Biden says US is "pushing hard" to prevent "wider war" in Middle East amid escalation fears
Washington DC - US President Joe Biden and other world powers on Sunday implored Israel and Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah movement to refrain from escalating their conflict as the Gaza war threatens to spill over across the Middle East.
Biden said Sunday that the US would do everything possible to prevent an escalation of war in the Middle East, as hostilities flare between Israel and Hezbollah.
Affirming that he was worried about rising regional tensions, Biden told reporters from the White House South Lawn that his administration was "going to do everything we can to keep a wider war from breaking out. And we're still pushing hard."
Hezbollah and Israeli forces have traded regular cross-border fire since Palestinian Islamist group Hamas's unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel sparked the devastating war in Gaza.
But fears of an all-out regional conflagration soared this week as both sides intensified the fighting, with Israeli strikes killing dozens in Lebanon, including top Hezbollah commanders.
White House National Security spokesman John Kirby on Sunday said that escalating the conflict was not in key US ally Israel's "best interest."
Washington was saying this "directly to our Israeli counterparts" and believes "there can be time and space for a diplomatic solution here and that's what we're working on," he told ABC.
The same day, UN chief Antonio Guterres told broadcaster CNN he feared "the possibility of transforming Lebanon [into] another Gaza."
The UN special coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, also warned on X that the region was "on the brink of an imminent catastrophe" and that no military solution would make either side safe.
Guterres also said neither Israel nor Hamas were interested in achieving a ceasefire to end the brutal war in Gaza that has raged for almost a year.
"That is a tragedy, because this is a war that must stop," he added.
Cover photo: DREW ANGERER / AFP