GAZA: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday the Zionist-Hamas conflict was not “escalating” across the Middle East, while the Zionist entity pounded southern Gaza more than three months into the war. Wrapped up a whistlestop tour of the region, Blinken met in Cairo with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, a key mediator in efforts to end the war.

“I don’t think the conflict is escalating” as regional stakeholders do not want that, Blinken told reporters before take-off. “(The Zionist entity) doesn’t, Lebanon doesn’t. I actually don’t think Hezbollah does,” the top diplomat said of the powerful Lebanese group, a Hamas ally, which has exchanged regular fire with Zionist forces across the border since the start of the war.

In a visit to Beirut, US envoy Amos Hochstein said both Lebanon and the Zionist entity “prefer a diplomatic solution” to curb border tensions. Violence involving Hezbollah and other Iran-backed armed groups in Iraq, Syria and Yemen has spiked since early October, stoking fears of the conflict spiraling.

The UN Security Council on Wednesday adopted a resolution that demanded Yemen’s Tehran-aligned Houthi rebels “immediately cease” attacks which have disrupted Red Sea shipping. The Hamas press office on Thursday reported 62 killed in Zionist strikes overnight, including around Gaza’s main southern city of Khan Yunis.

In Gaza’s southern city of Rafah, on the border with Egypt and overrun with displaced people fleeing violence further north, Palestinians mourned their dead and hoped the ICJ could render justice on their behalf. “(The Zionist entity) considers itself above the law,” said Hisham Al-Kullah, holding a dead baby whose body was one of several to arrive at Rafah’s Al-Najjar hospital. Another mourner, Mohammad Al-Arjan, expressed hope that “the court stops the war”.

The United Nations estimates 1.9 million Gazans have been uprooted by the war. In Rafah, where many families now shelter in makeshift tents against the winter cold, displaced Palestinian Abdul Aziz Saadat said the war “has not spared anyone”.

The war has triggered an acute humanitarian crisis, with a Zionist siege sparking shortages of food, water, fuel and medicine in Gaza, home to 2.4 million people. The UN humanitarian office said in a report that “access denials” and other constraints blocked most aid deliveries that had been planned this month.

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Wednesday said there are “nearly insurmountable challenges” to aid delivery in Gaza amid bombardment, movement restrictions, fuel shortages and interrupted communications. The WHO says only a few Gaza hospitals are even partly functioning.

In Rafah, former Gaza health ministry staffer Zaki Shaheen converted his shop into a makeshift clinic in a bid to ease pressure on overburdened hospitals. “We receive no less than 30 or 40 cases per day, morning to night. I’ll be sleeping, then someone comes in with an injury or a burn, so we treat them,” he told AFP.

In Cairo, Blinken said movement towards a Palestinian state, alongside a rapprochement between the Zionist entity and Arab countries, is the way to isolate the Zionist entity’s sworn enemy Iran and its proxies. - AFP