Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in Jerusalem on Monday to discuss the spike in violence between Israel and Palestine.
Blinken urged the two sides to ease tensions and appealed for de-escalation, but he did not offer specific proposals for how they can achieve peace, nor did he say what role the United States would play in offering help. The secretary of state will meet with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday.
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“We’re urging all sides now to take urgent steps to restore calm, to de-escalate,” Blinken said after meeting Netanyahu, per the Associated Press. “We want to make sure that there’s an environment in which we can, I hope at some point, create conditions where we can start to restore a sense of security for Israelis and Palestinians alike, which of course is sorely lacking.”
Blinken’s meeting with the leaders comes amid a rise in violence and death in the region. Ten Palestinians were killed last Thursday when Israeli forces executed a raid on the Jenin refugee camp. The next day, a Palestinian gunman killed seven people outside a synagogue in an east Jerusalem settlement, according to the Associated Press, before a 13-year-old Palestinian boy shot and wounded two Israelis elsewhere in the city Saturday morning.
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CIA Director William Burns traveled to Israel and the West Bank on Friday to speak with his Israeli and Palestinian counterparts. His trip was planned before the spike in violence, however, and the deaths undoubtedly have refocused his visit and the leaders’ discussions.
The Biden administration is tasked with working with Israeli and Palestinian leaders during a time when Netanyahu’s new far-right government has promised to adopt a tough stance with Palestine and on threats from within the state, either real or perceived.
