The Jewish state lacks a plan for the day after the war in Gaza, so Israel faces either an “enduring insurgency on its hands” or a vacuum that “jihadis” who are worse than Hamas will fill, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday.
Speaking alongside Maia Sandu, the Moldovan president, at a press conference in the East European nation’s capital city Chișinău, Blinken fielded several questions about the Jewish state.
The U.S. secretary called recent civilian deaths in Rafah “horrific” and said that Washington awaits what he hopes will be a “deliberate but also fast investigation” by Israel. He noted that the Jewish state has said that it used targeted munitions as it sought to kill Hamas terrorists.
“Even limited, focused, targeted attacks designed to deal with terrorists who’ve killed innocent civilians and are plotting to kill more—even those kind of operations can have terrible, horrific, unintended consequences,” Blinken said.
He added that Israel “has to ask whether—and especially in the absence of a plan for the day after in Gaza—further incremental gains against Hamas, but gains that may not be durable in terms of Hamas’s defeat in the absence of a plan—how that stacks up against some of the, again, unintended but horrific consequences of military action in a place where the people you’re going after are so closely embedded with civilians.”
In addition to appearing to suggest that civilian casualties were Israel’s and not Hamas’s responsibility, Blinken said that the incident underscored that without a “day after” plan in Gaza, “there won’t be a day after.”
“We need to get as quickly as possible a plan for the day after that does not leave Israel responsible for Gaza, which it says it does not want to be,” he said. “But if it is, it will simply have an enduring insurgency on its hands for as far as one can see into the future.”
If Israel does not secure Gaza, “Hamas will be left in charge, which is unacceptable,” Blinken predicted. “Or if not, we’ll have chaos, lawlessness and a vacuum that eventually will be filled again by Hamas or maybe something, if it’s possible to imagine, even worse—jihadis.”
