ULAANBAATAR: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday urged \u201call parties\u201d in the Middle East to stop \u201cescalatory actions\u201d and achieve a ceasefire in Gaza, after Hamas\u2019s political leader was killed in a strike in Tehran that Iran blamed on Israel.
\nThe strike that killed Ismail Haniyeh came just hours after Israel said it had killed a top Hezbollah commander in a retaliatory strike on the Lebanese capital Beirut.
\nThe killings took place as regional tensions were already inflamed by the war in Gaza, a conflict that has drawn in Iran-backed militant groups in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen.
\nIsrael has declined to comment on the Tehran strike.
\nSpeaking in the Mongolian capital, top US diplomat Blinken warned the Middle East was on a path \u201ctoward more conflict, more violence, more suffering, more insecurity, and it is crucial that we break this cycle.\u201d
\n\u201cThat starts with a ceasefire that we\u2019ve been working on,\u201d Blinken told reporters alongside his local counterpart.
\n\u201cAnd to get there, it also first requires all parties to talk, to stop taking any escalatory actions, it requires them to find reasons to come to an agreement,\u201d he said.
\nAs he did on Wednesday in Singapore, Blinken did not comment directly on the death of the leader of the Palestinian Islamist movement.
\nHe also declined to speculate on the impact that Haniyeh\u2019s killing could have on a potential ceasefire in Gaza, which the United States has been spearheading along with Egypt and Qatar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ULAANBAATAR: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday urged \u201call parties\u201d in the Middle East to stop \u201cescalatory actions\u201d and achieve a ceasefire in Gaza, after Hamas\u2019s political leader was killed in a strike in Tehran that Iran blamed on Israel. The strike that killed Ismail Haniyeh came just hours after Israel said it …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":63928,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68171"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68196,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68171\/revisions\/68196"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}