Top White House official Jake Sullivan arrived in Israel on Thursday amid a public rift over civilian casualties in Gaza more than two months into the Israel-Hamas war.
President Joe Biden’s national security adviser was greeted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of talks expected to focus on Israel’s military offensive in the Palestinian territory.
A photo shared by the Israeli prime minister’s office showed Sullivan and Netanyahu shaking hands in Tel Aviv.
It said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that “an expanded meeting with the members of the war cabinet will be held later”.
Defence Minister Yoav Gallant also met Sullivan and told him the war would “last more than several months,” according to his office.
“Hamas is a terrorist organization that built itself over a decade to fight Israel, and they built infrastructure under the ground and above the ground and it is not easy to destroy them.
“It will require a period of time — it will last more than several months, but we will win and we will destroy them.”
Ahead of his trip, Sullivan told a Wall Street Journal event he would discuss a timetable to end the war and urge Israeli leaders “to move to a different phase from the kind of high-intensity operations that we see today.”
The United States is a major funder of the Israeli military and last week vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that called for a ceasefire.
The war began when militants from the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas burst across the Gaza border on October 7 and killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to the Israeli authorities.
In response, Israel vowed to destroy Hamas and launched a relentless bombardment and ground invasion that has left swathes of Gaza in ruins.
The health ministry in the Hamas-run territory says 18,787 people have been killed, mostly women and children.
(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed - AFP)