For Palestinians in Gaza, the continuing trajectory of Israel’s two-month long offensive is writ large in terms of daily deaths and suffering, amid mounting hunger and disease.
With the death toll – civilian and combatant – now almost 19,000 according to the Hamas-run health ministry in the coastal strip, whole neighbourhoods have been reduced largely to rubble and 1.8 million of the strip’s population of 2.3 million internally displaced.
All of which has fuelled an escalating humanitarian crisis that has been driving the wider international discomfort, not least in Washington, Israel’s closest ally.
Even as senior Israeli officials insisted they need further months to complete their campaign against Hamas, the message from Biden – delivered by Sullivan– was clear.
Discussions, said a US official after the meeting, were focused on “a shift in emphasis from high-tempo clearance operations, high-intensity clearance operations, which are ongoing now, to ultimately lower-intensity focus on high-value targets, intelligence-driven raids, and those sorts of more narrow, surgical military objectives.”
While US officials have said in public they do not wish to impose a timeline for that transition, privately it is clear that the Biden administration is pushing for an end to major combat operations by the end of December, convinced that Israel’s intensive bombing campaign is militarily