Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken visited a warehouse in Jordan on Tuesday where workers were loading trucks for the first attempt to send medical and food aid overland from Jordan to the Israel-Gaza border crossing of Erez. He praised the start of the new aid corridor and also said a pier being built by the U.S. military to bring aid by sea to coastal Gaza would be operational in about one week.
"This is real and important progress, but more still needs to be done," he said told reporters traveling with him across the Middle East this week. "And in particular, we have to make sure our focus is not on inputs, but on impact and really measuring whether the aid that people need is getting to them in an effective way."
Distribution of aid in Gaza has been a challenge, especially in the devastated northern part of the strip. That has been made more difficult by the fact that the Biden administration recently said the United States had stopped giving money to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the main aid agency operating in the strip, after Israel accused some of its workers of taking part in the Oct. 7 attacks in southern Israel.
The trucks bound for Erez are organized by the Jordan Hashemite Charity Organization, and the aid has been donated by various international groups. The first of these trucks were scheduled to leave the warehouse near the city of Zarqa, Jordan, on Tuesday night and to arrive at Erez on Wednesday, when Mr. Blinken will be in Israel to speak with Israeli officials. Workers put wooden pallets of boxes of aid onto the trucks using forklifts.
Shortly before arriving at the warehouse in the early evening, Mr. Blinken met with several Palestinian women who had left Gaza during the war and who still have family members there.
"I heard the suffering that they endured and that their friends and family continue to endure every day," Mr. Blinken said.
Mr. Blinken also called on Hamas to commit to an agreement to release some civilian hostages in exchange for a temporary cease-fire and the liberation of scores of Palestinian prisoners.
The Biden administration is trying to increase pressure on Hamas to accept the deal. Israeli officials said this week that they were willing to lower their demand for the number of hostages in an initial release to 33 from 40.
Mr. Blinken discussed the proposed deal at meetings in Saudi Arabia on Monday and again in Jordan on Tuesday. He planned to do the same in Israel on Wednesday, according to State Department officials.
After arriving in Jordan on Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Blinken first went to separate meetings with the foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, and with King Abdullah II.
Matthew Miller, a State Department spokesman, said Mr. Blinken and the Jordanian king discussed the cease-fire proposal along with Jordan's humanitarian aid contributions to Gaza.
On his seventh trip to the Middle East since the war began last October, Mr. Blinken and his aides have been trying to work on a range of issues, including Israel's continuing need for U.S. weapons, the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza and a plan for a political solution to the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Before he went to the aid warehouse on Tuesday, Mr. Blinken also met with Sigrid Kaag, the United Nations coordinator for Gaza, to discuss humanitarian aid needs in Gaza.
"This is a critical moment in making sure that everything that needs to be done is actually being done," Mr. Blinken said at the start of the meeting.
In talks with Jordanian officials, Mr. Blinken also spoke about issues involving the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, which governs the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The Biden administration has called for a more technocratic Palestinian Authority, which is considered by many Palestinians to be authoritarian and corrupt, in the hopes that it could help govern postwar Gaza — an idea that Israel's government opposes. Jordanian officials have close ties with Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the authority, and other prominent Palestinians in the organization. Mr. Blinken has not met with Mr. Abbas on his trip.
No comments:
Post a Comment