Defence secretary Lloyd J. Austin III will visit Israel and two Persian Gulf nations this week, as Biden administration officials push Israel to end its large-scale ground and air campaign in the Gaza Strip within weeks and transition to a more focused phase in its war against Hamas.
Austin will meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s defence minister Yoav Gallant to discuss in detail when and how Israeli forces will carry out a new phase that US officials envision would involve smaller groups of elite forces that would move in and out of population centres in Gaza, conducting more precise, intelligence-driven missions to find and kill Hamas leaders, rescue hostages and destroy tunnels, US officials said.
While Austin is expected to voice support for Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas’s ability to wage military operations, he will also reinforce the importance of taking civilian safety into account and the critical need to increase the delivery of humanitarian assistance, a Pentagon official said. As a former four-star head of the Pentagon’s Central Command, Austin is familiar with the painful lessons the American armed forces learned in the past two decades as they transitioned from major ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to more targeted operations, and wants to share those lessons with Israeli officials, the Pentagon official said.
General Charles Q. Brown Jr, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will join Austin in Israel.
Austinwill also travel to Bahrain, home of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, and to Qatar, where the Pentagon operates a major command centre at Al Udeid air base.
New York Times News Service