US Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Israel and the Palestinians on Monday to ease tensions following a spike in violence that has put the region on edge, Euronews reports.
The bloodshed has alarmed the Biden administration as it attempts to find common ground with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new right-wing government.
Yet aside from appeals for de-escalation and restraint, Blinken did not publicly offer any particular ideas for calming the situation and it was not immediately clear from his meeting with Netanyahu that the administration would be proposing any.
Blinken will meet Tuesday with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.
“We’re urging all sides now to take urgent steps to restore calm, to de-escalate,” he said after meeting Netanyahu.
“We want to make sure that there’s an environment in which we can, I hope at some point, create conditions where we can start to restore a sense of security for Israelis and Palestinians alike, which of course is sorely lacking.”
Blinken arrived during one of the deadliest periods of fighting in years in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem.
An Israeli military raid Thursday killed 10 Palestinians in the flashpoint West Bank town of Jenin, while a Palestinian gunman killed seven people outside a synagogue in an east Jerusalem settlement on Friday.
The next morning, a 13-year-old Palestinian boy shot and wounded two Israelis elsewhere in east Jerusalem.
