Said Arikat, Washington bureau chief for the Jerusalem-based newspaper Al-Quds, regularly criticizes the Jewish state in his ostensible questions at the U.S. State Department press briefings.
“Why is [sic] all these attacks by Israel and basically coming so close to Damascus—and in fact, they struck Tartus the other day with a bomb that measured three-point something on the Richter scale,” he said at Wednesday’s briefing. “So why does that—doesn’t that raise an alarm? Why is it OK for Israel to keep doing what it’s doing, occupying more land?”
The Palestinian reporter added that he is talking “about what Israel is doing every day.”
“They have occupied more territory every day. They sent in their tanks. Now, they are in Daraa. They are very close to Damascus, as a matter of fact,” he said. “They struck the city of Tartus for no reason, for instance—bombs that, like I said, measured something like three-point something on the Richter scale.”
Vedant Patel, principal deputy spokesman at the State Department, told Arikat that “what we want to see is lasting stability between Israel and Syria.”
“Israel has said that these kinds of actions and the limited defense of its borders are temporary, and no nation—certainly not even the United States—could tolerate terrorists and other armed militia groups becoming embedded right on their doorsteps,” Patel said.
“Israel, of course—as we’ve long said—has every right to its self-defense and its security,” he added. “But what we are hoping for and what we’re continuing to engage on is support for the critical mandate of the U.N. Disengagement Observer Force to uphold stability in the region, and that’s something we’ll continue to focus on.”
In another ostensible question, Arikat accused Israeli snipers of using a Gaza hospital “for target practice for a long time, destroying everything in it.”
“Israel is in an unusual—even unprecedented—burdened place in that Hamas has a long track record of using hospitals and schools and other facets of civilian infrastructure for military purposes,” Patel said. “We know them. They’ve built a vast military network of tunnels under civilian areas that put civilians and put civilian institutions like these in the crossfire, and so we’ve been clear about that as well as are clear about our concerns about such kind of kinetic fighting around hospitals as well.”
Patel also told reporters that Antony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, met with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for the top diplomat role in Foggy Bottom. The two had a “good and constructive and substantive conversation,” Patel said.