International pressure to bring an end to the conflict between Israel and Hamas militants mounted Sunday as U.N. Security Council diplomats and Muslim foreign ministers convened emergency meetings.
At the virtual meeting of the Security Council, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the organization was actively engaging all parties for an immediate cease-fire, as Israeli warplanes carried out the deadliest attacks in nearly a week of Hamas rocket barrages and Israeli airstrikes.
The return to conflict between Israel and Hamas "only perpetuates the cycles of death, destruction and despair, and pushes farther to the horizon any hopes of coexistence and peace," Guterres said. Israel and Hamas fought in three previous wars.
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Eight foreign ministers spoke at the Security Council session, with most of them urging an end to the fighting.
Riad Al Malki, foreign minister of the Palestinian Authority, implicitly rebuked the United States and other world powers that have defended Israel's right to protect itself from Hamas rocket attacks. Al Malki asserted that Israel is then "further emboldened to continue to murder entire families in their sleep."
Gilad Erdan, Israel's ambassador to the U.N., who spoke after Al Malki, rejected any attempt to portray the actions of Israel and Hamas as moral equivalents.
"Israel uses missiles to protect its children," Erdan said. "Hamas uses children to protect its missiles."
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi took a jab at the U.S., saying it should join the rest of the Security Council in supporting an effort to bring calm. The Security Council has met in private twice since the conflict broke out, but it hasn't issued a joint statement because of U.S. opposition.
"We call on the U.S. to support the Security Council in easing the situation," Wang said. "It is important that Israel exercise restraint," he added, calling on Palestinians to deescalate as well.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said President Joe Biden had spoken with Israeli and Palestinian leaders and that Secretary of State Antony Blinken had also been engaging with his counterparts in the region.
Thomas-Greenfield called on Hamas to stop its rocket barrage against Israel, expressed concerns about intercommunal violence and warned against incitement on both sides.
"The human toll of this past week has been devastating," she said. "It's time to end the cycle of violence."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told citizens in a televised address Sunday that Israel "wants to levy a heavy price" on the Gaza Strip's militant Hamas rulers. That will "take time," Netanyahu said, signaling the war would rage on for now.
Representatives of Muslim-majority nations also met Sunday to demand that Israel halt attacks that are killing Palestinian civilians. Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan called for "the international community to take urgent action to immediately stop military operations."
A statement by the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation hewed closely to previous ones issued by the Saudi Arabia-based group, including backing the decades-old call for Palestinians to have their own nation with east Jerusalem as its capital.
The statement also called for Israel to respect Muslims' access to Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam, as well as stop settlers from forcibly evicting Palestinian families from their homes.
"The plight of the Palestinian people is the bleeding wound of the Islamic world today," Afghan Foreign Minister Mohammad Haneef Atmar said.
At the meeting, some criticized a U.S.-backed push under which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and other Islamic nations signed deals with Israel to normalize their relations, stepping over the wreckage of collapsed international efforts to broker long-term peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
Hamas, which seized power in Gaza in 2007, didn't take part in the meeting, which came before the consultations at the U.N. over the crisis.
U.S. RESPONSE
But as fighting in Israel and Gaza escalates and the international outcry grows, the Biden administration has declined to further deepen U.S. diplomatic involvement or ratchet up any public demands on Israel to agree to a cease-fire.
Thomas-Greenfield warned that the return to armed conflict would only put a negotiated two-state solution to the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict even further out of reach.
In Israel, Hady Amr, a deputy assistant dispatched by Blinken to try to deescalate the crisis, met with Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz, who thanked the U.S. for its support.
Blinken headed out Sunday on an unrelated tour of Nordic countries, with no announced plans to stop in the Middle East in response to the crisis. From the plane, he made calls to Egypt and other nations working to broker a cease-fire, telling Egypt that all parties "should deescalate tensions and bring a halt to the violence."
Biden's support for Israel has attracted criticism from his own party, with some Democrats arguing the administration needs to push harder to stop the violence. On Friday, a dozen Jewish Democrats wrote to Biden to demand that the U.S. address Israel's "deepening occupation" in Jerusalem.
Democrats have been increasingly divided on Israel as some on the party's left flank tie what they see as unjust Israeli policies toward the Palestinians to calls for racial justice at home.
Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, on Sunday joined Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in calling for Biden to step up pressure on both sides to end the fighting and revive talks to resolve Israel's conflicts and flash points with the Palestinians.
"I think the administration needs to push harder on Israel and the Palestinian Authority to stop the violence, bring about a cease-fire, end these hostilities and get back to a process of trying to resolve this long-standing conflict," Schiff, a California Democrat, said on CBS' "Face the Nation."
Biden administration officials have urged calm but have said nothing publicly about prodding Israel to immediately go along with a push by Egypt and others for a cease-fire. Thomas-Greenfield said U.S. diplomats were engaging with Israel, Egypt and Qatar, along with the U.N.
Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump, had thrown U.S. support solidly behind Israel, embracing Netanyahu as an ally as Trump focused on confronting Iran. Trump gave little time to efforts by past U.S. administrations to push for peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians, instead encouraging and rewarding Arab nations that signed the two-country normalization deals with Israel.
Biden calls Middle East and Central Asia conflicts a distraction from U.S. foreign policy priorities, including competition with China.
He has sought to calm some conflicts and extricate the U.S. from others, including ending American military support for a Saudi-led war in Yemen, planning to pull U.S. troops from Afghanistan and trying to return to a nuclear deal with Iran.
Biden officials haven't listed deeper Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts at the top of their agenda.
HAMAS' GAIN
Hamas last week signaled that it was ready to end this round of fighting. Analysts say the militant group wants to consolidate political gains it's made over the Palestinian Authority, with which Hamas has a rivalry over the leadership of the national movement.
By standing up to Israel with incessant rocket barrages against a much stronger enemy, the rulers of Gaza have scored points with the Palestinian public as defenders of their sacred city, said Ghassan Khatib, a former Palestinian Cabinet minister who teaches political science at Birzeit University near Ramallah in the West Bank.
"Their image was lifted dramatically," Khatib said.
Before the fighting that started last week, Israel and Hamas fought three brutal, inconclusive wars. This round is also likely to end without a clear victor, but Israel is trying to damage Hamas as much as possible before it agrees to end the fighting, diplomats and experts say.
The problem won't go away, said Tamara Cofman Wittes, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for the Middle East in the Obama administration.
The current fighting "reveals how deeply unstable is the 'status quo' between Israelis and Palestinians, and how urgently a new political path is needed to move this conflict toward negotiated resolution," she said.
Hamas, for its part in the current conflict, wants to show it can wreak damage while reclaiming the mantle of the Palestinian movement best able to stand up to Israel. But Israel doesn't appear ready to give up the fight: Hebrew and Arab media outlets have reported that Israel for now has rejected the Egyptian attempts to broker a cease-fire.
"There is full support behind the government even though we are all paying a price," said former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon. "Israel will keep hitting Hamas hard until it begs for a cease-fire and understands that it made a mistake in starting this fight with us."
Across the Arabian Peninsula, reactions to the fighting has been mixed. In Qatar, home to broadcast network Al-Jazeera, hundreds of people turned out late Saturday night to listen to a speech by Hamas' top leader, Ismail Haniyeh. Kuwait's parliament speaker reportedly spoke with Haniyeh on Saturday, as did Qatar's foreign minister.
Meanwhile, in Bahrain and the UAE, government-linked media haven't been covering the flare-up of violence nonstop like other networks in the region.
There are murmurs of dissent, though. In Bahrain, civil society groups signed a letter urging the kingdom to expel the Israeli ambassador. In the UAE, where political parties and protests are illegal, Palestinians have expressed their anger quietly, worried about losing their residency permits. Some Emiratis also have expressed concerns.
"The region's only democracy," tweeted the Emirati writer and political analyst Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi in a comment about Israel's Saturday strike on a Gaza building that housed the offices of The Associated Press and Al-Jazeera.
Hussein Ibish, a senior scholar at the Washington-based Arab Gulf States Institute, said most Gulf Arab leaders fear Hamas' rocket fire as "cynical, dangerous, unnecessarily provocative and endangering Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza alike." That takes the pressure off those Gulf leaders to respond, unlike in other confrontations involving Al-Aqsa Mosque or Israeli settlers forcing Arab families out of their homes, he said.
"There won't be much sympathy for what is widely viewed in the Gulf as Israel's heavy-handed and disproportionate retaliation," Ibish wrote, "but it will be much easier for Gulf leaders and many citizens to regard the exchange as a tragic conflagration at the expense of ordinary people brought about by two leaderships over which they have neither control nor responsibility."
Information for this article was contributed by Ellen Knickmeyer, Edith M. Lederer, Jon Gambrell and Matthew Lee of The Associated Press; by Rick Gladstone, Shashank Bengali, Marc Santora and Dan Bilefsky of The New York Times; and by David Wainer of Bloomberg News (TNS).
