NEW YORK (AP) — President Joe Biden said Wednesday that fighting between Israel and Hezbollah threatens to become an “all-out war” as his top diplomat and other advisers worked behind the scenes pressing for a temporary cease-fire to calm an escalating conflict that has killed more than 600 people in Lebanon in recent days.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. administration was "intensely engaged with a number of partners to de-escalate tensions in Lebanon and to work to get a cease-fire agreement that would have so many benefits for all concerned.”
Blinken and other Biden advisers have spent the past three days at and on the sidelines of the annual U.N. General Assembly meeting of world leaders in New York lobbying other countries to support the plan, according to U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic conversations.
Americans hope such a cease-fire could lead to longer-term stability along the border between Israel and Lebanon. Even ahead of this week's escalation in Lebanon, months of Israeli and Hezbollah exchanges of fire across the border drove tens of thousands of people from their homes on both sides of the border.
U.S. officials said the specifics of the proposal were not yet complete. The Biden administration efforts came as the mounting hostilities between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon rekindled fears of a broader war in the Middle East.
Biden's national security adviser Jake Sullivan and senior advisers Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein have been meeting with Middle East allies in New York and have been in touch with Israeli officials about the proposal, one of the U.S. officials said. McGurk and Hochstein have been the White House’s chief interlocutors with Israel and Lebanon since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, another Iranian-backed militant group.
An Israeli official said Netanyahu has given the green light to pursue a possible deal, but only if it includes the return of Israeli civilians to their homes. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were discussing behind-the-scenes diplomacy.
A Lebanese official called them “very serious efforts,” and when asked about the possibility of a halt in the fighting taking effect Thursday, he said it was “not wishful thinking." He hinted that the deal, if reached, would start with a four-week cease-fire.
Hezbollah has maintained that it will not halt its fire until there's a truce in Gaza. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to share details with the media, said Lebanon still does not accept separating the fronts in the Palestinian territory and Lebanon but would not say if or how the proposal might deal with Gaza.
Earlier Wednesday, Biden warned in an appearance on ABC’s “The View” that “an all-out war is possible” but thinks the opportunity also exists “to have a settlement that can fundamentally change the whole region.”
Biden suggested that getting Israel and Hezbollah to agree to a cease-fire could help achieve a cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. That war is approaching the one-year mark after Hamas raids in southern Israel on Oct. 7 killed about 1,200 people. Israel responded with an offensive that has since killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, who do not provide a breakdown of civilians and fighters in their count.
“It's possible and I'm using every bit of energy I have with my team … to get this done,” Biden said. “There's a desire to see change in the region.”
The U.S. and other international mediators have tried and failed for months to broker a cease-fire in Gaza that also would release hostages held by Hamas.
The U.S. government also raised the pressure with additional sanctions Wednesday targeting more than a dozen ships and other entities it says were involved in illicit shipments of Iranian petroleum for the financial benefit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah.
Meanwhile, the chief of Israel's army said Wednesday that the military is preparing for a possible ground operation in Lebanon as Hezbollah hurled dozens of projectiles into Israel, including a missile aimed at Tel Aviv that was the militant group’s deepest strike yet.
Blinken has been urging both Israel and Hezbollah to step back from their intensifying conflict, saying that all-out war would be disastrous for the region and that escalation was not the way to get people back to their homes on the Israel-Lebanon border.
“It would be through a diplomatic agreement that has forces pulled back from the border, create a secure environment, people return home,” Blinken told NBC News. “That’s what we’re driving toward because while there’s a very legitimate issue here, we don’t think that war is the solution.”
France has called a special U.N. Security Council meeting on Lebanon for later Wednesday at which the U.S. proposal may be discussed.
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Superville reported from Washington. AP White House correspondent Zeke Miller in Washington, Josef Federman in Jerusalem and Bassem Mroue in Beirut contributed.
