US bets on Gaza cease-fire talks as assassinations tilt Mideast toward bigger war

The Biden administration is clinging to the stubbornly elusive goal of a cease-fire deal to end the fighting in Gaza, even as a pair of assassinations blamed on Israel may have undercut the effort and brought the Middle East closer to a full-on regional war.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stressed to reporters on Wednesday that their main focus is still on diplomacy between Israel and the Hamas militant group, with Blinken casting it as key to bringing calm on other fronts.

“The best way to bring the temperature down everywhere, put us on a better path, is through a cease-fire in Gaza,” Blinken said in an interview in Singapore. “That will have, I think, important effects on other areas where you could see conflict — whether it’s in the north of Israel and Lebanon, whether it’s Iran, whether it’s in the Red Sea with the Houthis.”

The American officials’ remarks came as two killings in recent days have shaken up an already volatile region: that of Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. Israel has claimed credit for the first assassination and is suspected in the second. The early Wednesday killing of Haniyeh in particular could affect the cease-fire talks because he was involved in the negotiations, and Iran has already vowed retribution.

The Biden team’s emphasis on the Gaza cease-fire talks underscores how much the U.S. is counting on those conversations as the linchpin to preventing a broader regional war — and that U.S. officials don’t appear to have a serious plan B. Options such as convincing Hamas leaders to surrender and go into exile have been floated but don’t appear realistic at the moment.

The negotiations between Israel and Hamas have faltered in recent weeks as both sides have asked for new concessions and amid a lack of trust that either will stick to the terms of what’s supposed to be a multi-phase deal.

A senior Biden administration official declined to describe U.S.-Israeli conversations about the Haniyeh strike, but acknowledged that when it comes to the Gaza cease-fire talks, “it did not make our jobs any easier.”

Senate Armed Services Chair Jack Reed (D-R.I.). questioned whether Israel — whose leaders, especially Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have at times appeared lukewarm about a cease-fire before destroying Hamas — are intentionally trying to undercut the talks given that Haniyeh was one of the negotiators.

“The concern is is this going to cause an escalation because in downtown Beirut they took somebody out, and in downtown Tehran they took someone out,” Reed said. “The question is what effect will it have on negotiations. I don’t think it will help it, I think it will set it back. That might be part of the logic of the attack on him too.”

Without some sort of truce, U.S. officials fear Israel and Hamas will ratchet up the violence, with Israel in particular deciding that the only way to eventually calm Gaza is through more fighting now.

That could lead to escalation by other groups that are already exchanging fire with Israel, including Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen, and pull the whole region into a conflagration. In particular, it could lead to direct battles between Israel and Iran.

In the months since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which killed some 1,200 people, Israel has fought the Palestinian militants but also engaged in multiple rounds of talks with them about temporary truces and hostage releases, including one major successful effort.

The violence between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah forces in Lebanon has reached new heights in recent months, but the U.S. has pursued indirect talks on that front as well. That’s even though American officials believe that Hezbollah won’t back down in its faceoff with Israel until after Hamas agrees to a cease-fire with the Israelis.

An alleged Hezbollah strike that killed a dozen children at a soccer field in the Golan Heights has thrown a wrench on every front. That attack — which Hezbollah denied responsibility for — is what is thought to have led Israel to carry out the strike in Beirut against Shukr.

The U.S. perceived the strike in the Lebanese capital as a standard, proportional response for the killing of the children, according to two U.S. officials, although it was unclear how Hezbollah would respond. Like others, the officials were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive issues.

The attack in Iran could have far larger implications.

The White House did not receive a heads-up about it, one of the officials said. Blinken appeared to confirm this, saying, “this is something we were not aware of or involved in.” Israel has stayed silent on the strike, but U.S. officials have not yet received information that would suggest another player carried it out.

One obvious question is why Israel would take out Haniyeh now.

The assassination of the Hamas political leader will make intermediaries and hosts of Hamas feel “a bit like the rug is being pulled out from under them,” said Nathan Brown, a George Washington University professor who previously served as an adviser for the committee drafting the Palestinian constitution.

Israel still wants to move forward with a cease-fire deal with Hamas in the coming weeks, according to an Israeli official. The official added, however, that the momentum Israel and the U.S. gained at the beginning of July, when Hamas signaled it was ready to work toward finalizing a deal, has fallen off.

By mid-July, both sides were asking for additional concessions. The Israelis wanted to increase the number of live hostages that would be released under the pact. Hamas wanted Israel to agree to withdraw all of its forces from Gaza, not just from certain populated areas. The negotiating team met again in Rome last week, but did not make significant progress. More talks are expected this week, the senior administration official said.

While Israel stands by its public statements that it does not want to go to war with Iran, it sees the situation with Hezbollah — one of Iran’s most powerful proxies in the region — as one that will only continue to escalate. Israelis have been left feeling that the Shiite militia had “really crossed the line” with its strike that killed the children, the Israeli official said.

“You have a situation where each of the parties believes that in order to deter the other, they have to climb the ladder. And so where we are today with Hezbollah is a different place then where we were … six months ago,” the Israeli official said.

That sentiment matches some analysts’ observations that Israel may be operating on the theory that the best way to get Hamas and Hezbollah to back down and agree to pause hostilities is to demonstrate its strength.

This tactic is often called “escalate to deescalate.”

“Israel is saying by these strikes: We’d prefer to wind all this down diplomatically but if we cannot achieve our goals that way, we will escalate as we would prevail — and that you know we would,” said James Jeffrey, a former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Turkey and Albania.

Netanyahu also has personal reasons to drag out the fighting.

The Israeli leader is under pressure from far-right figures critical to sustaining his governing coalition not to cede an inch to Hamas and to be more defiant against the Islamist regime in Tehran. Many U.S. officials also suspect that Netanyahu — who is facing corruption charges — feels that continuing the fighting is the best way for him to stay in power and out of jail.

Hamas-controlled health institutions say Israel has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza since Oct. 7; those numbers include militants and civilians.

But “there’s always a risk” in acts of escalation such as the strike against Haniyeh, said Alper Coşkun, former director general for international security affairs at the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “Hitting such a target in Tehran really pushes the limits.”

This is not the first time Israel has made a sensitive move against Iran since Oct. 7.

In April, it struck what Iran said was one of its diplomatic facilities in Damascus, Syria, killing several top Iranian military officials. Iran responded by launching hundreds of missiles and rockets at Israel — an unprecedented direct attack from Iran against Israel, not just via Iran’s proxies elsewhere in the region.

The U.S., Israel and some Arab states intercepted the vast majority of the projectiles, limiting the damage to Israel. Israel then carried a small counterstrike against Iran. But the faceoff was essentially contained.

Biden’s allies in Congress were scrambling Wednesday to make sense of the latest events. Reed confirmed that Gen. Erik Kurilla, the head of U.S. Central Command, was supposed to brief lawmakers on the Middle East on Wednesday but the gathering was postponed due to the assassinations.

Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) was critical of the decision to assassinate Haniyeh. “It’s reinforcing the Netanyahu approach, which is to do everything his way without consultation with the U.S., yet expecting the U.S. to back him up with every decision he makes,” Welch said.

Hawkish Republicans, meanwhile, cheered Haniyeh’s death.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the Senate Intelligence Committee’s ranking member, said “Iran has no right to protest” because it has plotted to assassinate former President Donald Trump and Iranian dissidents.

“The world’s a better place with that guy gone,” Rubio said.

Matt Berg, Miles J. Herszenhorn and Paul McLeary contributed to this report.