CAIRO: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken embarked on a Middle East mission on Wednesday as strain showed in the relationship between President Joe Biden's administration and the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In Gaza, where hopes were dashed for a ceasefire in the nearly six-month-old war in time for Ramadhan last week, residents of Gaza City in the north described the most intense fighting for months around the Al Shifa hospital.
Blinken was due in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday and Cairo on Thursday to talk to regional leaders about efforts to secure a truce.
Unusually, no stop in Israel was announced at the outset of his trip, and Israel's foreign ministry said on Tuesday it had not been notified to prepare for one.
A U.S. State Department official did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether a stop in Israel might be added to the itinerary later. Blinken has visited Israel on each of his five previous visits to the region since the war began.
Recent days have seen an intensification of fighting in northern parts of Gaza captured by Israeli forces early in the war, including Al Shifa, once Gaza's biggest hospital, now one of the few even partially functioning in the north.
The Israeli prime minister on Tuesday rebuffed a plea from Biden to call off plans for a ground assault of Rafah, the city on the southern edge of Gaza sheltering more than half the enclave's 2.3 million people.
Netanyahu told lawmakers he had made it "supremely clear" to Biden in a phone call "that we are determined to complete the elimination of these battalions in Rafah, and there's no way to do that except by going in on the ground".
Israel says Rafah is the last major holdout of armed fighters from Palestinians. Washington says a ground assault there would be a "mistake" and cause too much harm to civilians.
More than a million Gazans, ordered into Rafah earlier in the war by advancing Israeli forces, have nowhere further to flee. Israel says it has a plan to evacuate them.
Long-running ceasefire talks have resumed this week in Qatar after Israel rejected a counter-proposal last week. Both sides have discussed a truce of around six weeks during which Palestinian groups would release around 40 Israeli captives in return for hundreds of Palestinian detainees.
But despite months of talks mediated by the United States, Egypt and Qatar, they still differ on what would follow any truce. — AFP
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