Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, held meetings on Sunday with leaders in Jordan and Qatar as part of a weeklong eastern Mediterranean and Middle East tour aimed at reducing the risk that the war in Gaza could spread in the region.
Mr. Blinken met separately in Amman with King Abdullah II and Ayman Safadi, Jordan’s foreign minister. He thanked the king for Jordan’s role in sending humanitarian aid to Gaza, and the two agreed to keep coordinating on aid, according to a statement by a State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller.
The U.S. has been pressing Israel for months to allow more aid into Gaza. Mr. Blinken reinforced that message with a visit to a warehouse with boxes of canned food that were intended to be brought to Gaza on trucks organized by the United Nations World Food Program.
Sheri Ritsema-Anderson, the resident U.N. coordinator in Jordan, told reporters that in her 15 years working in the Middle East, she had never seen a humanitarian situation as dire as the one in Gaza, describing it as an “epic catastrophe.”
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