As West Bank Violence Rises, Israel Vows to Pursue Military Goals in Gaza

By Isabel Kershner, Edward Wong and Thomas Fuller

Diplomats toured the Mideast Sunday on a mission to stop the war from widening, but tensions in the Gaza Strip spread across the region.

As the war in the Gaza Strip ended its third month on Sunday, with top diplomats touring the region to try to stop the conflict from spreading, Israel said it had broken up Hamas’s command structure in northern Gaza and signaled that it would not change its objective of dismantling the group’s capabilities across the ravaged territory.“The war must not be stopped until we achieve all of its goals — eliminating Hamas, returning all of our hostages and ensuring that Gaza will never again constitute a threat to Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the start of his weekly cabinet meeting. His message, he said, was intended for “both our enemies and our friends.”Fears of a wider war have added urgency to visits to the region by the American secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, and the European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell Fontelles.Early Sunday, even as diplomats were working to stop the fighting from spreading more broadly, a spike in violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank left about a dozen people dead, among them nine Palestinians, including a young child, an Israeli border police officer and a man from East Jerusalem, officials said. Cross-border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon, has also become a point of increasing concern.

“This is a moment of profound tension in the region,” Mr. Blinken said at a news conference in Doha, Qatar, where he travelled on Sunday after a stop in Jordan. “This is a conflict that could easily metastasize, causing even more insecurity and even more suffering.”“We have intense focus on preventing this conflict from spreading,” Mr. Blinken told reporters on Saturday, a day before meeting in Jordan with King Abdullah II. The king said he had warned the secretary of state about “catastrophic ramifications” if the war continues.Of growing concern are clashes with Iran’s proxies: skirmishes with Hezbollah along the northern border with Lebanon and attacks on ships and missiles launched at Israel by Houthis in the Red Sea. In recent days, the United States has conducted strikes on militants in Iraq and Israel is presumed to have carried out targeted assassinations in Syria and Lebanon.

Israel is under great pressure from its allies, neighbors and world leaders to curtail the fighting in Gaza, where more than 22,000 people have been reported killed in the weeks since Oct. 7, when a Hamas-led attack on Israel killed an estimated 1,200 people and set off the war.

The Biden administration has been pressing Israel to allow more aid into Gaza, where a humanitarian crisis has been unfolding since the start of the war in October. Mr. Blinken reinforced that message with a visit on Sunday to a warehouse holding boxes of canned food intended for Gaza. The desperately needed provisions are being brought into the Palestinian enclave by truck in an aid effort organized by the United Nations World Food Program.

Sheri Ritsema-Anderson, the resident U.N. coordinator in Jordan, told reporters that in her 15 years working in the Middle East, she had never seen a humanitarian situation as dire as the one in Gaza, describing it as an “epic catastrophe.” About 220 trucks of various types of aid and fuel are now going into Gaza daily, but that is only a fraction of the amount needed, she said.As the conflict reached its three-month mark, the United Nations’ emergency relief coordinator issued a plea for peace.“We continue to demand an immediate end to the war,” the U.N. official, Martin Griffiths, said, “not just for the people of Gaza and its threatened neighbors, but for the generations to come who will never forget these 90 days of hell and of assaults on the most basic precepts of humanity.”