US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday warned of the danger of escalating tensions in the Middle East as the explosion of thousands of Hezbollah pagers threatened to derail his latest regional diplomacy initiative.
News of the blasts came as top US diplomats visited Cairo to meet senior Egyptian officials, hoping to advance efforts to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and improve relations with Egypt.
Militant group Hezbollah vowed to retaliate against Israel, accusing it of carrying out a pager bombing in Lebanon on Tuesday that killed at least 12 people, including two children, and wounded nearly 3,000.
Israel has refused to answer questions about the explosions.
Asked about the blasts, Blinken said the US was still gathering facts but that an escalation of the conflict was not in anyone’s interest.
“It is imperative that all parties avoid any actions that could escalate the conflict,” Blinken said at a news conference with his Egyptian counterpart.
He did not say who the US believes was behind the blasts.
Blinken said his focus was on securing a ceasefire deal that would bring peace to areas including Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, and that 15 of the deal’s 18 articles had been agreed to by all sides.
Blinken said making progress requires waiting too long for messages to be exchanged between the sides, allowing time for events to disrupt the talks.
“We’ve seen that in the intervening time, you can have an incident, an incident — something that makes the process more difficult, that threatens to slow it down, to stop it, to derail it — and anything of that nature, by definition, is probably not good in terms of achieving the outcome that we want, which is a ceasefire,” Blinken said.
He cited the killing of six Israeli hostages by Hamas last month. He did not name Israel, which is believed to have targeted members of groups aligned against it in Lebanon, Syria and Iran, as a factor in hampering the talks.
President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, in a meeting with Blinken on Wednesday morning, said Egypt opposes attempts to “escalate the conflict and expand its scope regionally” and called on all parties to act responsibly, Egypt’s presidential office said in a statement.
A State Department official said Blinken will travel from Cairo to Paris on Thursday for meetings with the foreign ministers of France, Italy and Britain to discuss the Middle East and Ukraine, among other issues. Blinken will also meet French President Emmanuel Macron, the official said.
Blinken will not visit Israel on this trip. This is the first time he has skipped a visit to Israel, Washington’s closest regional ally. Hamas waged a war in Gaza nearly a year ago.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said on Tuesday that this was because Washington’s goal on the trip was to discuss bilateral issues with Egypt and that the Gaza ceasefire proposal that the US and mediators have been working on was still not ready to be presented to Israel.
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