at Mohamed Ben Abdallah –
The determination of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to free the hostages and “wipe out Hamas”, but more likely to take over the Gaza Strip once and for all, has transformed the diplomatic operation of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken into a flop, the who met his Turkish colleague Hakan Fidan in Ankara.
Faced with almost 11 thousand deaths and a quarter of the city of Gaza razed to the ground, entire families under the rubble and Israeli tanks advancing from the north forcing the population to flee, Blinken continues to have difficulty in speaking with his allies in the Arab world and to keep the pieces together, especially with a NATO member that has always managed to keep its foot in both shoes, once with Russia, another with Iran. So much so that Blinken was not even received by President Recep Tayyp Erdogan, who was clear in affirming Turkey’s duty to stand alongside the Palestinian people, as well as the need for an immediate ceasefire.
Blinken, who in Jordan and in long phone calls to his Arab counterparts tried to push for a softening of the tone in order to avoid the hardening of Israel’s position, has in short failed, demonstrating with facts that the USA can deploy imposing forces, like the nuclear submarine deployed today off the coast of Gaza, but they are unable to make inroads even into the diplomacy of the Arab world.
At the end of the two-hour conversation with his Turkish colleague, the head of US diplomacy could only envisage a post-war situation which would see the president of the Palestinian National Authority, Abu Mazen, take political control of Gaza, without, however, having considered that Hamas it is a political party that won overwhelmingly in Gaza in the previous (now distant) elections, and which today would overtake al-Fatah (Abu Mazen’s party, last elections in 2014) even in the rest of the Palestinian territories.
The leader of the PA has harshly condemned the attack on Gaza in recent days, stating that “The Israeli occupation has full responsibility for everything that happens and military solutions will not lead to Israel’s security”, but it is clear that the The first to gain from the annihilation of Hamas would be its PNA. Also because it was the Israeli services that informed Abu Mazen shortly before October 7th of the strong growth of Hamas’s consensus in all the Palestinian territories, especially in those controlled by the PNA.
Blinken nevertheless managed to obtain the reopening of the crossings towards the south, i.e. towards Egypt, of the Strip, which were severely bombed by the Israelis. They will allow families left bottled up by Benjamin Netanyahu’s brutality to escape from the bombs.
