UAE warns U.S. time running out to avoid wider Mideast crisis
The United Arab Emirates urged the United States to support an immediate cease-fire of Israel’s war in Gaza, warning that the risk of a regional conflagration is growing daily as the three-month-long conflict rages on.
“We need a humanitarian cease-fire now, we can’t wait another 100 days,” the UAE Ambassador to the United Nations, Lana Nusseibeh, said in an online interview from New York. “The risks are high, the war in Gaza is very clearly an open wound and it’s destabilizing the region,” she said, adding that the U.S. could play a critical role in easing the tensions.
The warning by one of Washington’s key allies in the region marks a new level of concern about the spiral of attacks involving Israel, Iran and its proxies and U.S. forces as fighting drags on in Gaza amid widespread destruction and a soaring civilian death toll.
The Iranian-backed militant group Hamas, designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and European Union, killed 1,200 people and abducted 240 others in its Oct. 7 incursion into southern Israel. In retaliation, Israeli troops displaced most of Gaza’s 2 million population and killed more than 24,000, according to the Hamas-run health authorities. In mid-December the World Bank estimated Israeli bombardment had damaged or destroyed over 60% of Gaza’s infrastructure.
President Joe Biden’s administration has refrained from demanding a halt to the Israeli military campaign and vetoed a U.N. Security Council demand for a cease-fire put forward by the UAE in December.
Israel’s far-right government has vowed to pursue its offensive and rejected a U.S.-backed proposal by five Arab nations including the UAE for postwar Gaza reconstruction because it’s conditional on Israeli support for a Palestinian state.
Since the start of the war in Gaza, there have been almost daily skirmishes on Israel’s border with Lebanon between Israeli forces and Hezbollah, the Iranian-supported Shiite militia. Regional tensions have increased dramatically since late last year with Israel mounting a series of assassinations of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iranian commanders and Iran openly going on the offensive in its proxy war with the Jewish state.
Iran on Saturday accused Israel of a deadly rocket attack on a building in the Syrian capital Damascus serving as a residence for Iranian military advisers, killing at least five people. The strike followed an attack by Iran earlier in the week on what Tehran said was an Israeli spy base in Iraq.
Meanwhile, Iranian-armed Houthi rebels in Yemen are disrupting global trade by attacking cargo ships moving goods across the Red Sea, despite U.S.-led military punitive action. Attacks by Iran-linked groups on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria are also intensifying.
“If the objective is not to increase extremism and terrorism in our region, this would be described as the case study for how not to do it,” Nusseibeh said.