AMMAN: Jordan’s king on Sunday urged US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to push for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and an end to the humanitarian crisis as war raged on into a fourth month.
Blinken was in Amman as part of a Mideast tour that started on January 4, with a mission to prevent the Israeli-Hamas war from spreading.
A statement from Jordan's royal palace said King Abdullah warned Blinken during their meeting against “the catastrophic repercussions of continuation of the aggression against Gaza, underlining the necessity of ending the tragic humanitarian crisis” there.
The king reiterated “the important role of the United States in bringing pressure for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, protecting civilians, and guaranteeing delivery” of medical and humanitarian aid, the statement said.
Washington has twice exercised its veto at the United Nations Security Council over cease-fire calls, drawing outrage in the Arab world, and Blinken has bypassed Congress to rush weapons to Israel.
He and other US officials have, however, become increasingly vocal about the need for Israel to protect civilians in Gaza, where the Hamas-run health ministry says 22,835 people have been killed since October 7.
The war began with Hamas’s attack on Israel which resulted in the deaths of around 1,140 people, according to an AFP tally based on the latest official Israeli figures.
Militants also took around 250 people hostage, 132 of whom remain captive, Israel says.
On Sunday, the Israeli army pounded the Palestinian territory without letup. Gun battles also intensified between Israeli forces and Hamas fighters in the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis as well as in central districts of the densely populated Palestinian enclave.
Israeli bombardments had killed at least 113 people in the past 24 hours, said the Health Ministry in the besieged territory, with two journalists among the victims when their car was struck in Rafah.
The war has left Gazans desperately in need of humanitarian aid.
Blinken, seeking to get more aid into besieged Gaza, visited the World Food Programme’s regional coordination warehouse near the Jordanian capital.
Inside the warehouse, stocked with pallets of canned food aid, the senior UN official in Jordan, Sheri Ritsema-Anderson, described the situation in Gaza, unlike anything she had seen during 15 years in the Middle East.
It is “catastrophic,” she said.
Blinken said “it is imperative that we maximize assistance to people in need,” by getting the aid and distributing it effectively.
“We’ll be working on that as well in the days to come,” he said at the warehouse.
King Abdullah, whose country signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, also reaffirmed the need for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian question and underlined Jordan’s “total rejection” of any forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Blinken assured the king that the US also opposes the forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza or the occupied West Bank.
“Palestinian civilians in the West Bank from extremist settler violence,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a statement.
Washington also insists on a two-state solution, a proposal rejected by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Some of his cabinet members have even called for Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza to leave.
Regional tensions have soared since Tuesday when a strike in a Beirut stronghold of the Iran-backed Hezbollah movement, a Hamas ally, killed Hamas’s deputy leader Saleh Al-Arouri. A US Defense Department official has told AFP that Israel carried out the strike.
Blinken arrived in Jordan from Turkiye and Greece, where he said there is “real concern” over the Israel-Lebanon border, which even before the Aruri strike had seen regular exchanges of fire largely between Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah movement, and Israeli forces.
“We want to do everything possible to make sure that we don’t see escalation there” and to avoid an “endless cycle of violence,” Blinken said.
The European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell carried a similar message on a visit to Beirut Saturday.
“It is imperative to avoid regional escalation in the Middle East. It is absolutely necessary to avoid Lebanon being dragged into a regional conflict,” Borrell said.
Blinken also traveled on Sunday to Qatar and to Abu Dhabi.
(With Agencies)
