Blinken says Israel must weigh ‘incremental gains’ with ‘unintended horrific consequences’ of military action in Gaza
CNN
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that Israel must decide if its military campaign in Gaza is worth the cost in civilian lives.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that Israel must decide if its military campaign in Gaza is worth the cost in civilian lives. Coming just days after an Israeli strike killed dozens of displaced Palestinians in Rafah, Blinken said Israel should ask itself whether “incremental gains” against Hamas “stack up against” the “unintended horrific” consequences of military action. 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 the plan, how that stacks up against some of the, again unintended, horrific consequences of military action in a place where the people you’re going after are so closely embedded with civilians,” Blinken said during a news conference in Moldova. Though the Biden administration has been urging Israel to do more to protect civilians in the war against Hamas for months, Blinken’s remarks were some of the most pointed he’s made to date. However, the US has not gone as far as allies like France in condemning the Rafah strike, with the White House making clear it believes Israel has not crossed a red line that would lead the US to withdraw military support. Blinken called the scenes from the weekend “horrific,” reiterating Biden administration calls for Israel to investigate how the Rafah attack led to so many civilian deaths. “I don’t think anyone who has seen the images cannot be deeply affected by just on a basic human level. We have been very clear with Israel and the imperative and this is as in other instances, to immediately investigate and determine exactly what happened and why it happened,” Blinken said.
A California woman told police that Trump Cabinet pick Pete Hegseth physically blocked her from leaving a hotel room, took her phone, and then sexually assaulted her even though she “remembered saying ‘no’ a lot,” a police report obtained by CNN shows.
For more than a decade, Chinese students have flocked to the United States, drawn by the prestige of an overseas education and the glamor of the American Dream. But that’s changing now – and recent statistics suggest the allure may be wearing off.
After rarely being seen in public in the two weeks since he delivered a brief, 46-second victory speech on election night, JD Vance reemerged this week to play one of the most important roles he will be expected to fill as Donald Trump’s No. 2: His point person on Capitol Hill.
A Florida man was arrested Wednesday and charged in a plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange this week, according to the FBI.
The Senate on Wednesday voted down an effort led by Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders to block a series of planned US weapons sales to Israel.
Republicans on the House Ethics Committee fell in line behind GOP leaders and voted not to release the results of their investigation into Donald Trump’s attorney general pick, Matt Gaetz, despite growing calls from the Senate GOP to make the findings public ahead of his confirmation hearing.
Senate Democrats have confirmed some of President Joe Biden’s picks for the federal bench this week in the face of President-elect Donald Trump’s calls for a total GOP blockade of judicial nominations – in part because several Republicans involved with the Trump transition process have been missing votes.
A former University of Virginia student pleaded guilty Wednesday to fatally shooting three football players and wounding two other students on the Charlottesville campus in 2022.
Donald Trump is considering a right-wing media personality and people who have served on his US Secret Service detail to run the agency that has been plagued by its failure to preempt two alleged assassination attempts on Trump this summer, sources familiar with the president-elect’s thinking tell CNN.
The United States has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that called for an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, on the grounds it would not have secured the release of hostages.
A Democratic election official in Pennsylvania offered an impassioned apology Wednesday for claiming “precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country” to justify counting about 600 faulty ballots in defiance of state Supreme Court rulings.