Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hosts Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Jerusalem, May 1st, 2024. (Haim Zach/GPO)
Blinken described Israeli society as ‘traumatized’ and unwilling to send aid to Gaza after the savage Hamas attack on October 7.
By Vered Weiss, World Israel News
In the days following Hamas’s brutal assault on Israel on October 7, outgoing US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told The New York Times that he threatened to hold up US President Joe Biden’s visit if Israel didn’t immediately transfer humanitarian aid to Gaza.
He described Israeli society as “traumatized” and unwilling to send aid to Gaza after the savage Hamas attack.
Blinken told the NYT, “I spent with my team nine hours in the IDF’s headquarters in Tel Aviv, six stories underground with the Israeli government, including the prime minister, including arguing for hours on end about the basic proposition that the humanitarian assistance needed to get to Palestinians in Gaza.”
He added, “Israel in the days after October 7 was a traumatized society. This wasn’t just the prime minister or a given leader in Israel. This was an entire society that didn’t want any assistance getting to a single Palestinian in Gaza.”
After Blinken tried to persuade the Israeli government to send humanitarian aid to Gaza, he switched tactics and threatened to hold off Biden’s planned trip to Israel if the aid wasn’t sent.
“President Biden was planning to come to Israel a few days later. And in the course of that argument, when I was getting resistance to the proposition of humanitarian assistance getting in, I told the prime minister, I’m going to call the president and tell him not to come if you don’t allow this assistance to start flowing. And I called the president to make sure that he agreed with that, and he fully did,” said Blinken.
Blinken then boasted to the reporter that his threat to hold off the president’s visit led to the opening of Rafah and Kerem Shalom to aid to Gaza.
In several moments during the interview, the interviewer tried to convince Blinken that what was going on in Gaza was genocide, a term Blinken rejected as he insisted Israel’s military efforts were to prevent another October 7 from happening.
In addition, Blinken stated that he holds Hamas, not Netanyahu, responsible for the breakdown in hostage deal talks. “What we’ve seen time and again is Hamas not concluding a deal that it should have concluded.”
He also expressed dismay that many countries are condemning Israel for the conflict rather than Hamas.
“One of the things that I found a little astounding throughout is that for all of the understandable criticism of the way Israel has conducted itself in Gaza, you hear virtually nothing from anyone since October 7 about Hamas,” he said.
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