Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: As the United States frantically tried to contain the fallout of the 10-day-old Hamas-Israeli war from spreading across the Middle East and beyond, Tehran warned Tel Aviv of escalation. “Our hands are on the trigger.”
Amid the catastrophe-like situation, and spiraling death count beyond 4,000 on both sides, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged Sunni terror group Hamas to immediately release all 200-odd Israeli and other hostages without preconditions and appealed to Israel to allow rapid and unimpeded access to humanitarian aid for civilians in the Gaza Strip.
The Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, home to about 2.3 million people, is under a total blockade and Israel cut off all supplies of food, and water after the hostilities broke out. It also mobilized some 360,000 reservists to assist regular forces in the conflict.
This triggered a rising humanitarian crisis in the enclave, amid fleeing Palestinians, and enraged Muslims across the world. This anger has built up community pressure on these countries’ rulers to act against Israel.
But Iran also discovered an opportunity in the Gaza Strip’s crisis. By supporting Hamas, it is trying to divert the attention of its own angry people, particularly women, who launched a massive, nationwide agitation against the entrenched religious dictatorship in September 2022, demanding freedom from clergy.
Iran’s warning came as Israel readied for a long haul in the Gaza Strip with its armed forces amassing huge piles of arms and ammunition for ground attack across the borders as hundreds of thousands of panicked Gazans fled to the southern areas waiting to enter Egypt through the Rafah Crossing.
Iran warned Israel of escalation if it failed to end the aggression against Palestinians, with its foreign minister claiming that other parties in the region were also ready to act, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.
“If the Zionist aggressions do not stop, the hands of all parties in the region are on the trigger,” Hossein Amirabdollahian said.
On Sunday, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to “demolish Hamas” as his military prepared to barge into the Gaza Strip looking for Hamas terrorists who killed hundreds of Israelis and took around 200 hostages and whose deadly rampage through Israeli border towns shocked the world on October 7.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei claimed Tehran was not involved in the militant Hamas group’s attack, but hailed what he called Israel’s “irreparable” military and intelligence defeat.
Israel has long accused Iran’s theocratic Shia rulers of stoking violence by supplying arms to Hamas. Tehran claims it gives moral and financial support to Hamas, who control the Gaza Strip.
Backing the Palestinian cause has been a pillar of the Islamic Republic of Iran since the 1979 revolution and a way the Shi’ite-dominated country has fashioned itself as a leader of the Sunni-dominated Muslim world as well.
Amiabdollahian, who last week accused Israel of planning “genocide” by enforcing a complete siege in the Gaza Strip, said an attack on Gazans would “open new fronts of resistance” in the Middle East.
“The responsibility for the possible opening of new fronts of resistance in the region and any escalation of today’s war directly falls on the United States and the Zionist regime (Israel),” Amirabdollahian said.
He also met with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Saturday last week in Qatar, where they discussed the terror group’s deadly attack on Israel “and agreed to continue cooperation” to achieve the group’s goals, the Iran-backed Hamas said in a statement.
Earlier, Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi, in a telephone conversation, urged his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron to help “prevent oppression” of Palestinians.
Meanwhile, Israel denied reports of a ceasefire in southern Gaza and said it was determined to launch a ground assault across the Gaza Strip to annihilate Hamas forever.
But America is worried. Fearing that the escalation of this conflict could make the Middle East an inferno, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is following the ‘shuttle diplomacy’ of Henry Kissinger in the 1970s and 1980s to dissuade the Gulf nations to keep away from the mutually destructive religious war.
The US, which has already deployed two of its best and largest aircraft carriers—USS Gerald R Ford and USS Eisenhower—into the Eastern Mediterranean Sea to give Israel a protective shield, is also trying to diplomatically douse the fire from spreading further.
The Arab states are “determined” to not let the Hamas-Israel war spread to the region, he was reported as saying.
The top US diplomat arrived in Israel on Thursday last, amid Tel Aviv’s preparation for a massive ground offensive in the Gaza Strip, and has also been to Qatar, Jordan, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.
Blinken is set to return to Israel on Monday to talk “about the way forward” after several days of shuttle diplomacy between Arab states, which he said shared the US determination to ensure Israel’s conflict with Hamas does not spillover elsewhere in the region, the media reported.
“There’s a determination in every country I went to, to make sure that this conflict doesn’t spread,” Blinken told reporters as he prepared to leave Cairo. “They are using their own influence, their own relationships, to try to make sure that this doesn’t happen.”
Blinken met with Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) in Riyadh on Sunday and then the Egyptian President in Cairo, where he received a blunt assessment from Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Israel’s response to the Hamas attack that killed 1,300 Israelis.
MBS stressed the need to stop the conflict, and respect international law, including by lifting the Israeli blockade on Gaza, Saudi state news agency SPA reported.
“The (Israeli) reaction went beyond the right to self-defense, turning into collective punishment for 2.3 million people in Gaza,” Abdel Fattah al-Sisi told Blinken in televised remarks.
Israeli jets and artillery have already subjected Gaza to the most intense bombardment it has ever seen, putting the enclave under total siege.
International diplomacy has been focused on preventing a spillover of the conflict, particularly into Lebanon. Worried, the US has been specifically trying to deter Iran, which backs both Sunni Hamas and Lebanon’s Shia Hezbollah groups. Hezbollah and Israel have already been exchanging border fire over the past week.