Attacks in Lebanon threaten to derail Gaza talks: Antony Blinken

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed frustration on Wednesday at surprise escalations that he said threaten to derail efforts to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. He said the US is still assessing the previous day’s deadly pager explosions, linked to Israel, in Lebanon.

Blinken spoke in Egypt, where he travelled for talks on the Gaza cease-fire negotiations and US-Egyptian relations. The United States and international partners, including Egypt, are working to broker a cease-fire in the nearly year-old war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and to tamp down tensions as Israeli leaders threaten to step up military action against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

“Time and again” when the US and other international mediators believe themselves to be making progress in a cease-fire deal for Israel’s and Hamas’s war in Gaza, “we’ve seen an event that makes the process more difficult, might derail it,” Blinken said, speaking in answer to a question about the previous day’s explosions in Lebanon.

Explosive attacks using personal pagers used by members of the Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon killed at least 12 people Tuesday, including a child. Israel has not publicly spoken on whether it was responsible.

Blinken spoke of Hamas’ killing earlier this month of six of the several dozen hostages that Hamas-led militants have held in Gaza since capturing them October 7, in the attack in Israel that launched the war.

At the time news came of the six hostages’ killing, negotiators had been making progress on the timing and other details of a swap that would have freed hostages in exchange for a freeing of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention, Blinken said.

Blinken on Wednesday repeated administration statements that the US was still gathering information on the circumstances of the pager attacks.

Exploding pager trail runs from Taiwan to Hungary

Beirut: A Taiwanese pager maker denied on Wednesday that it had produced devices that wounded thousands of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon when they exploded, an audacious attack that raised the prospect of a full-scale war between the Iran-backed group and arch-foe Israel. Gold Apollo said the devices were made by under licence by a company called BAC, based in Hungary’s capital Budapest. Israel’s spy agency Mossad, which has a long history of pulling off sophisticated attacks on foreign soil, planted explosives inside pagers imported by Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s detonations, a senior Lebanese security source and another source said. Iran-backed Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, whose military declined to comment on the blasts. The two sides have been engaged in cross-border warfare since the Gaza conflict erupted last October. Reuters