Mr. Biden’s team is trying to manage all those flashpoints at the same time it is trying to find a way to press Israel to scale back its war against Hamas to a more surgical operation with fewer civilian casualties. So far, according to Gaza health officials, more than 25,000 people have been killed, some of them Hamas combatants but most of them women and children.
A senior Biden administration official was leaving for the region on Sunday to seek a new agreement between Israel and Hamas to release some or all of the 120 hostages still believed to be held in exchange for at least a pause in the fighting, according to two American officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities.
The official, Brett McGurk, the president’s Middle East coordinator, planned to travel to Cairo to meet with Abbas Kamel, the chief of Egypt’s General Intelligence Service and widely considered the nation’s second-most-powerful official. As part of the trip, previously reported by Axios, Mr. McGurk will also head to Doha, Qatar, to meet with the country’s prime minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim al-Thani.
At the same time, administration officials said they were worried the conflict in the region might be getting worse, not better.
“We have to guard against and be vigilant against the possibility that, in fact, rather than heading towards de-escalation, we are on a path of escalation that we have to manage,” Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, said last week during an appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“It remains a central locus of our strategy,” he added. “Try to ensure that we manage escalation across the Middle East to the maximum extent possible, taking every possible measure that we can in that regard, and ultimately get on a path of diplomacy and de-escalation.”
