U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday he has still not seen a plan for Israel’s planned offensive on the southern Gaza city of Rafah that would protect civilians, repeating that Washington could not support such an assault, Reuters reported.

Blinken and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met in Jerusalem for two-and-a-half hours, after which Israel repeated that the Rafah operation would go ahead despite the U.S. position and a U.N. warning that it would lead to “tragedy”.

“We cannot, will not support a major military operation in Rafah absent an effective plan to make sure that civilians are not harmed and no, we’ve not seen such a plan,” Blinken told reporters.

“There are other ways, and in our judgment better ways, of dealing with the … ongoing challenge of Hamas that does not require a major military operation in Rafah,” he said, adding that it was the subject of ongoing talks with Israeli officials.

An Israeli government spokesperson said Israel remained determined to destroy the remaining Hamas fighting formations.

“When it comes to Rafah – we are committed to remove the last four of five Hamas battalions in Rafah – we are sharing our plans with Secretary of State Blinken,” the spokesperson told a regular briefing.

Israel is the final stop on the top U.S. diplomat’s Middle East tour, his seventh visit to the region which was plunged into conflict last October when Hamas attacked southern Israel. It has largely focused on efforts to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza.Blinken spoke at Israel’s main port, Ashdod, and praised “meaningful progress” in recent weeks on humanitarian access, including by allowing flour for Gaza to flow through the port, as well as by opening up new border crossings.

“The progress is real but given the need, given the immense need in Gaza, it needs to be accelerated, it needs to be sustained,” he said.

Blinken asked Israel’s government to take a set of specific steps to facilitate aid to Gaza, where nearly half the population are suffering catastrophic hunger, he said.

The United States is Israel’s main diplomatic supporter and weapons supplier. Blinken’s visit comes about a month after U.S. President Joe Biden issued a stark warning that Washington’s policy could shift if Israel fails to take steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering and the safety of aid workers, read the report.

Blinken also urged Hamas to accept a truce deal proposed by Egyptian mediators which would see 33 hostages released in exchange for a larger number of Palestinian prisoners and a halt to the fighting, with the possibility of further steps towards a comprehensive deal later.

“Israel has made very important compromises,” he said. “There’s no time for further haggling. The deal is there. They (Hamas) should take it.”

A senior official for Hamas said it was still studying the proposed deal but said Israel was the real obstacle.

“Blinken’s comments contradict reality,” Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters.

Israel is holding off sending a delegation to Cairo for follow-up truce talks, pending a response from Hamas’ leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, an Israeli official told Reuters.

U.N. aid chief Martin Griffiths said on Tuesday that an Israeli ground operation in Rafah was “on the immediate horizon.” In a statement, he said Israeli improvements to aid access in Gaza “cannot be used to prepare for or justify a full-blown military assault on Rafah.”

Netanyahu has insisted the operation will go ahead, whatever the outcome of the talks, and Israeli media reported on Wednesday that he was still refusing to accept Hamas’ central demand that any deal would have to include a permanent ceasefire and a withdrawal of Israeli troops, Reuters reported.

Ynet news site, citing the Prime Minister’s Office, said Netanyahu told Blinken a Rafah operation “was not contingent on anything” and that he rejected any truce proposals that would end the Gaza war.

While facing international calls to hold off on any Rafah offensive, Netanyahu has faced pressure from the religious nationalist partners he depends on for the survival of his coalition government to press ahead. Israel has described Rafah as a last bastion of Hamas, which it has vowed to eliminate.

En route to a visit to Kerem Shalom, one of the main crossing points for aid into Gaza, Blinken made a brief stop at Kibbutz Nir Oz in southern Israel, where Hamas militants attacked on Oct.7, killing dozens of residents and kidnapping others. Blinken visited the heavily damaged home of an American-Israeli family, all of whom, including five-year old twins, were killed in the assault.

Hamas killed 1,200 people and abducted 253 in the assault, according to Israeli tallies. The hostages are mostly Israeli but include some foreign nationals.

In response, Israel has overrun Gaza, killing more than 34,000 Palestinians, local health authorities say, in a bombardment that has reduced much of the enclave to a wasteland.

More than one million people face famine after six months of war, the United Nations has said.

As night fell on Wednesday, Israeli planes and tanks pounded several areas across Gaza, residents and Hamas media said.

Medics in Gaza said at least 27 Palestinians were killed in strikes on Wednesday, with others likely hurt or killed in areas they were unable to reach.

New York City police raided Columbia University late on Tuesday to arrest dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, some of whom had seized an academic building, and to remove a protest encampment the Ivy League school had sought to dismantle for nearly two weeks.

Shortly after police moved in, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik released a letter in which she requested police stay on campus until at least May 17 – two days after graduation – “to maintain order and ensure that encampments are not re-established.”

Within three hours the campus had been cleared of protesters, said a police spokesperson, adding “dozens” of arrests were made, Reuters reported.

At the start of the raid around 9 p.m. ET throngs of helmeted police marched onto the elite campus in upper Manhattan, a focal point of student rallies that have spread to dozens of schools across the U.S. in recent days expressing opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza.

“We’re clearing it out,” the police officers yelled.

Soon after, a long line of officers climbed into Hamilton Hall, an academic building that protesters had broken into and occupied in the early morning hours of Tuesday. Police entered through a second-story window, using a police vehicle equipped with a ladder.

Students standing outside the hall jeered police with shouts of “Shame, shame!”

Police were seen loading dozens of detainees onto a bus, each with their hands bound behind their backs by zip-ties, the entire scene illuminated with flashing red and blue lights of police vehicles.

“Free, free, free Palestine,” chanted protesters outside the building. Others yelled “Let the students go.”

“Columbia will be proud of these students in five years,” said Sweda Polat, one of the student negotiators for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the coalition of student groups that has organized the protests.

She said students did not pose a danger and called on police to back down, speaking as officers shouted at her and others to retreat or leave campus.

Protest Demands

Protesters were seeking three demands from Columbia: divestment from companies supporting Israel’s government, greater transparency in university finances, and amnesty for students and faculty disciplined over the protests, Reuters reported.

Shafik this week said Columbia would not divest from finances in Israel. Instead, she offered to invest in health and education in Gaza and make Columbia’s direct investment holdings more transparent.

In her letter released Tuesday, Shafik said the Hamilton Hall occupiers had vandalized University property and were trespassing, and that encampment protesters were suspended for trespassing. The university earlier warned that students taking part in the Hamilton Hall occupation faced academic expulsion.

The occupation began overnight when protesters broke windows, stormed inside and unfurled a banner reading “Hind’s Hall,” saying they were renaming the building for a 6-year-old Palestinian child killed in Gaza by the Israeli military.

The eight-story, neo-classical building has been the site of various student occupations dating back to the 1960s.

At an evening news briefing held a few hours before police entered Columbia, Mayor Eric Adams and city police officials said the Hamilton Hall takeover was instigated by “outside agitators” who lack any affiliation with Columbia and are known to law enforcement for provoking lawlessness, Reuters reported.

Police said they based their conclusions in part on escalating tactics in the occupation, including vandalism, use of barricades to block entrances and destruction of security cameras.

One of the student leaders of the protest, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian scholar attending Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, disputed assertions that outsiders led the occupation.

“Disruptions on campus have created a threatening environment for many of our Jewish students and faculty and a noisy distraction that interferes with the teaching, learning and preparing for final exams,” the university said in a statement on Tuesday before police moved in.

Protests across country

The Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel by Hamas militants from Gaza, and the ensuing Israeli offensive on the Palestinian enclave, have unleashed the biggest outpouring of U.S. student activism since the anti-racism protests of 2020.

Many of the demonstrations across the country have been met with counter-protesters accusing them of fomenting anti-Jewish hatred. The pro-Palestinian side, including Jews opposed to Israeli actions in Gaza, say they are being unfairly branded as antisemitic for criticizing Israel’s government and expressing support for human rights.

The issue has taken on political overtones in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election in November, with Republicans accusing some university administrators of turning a blind eye to antisemitic rhetoric and harassment.

White House spokesperson John Kirby on Tuesday called the occupation of campus buildings “the wrong approach.”

New York Police Department officials had stressed before Tuesday night’s sweep that officers would refrain from entering the campus unless Columbia administrators invited their presence, as they did on April 18, when NYPD officers removed an earlier encampment. More than 100 arrests were made at that time, stirring an outcry by many students and staff.

Dozens of tents, pitched on a hedge-lined grassy area – beside a smaller lawn since planted with hundreds of small Israeli flags – were put back up days later.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Saudi Arabia on Monday, the first stop in a broader trip to the Middle East to discuss issues including the governance of Gaza once the war with Israel ends.

The top U.S. diplomat heads to Israel later this week, where he is expected to press Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take the concrete and tangible steps U.S. President Joe Biden demanded this month to improve the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza.

In Riyadh, Blinken is expected to meet with senior Saudi leaders and hold a wider meeting with counterparts from five Arab states – Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan – to further the discussions on what governance of the Gaza Strip would look like after the war, according to a senior State Department official.

Blinken is also expected to bring together Arab countries with the European states and discuss how Europe can help the rebuilding effort of the tiny enclave, which has been reduced to a wasteland in the six-month long Israeli bombardment.

A group of European nations, including Norway, plan to recognise Palestinian statehood in conjunction with the presentation of an Arab state-backed peace plan to the United Nations.

“We can see by joining forces we can make this more meaningful. We really want to recognise the Palestinian state, but we know that is something you do once,” Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide told Reuters on the sidelines of a World Economic Forum meeting in Riyadh.

Blinkin’s trip comes as Egypt was expected to host leaders of the Islamist group Hamas to discuss prospects for a ceasefire agreement with Israel.

Hamas fighters attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and seizing 253 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel retaliated by imposing a total siege on Gaza, then launching an air and ground assault that has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, say health authorities in Hamas-ruled Gaza.

Conversations over Gaza’s rebuilding and governance have been going on for months with a clear mechanism yet to emerge.

The United States agrees with Israel’s objective that Hamas needs to be eradicated and can no longer play a role in Gaza’s future but Washington does not want Israel to re-occupy the strip.

Instead, it has been looking at a structure that will include a reformed Palestinian Authority with support from Arab states.

Blinken will also discuss with Saudi authorities the efforts for a normalization deal between the kingdom and Israel, a mega deal that includes Washington giving Riyadh agreements on bilateral defense and security commitments as well as nuclear cooperation. – REUTERS