MEZIESBLOG

America’s chief diplomat is engaged on a frantic bout of shuttle diplomacy across the Middle East with currently little to show for it. 

Antony Blinken has taken in Jerusalem, Ramallah, Amman, Baghdad and Ankara, but diplomatically speaking seems still to be on the road to nowhere. 

He has three tasks in hand – none of them going well. 

First, to persuade Israel to permit a lull in the fighting to let more aid in and hostages out – that’s been rejected, at least for now.

Second, to persuade Arab countries to think long-term solutions to end the Israel Palestine conflict. 

“Are you kidding?” said his Arab hosts – they think this really isn’t the time, with Gaza being reduced to rubble. They will also be telling him Israel must commit to ending all settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank.

Third, his mission of stopping the conflict from spreading – he is preaching to the choir here. 

No one he is meeting wants this conflict to expand, but they are not the ones likely to escalate. 

Hezbollah and Iran are the danger and for obvious reasons they are not on Blinken’s itinerary. 

Meanwhile, Israel’s unprecedented destruction of Gaza is exacerbating geopolitical fault lines across the region, making a bigger eruption of violence ever more likely. 

Israel has never done to Gaza what it is doing now. 

In one week, it dropped as many bombs on the small, densely populated strip of land as the US-backed coalition dropped on Mosul fighting Islamic State in two months. 

It has struck civilian buildings, schools, ambulances and areas where it said people should move to be safe. It says it has good military reasons for doing so, but the impact is the same. 

Pictures of dead Palestinian children lined up in their death shrouds outside Gaza hospitals and terrible scenes of destruction watched 24/7 on Arab TV news channels are galvanising public opinion across the region and the public fury of its leaders. 

The moment of danger may have passed for a wider conflict in the region, but not for the innocents in Gaza still dying in their thousands and the hundreds of hostages being held in their midst.