President Joe Biden will meet with his national security team on Monday to discuss developments in the Middle East as Israel and Iran inch closer to escalating attacks.
Vice President Kamala Harris will also attend the meeting in the Situation Room. Biden is expected to speak with King Abdullah II of Jordan earlier in the day.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a Cabinet meeting on Sunday that his country is already in a “multifront” war with Iran and its proxies. To Israel’s north lies Lebanon, where a senior Hezbollah commander was killed last week. To the south is Gaza, where Israel has conducted nearly 10 months of war against Hamas. And much further east is Iran, where Hamas’s top political leader was killed just hours after the Hezbollah leader’s death.
The killings, coming shortly after a rocket strike on Israel-controlled Golan Heights killed 12 children, have heightened already extremely tense relations in the Middle East. Iran’s top leadership, following the assassination of Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh, vowed “harsh revenge,” while Israel has said it is prepared to defend itself against any retaliatory strike.
The United States, for its part, has sought to get messages to Tehran asking it not to escalate the conflict in fear of a wider war. It has asked Israel to de-escalate as well.
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Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, is hoping for the same. “We want the escalation to end,” Safadi said. He is in Iran for the first visit of a senior Jordanian official to the country in over two decades.
Biden’s meeting on Monday comes after his handling of the war in Gaza helped crater his support among the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. How the U.S. responds to the developments in the Middle East is also likely to play a part in November’s election.
