices in the United States have been those urging extreme measures against Hamas. In some cases, commentators have even called for military action against Iran for its alleged sponsorship of Hamas’s operation.

But this is precisely the time that Washington must be the cooler head and save Israel from itself. The impending invasion of Gaza will be a humanitarian, moral, and strategic catastrophe. It will not only badly harm Israel’s long-term security and inflict unfathomable human costs on Palestinians but also threaten core U.S. interests in the Middle East, in Ukraine, and in Washington’s competition with China over the Indo-Pacific order. Only the Biden administration—channeling the United States’ unique leverage and the White House’s demonstrated close support for Israeli security—can now stop Israel from making a disastrous mistake. Now that it has shown its sympathy with Israel, Washington must pivot toward demanding that its ally fully comply with the laws of war. It must insist that Israel find ways to take the fight to Hamas that do not entail the displacement and mass killing of innocent Palestinian civilians.

UNSTEADY STATE

The Hamas attack upended the set of assumptions that have defined the status quo between Israel and Gaza of nearly two decades. In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip but did not end its de facto occupation. It retained full control over Gaza’s borders and airspace, and it continued exercising tight control (in close cooperation with Egypt) from outside the security perimeter over the movement of Gaza’s people, goods, electricity, and money. Hamas assumed power in 2006 following its victory in legislative elections, and it consolidated its grip in 2007 after a failed U.S.-backed effort to replace the group with the Palestinian Authority.

Since 2007, Israel and Hamas have maintained an uneasy arrangement. Israel keeps up a stifling blockade over Gaza, which severely restricts the territory’s economy and imposes great human costs while also empowering Hamas by diverting all economic activity to the tunnels and black markets it controls. During the episodic outbreaks of conflict—in 2008, 2014, and again in 2021—Israel massively bombarded the densely populated Gazan urban centers, destroying infrastructure and killing thousands of civilians while degrading Hamas’s military capabilities and establishing the price to be paid for provocations. All of this did little to loosen Hamas’s grip on power.

Israeli leaders had come to think that this equilibrium could last indefinitely. They believed that Hamas had learned the lessons of past adventurism through Israel’s massively disproportionate military responses and that Hamas was now content to maintain its rule in Gaza even if that meant controlling the provocations of smaller militant factions, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The difficulties the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) experienced in a brief ground offensive in 2014 tempered its ambitions to attempt more. Israeli officials waved off perennial complaints about the humanitarian effects of the blockade. Instead, the country was content to keep Gaza on the back burner while accelerating its increasingly provocative moves to expand its settlements and control over the West Bank.

Israeli leaders had come to think the status quo could last indefinitely.

Hamas had other ideas. Although many analysts have attributed its shifting strategy to Iranian influence, Hamas had its own reasons to change its behavior and attack Israel. Its 2018 gambit to challenge the blockade through mass nonviolent mobilization—popularly known as the “Great March of Return”—ended with massive bloodshed as Israeli soldiers opened fire on the protesters. In 2021, by contrast, Hamas leaders believed that they scored significant political gains with the broader Palestinian public by firing missiles at Israel during intense clashes in Jerusalem over Israeli confiscation of Palestinian homes and over Israeli leaders’ provocations in the al Aqsa mosque complex: one of Islam’s holiest sites, which some Israeli extremists want to tear down to build a Jewish temple.

More recently, the steady escalation of Israeli land grabs and military-backed settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank created an angry, mobilized public, one that the United States—and the Israel-backed Palestinian Authority—seemed unable and unwilling to address. Highly public U.S. moves to broker an Israeli-Saudi normalization deal may also have appeared like a closing window of opportunity for Hamas to act decisively, before regional conditions turned inexorably against it. And, perhaps, the Israeli uprising against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial reforms led Hamas to anticipate a divided and distracted adversary.

It is still unclear the extent to which Iran motivated the timing or nature of the surprise attack. Certainly, Iran has increased its support to Hamas in recent years and sought to coordinate activities across its “axis of resistance” of Shiite militias and other actors opposed to the U.S.- and Israeli-backed regional order. But it would be an enormous mistake to ignore the broader, local political context within which Hamas made its move.

TIPPING POINT

Israel initially responded to the Hamas attack with an even more intense bombing campaign than normal, along with an even more intense blockade, where it cut off food, water, and energy. Israel mobilized its military reserves, bringing some 300,000 troops to the border and preparing for an imminent ground campaign. And Israel has called on Gaza’s civilians to leave the north within 24 hours. This is an impossible demand. Gazans have nowhere to go. Highways are destroyed, infrastructure is in rubble, there is little remaining electricity or power, and the few hospitals and relief facilities are all in the northern target zone. Even if Gazans wanted to leave the strip, the Rafah crossing to Egypt has been bombed—and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has shown few signs of offering a friendly refuge.

Gazans are aware of these facts. They do not see the call to evacuate as a humanitarian gesture. They believe that Israel’s intention is to carry out another nakba, or “catastrophe”: the forced displacement of Palestinians from Israel during the 1948 war. They do not believe—nor should they believe—that they will be allowed to return to Gaza after the fighting. This is why the Biden administration’s push for a humanitarian corridor to allow Gazan civilians to flee the fighting is such a uniquely bad idea. To the extent that a humanitarian corridor accomplishes anything, it would be to accelerate the depopulation of Gaza and the creation of a new wave of permanent refugees. It would also, fairly clearly, offer the right-wing extremists in Netanyahu’s government a clear road map for doing the same in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

This Israeli response to the Hamas attack comes from public outrage and has thus far generated political plaudits from leaders at home and around the world. But there is little evidence that any of these politicians have given serious thought to the potential implications of a war in Gaza, in the West Bank, or in the broader region. Neither is there any sign of serious grappling with an endgame in Gaza once the fighting begins. Least of all is there any sign of thinking about the moral and legal implications of the collective punishment of Gazan civilians and the inevitable human devastation to come.

The invasion of Gaza itself will be laced with uncertainties. Hamas surely anticipated such an Israeli response and is well prepared to fight a long-term urban insurgency against advancing Israeli forces. It likely hopes to inflict significant casualties against a military that has not engaged in such combat in many years. (Israel’s recent military experiences are limited to profoundly one-sided operations, such as this July’s attack on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank.) Hamas has already signaled gruesome plans to use its hostages as a deterrent against Israeli actions. Israel could win a quick victory, but it seems unlikely; moves that might accelerate the country’s campaign, such as bombing cities to the ground and depopulating the north, would come with major reputational costs. And the longer the war grinds on, the more the world will be bombarded with images of dead and injured Israelis and Palestinians, and the more opportunities there will be for unexpected disruptive events.

Gazans have nowhere to go.

Even if Israel does succeed in toppling Hamas, it will then be faced with the challenge of governing the territory it abandoned in 2005 and then mercilessly blockaded and bombed in the intervening years. Gaza’s young population will not welcome the IDF as liberators. There will be no flowers and candy on offer. Israel’s best-case scenario is a protracted counterinsurgency in a uniquely hostile environment where it has a history of failure and in which people have nothing left to lose.

In a worst-case scenario, the conflict will not remain confined to Gaza. And unfortunately, such an expansion is likely. A protracted invasion of Gaza will generate tremendous pressures in the West Bank, which President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority may be unable—or, perhaps, unwilling—to contain. Over the last year, Israel’s relentless encroachment on West Bank land, and the violent provocations of the settlers, has already brought Palestinian anger and frustration to a boil. The Gaza invasion could push West Bank Palestinians over the edge.

Despite overwhelming Israeli anger at Netanyahu for his government’s nearly unprecedented strategic failure, opposition leader Benny Gantz has helped solve Netanyahu’s major political problems at no evident cost by joining a national unity war cabinet without the removal of the right-wing extremists Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. This decision is significant because it suggests that the provocations in the West Bank and Jerusalem, which Ben-Gvir and Smotrich spearheaded last year, will only continue in this unsettled environment. In fact, it could accelerate, as the settler movement seeks to take advantage of the moment to attempt to annex some or all of the West Bank and displace its Palestinian residents. Nothing could be more dangerous.

Serious conflict in the West Bank—whether in the form of a new intifada or an Israeli settler land grab—alongside the devastation of Gaza, would have massive repercussions. It would lay bare the grim truth of Israel’s one-state reality to a point where even the last diehards could not deny it. The conflict could trigger another Palestinian forced exodus, a new wave of refugees cast into already dangerously overburdened Jordan and Lebanon or forcibly contained by Egypt in enclaves in the Sinai Peninsula.

BEYOND THE PALE

Arab leaders are realists by nature, preoccupied with their own survival and their own national interests. Nobody expects them to sacrifice for Palestine, an assumption that has driven American and Israeli policy under both former U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. President Joe Biden. But there are limits to their ability to stand up to a furiously mobilized mass public, particularly when it comes to Palestine. Saudi Arabia might very well normalize relations with Israel, that curious obsession of the Biden administration, when there are few political costs to doing so. It is less likely to do so when the Arab public is bombarded with gruesome images from Palestine.

In years past, Arab leaders routinely allowed anti-Israel protests as a way to let off steam, diverting popular anger toward an external enemy to avoid criticism of their own dismal records. They will likely do so again, leading cynics to wave off mass marches and angry op-eds. But the Arab uprisings of 2011 proved conclusively how easily and quickly protests can spiral from something local and contained into a regional wave capable of toppling long-ruling autocratic regimes. Arab leaders will not need to be reminded that letting citizens take to the streets in massive numbers threatens their power. They will not want to be seen taking Israel’s side.

Their reluctance, in this climate, to cozy up to Israel is not simply a question of regime survival. Arab regimes pursue their interests across multiple playing fields, regionally and globally, as well as at home. Ambitious leaders seeking to expand their influence and claim leadership of the Arab world can read the prevailing winds. The last few years have already revealed the extent to which regional powers such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey have been willing to defy the United States on its most critical issues: hedging on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, keeping oil prices high, building stronger relations with China. These decisions suggest that Washington should not take their continued loyalties for granted, particularly if U.S. officials are seen as unequivocally backing extreme Israeli actions in Palestine.

Not since the American invasion of Iraq has there been such clarity about the fiasco to come.

Arab distancing is far from the only regional shift the United States risks if it continues down this path. And it is far from the most frightening: Hezbollah could also easily be drawn into the war. Thus far, the organization has carefully calibrated its response to avoid provocation. But the invasion of Gaza may well be a redline that would force Hezbollah to act. Escalation in the West Bank and Jerusalem almost certainly would be. The United States and Israel have sought to deter Hezbollah from entering the fight, but such threats will only go so far if the IDF continuously escalates. And should Hezbollah enter the fray with its formidable arsenal of missiles, Israel would face its first two-front war in half a century. Such a situation would be bad not just for Israel. It is not clear that Lebanon, already laid low by last year’s port explosion and economic meltdown, could survive another Israeli retaliatory bombing campaign.

Some U.S. and Israeli politicians and pundits seem to welcome a wider war. They have, in particular, been advocating for an attack on Iran. Although most of those advocating for bombing Iran have taken that position for years, allegations of an Iranian role in the Hamas attack could widen the coalition of those willing to start a conflict with Tehran.

But expanding the war to Iran would pose enormous risks, not only in the form of Iranian retaliation against Israel but also in attacks against oil shipping in the Gulf and potential escalation across Iraq, Yemen, and other fronts where Iranian allies hold sway. Recognition of those risks has thus far restrained even the most enthusiastic Iran hawks, as when Trump opted against retaliation for the attack on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq refineries in 2019. Even today, a steady stream of leaks from U.S. and Israeli officials downplaying Iran’s role suggests an interest in avoiding escalation. But despite those efforts, the dynamics of protracted war are deeply unpredictable. The world has rarely been closer to disaster.

CRIMES ARE CRIMES

Those urging Israel to invade Gaza with maximalist goals are pushing their ally into a strategic and political catastrophe. The potential costs are extraordinarily high, whether counted in Israeli and Palestinian deaths, the likelihood of a protracted quagmire, or mass displacement of Palestinians. The risk of the conflict spreading is also alarmingly large, particularly in the West Bank and Lebanon but potentially far wider. And the potential gains—beyond satisfying demands for revenge—are remarkably low. Not since the American invasion of Iraq has there been such clarity in advance about the fiasco to come.

Nor have the moral issues been so clear. There is no question that Hamas committed grave war crimes in its brutal attacks on Israeli citizens, and it should be held accountable. But there is also no question that the collective punishment of Gaza, through blockades and bombing and the forced displacement of its population, represents grave war crimes. Here, too, there should be accountability—or, better yet, respect for international law.

Although these rules may not trouble Israeli leaders, they pose a significant strategic challenge to the United States in terms of its other highest priorities. It is difficult to reconcile the United States’ promotion of international norms and the laws of war in defense of Ukraine from Russia’s brutal invasion with its cavalier disregard for the same norms in Gaza. The states and peoples of the global South far beyond the Middle East will notice.

The Biden administration has made very clear that it supports Israel in its response to the Hamas attack. But now is the time for it to use the strength of that relationship to stop Israel from creating a remarkable disaster. Washington’s current approach is encouraging Israel to launch a profoundly misbegotten war, promising protection from its consequences by deterring others from entering the battle and by blocking any efforts at imposing accountability through international law. But the United States does this at the cost of its own global standing and its own regional interests. Should Israel’s invasion of Gaza take its most likely course, with all its carnage and escalation, the Biden administration will come to regret its choices.

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