Blinken will need to convince both Israel and Washington’s Arab allies, whose foreign ministers he is planning to meet at a summit the State Department is organizing in the Jordanian capital Amman on Saturday, a senior Arab diplomat and a US official said on condition of anonymity.
The Biden administration is pitching “temporary and localized” humanitarian pauses to increase the flow of aid in the Strip and to more safely evacuate civilians out of harm’s way, a second US official said, adding that they could also give Hamas an opportunity to get a better account of the roughly 240 hostages it kidnapped into Gaza during its October 7 onslaught, in which the terrorists massacred 1,400 people in Israel, most of them civilians slaughtered amid brutal atrocities.
The hostages are believed to be scattered in tunnels throughout the Hamas-run enclave, with some of them held by Palestinian Islamic Jihad and possibly other terrorists, and Hamas has at times claimed not to know where they all are. If Hamas doesn’t have a clear idea of where all the hostages are amid the chaos caused by the fighting, it’s harder for it to hold negotiations over their release, the official said.
In the meantime, Reuters reported that the US is flying surveillance drones over the Gaza Strip to help gather intelligence on the locations of the hostages, which are believed to include roughly 10 Americans. READ MORE