Latest Developments:
- Hezbollah leader hosts talks with Hamas, Islamic Jihad senior leaders.
- U.S. rejects calls for immediate cease-fire, saying that would only benefit Hamas.
- More than 1,400 people in Israel have been killed, mostly civilians in the initial Hamas attack on October 7.
- Palestinian death toll in Gaza had reached at least 6,546 people, the majority women and children.
Even as war rages between Israel and Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip, U.S. President Joe Biden voiced support Wednesday for what now seems like a distant goal — the long-sought U.S. wish for separate, autonomous Israeli and Palestinian states.
Biden said at a White House news conference that "the aspirations of Palestinians cannot be ignored. Israelis and Palestinians equally deserve to live side by side in safety, dignity and peace."
The U.S. leader said he is alarmed by "extremist settlers" attacking Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. He called it "pouring gasoline on fire," and said the settlers are "attacking Palestinians in places they're entitled to be."
Biden also expressed concern for the safety of more than 200 hostages, some of them believed to be Americans, captured by Hamas during its shock October 7 attack on Israel.
"Obviously they're in jeopardy," Biden said. "If we can get them out, we should."
Hamas has released four hostages in recent days, an American woman and her daughter and two elderly Israeli women. But the State Department warned in a statement of how difficult the release of more will be.
"You can imagine how complicated it is," the statement said. "We're dealing with Israel, Egypt, and Hamas, and we're not talking directly to Hamas. Egypt can send messages to Hamas. Qatar can send messages to Hamas. But you can imagine how difficult every little thing is. Every bit of this is complicated.
"It's like unlocking a puzzle where you unlock a layer that can unlock one little piece of it," the State Department added. "And then another obstacle pops up, and you've got to go figure out with all the parties, how to unlock that piece."
Israel says that in the initial shock attack on October 7, Hamas killed about 1,400 Israelis.
The Hamas-controlled Health Ministry said the death toll in Gaza had reached at least 6,546 people, the majority of them women and children.
But Biden said he has "no confidence in the Hamas death toll."
"I have no notion that Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed," Biden said. "I'm sure innocents have been killed. And that's the price of waging a war."
The Israeli military said Wednesday it carried out airstrikes targeting Hamas militant sites in the Gaza Strip, as well as strikes against military sites in Syria.
The military said the targets of the Gaza strikes included Hamas tunnels, munitions warehouses and missile launching stations.
Syrian state media said Israeli attacks killed eight Syrian soldiers and wounded seven others in Daraa province.
Israel's military said its jets conducted the strikes in response to rockets being launched from Syria toward Israel.
The cross-border attacks come amid worries that the Israel-Hamas war could spiral into a larger regional conflict.
Israel has warned Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon not to join the war.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah hosted senior Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders for talks on Wednesday. A statement said the leaders discussed what to do to achieve victory "for the resistance in Gaza."
The U.N. Palestinian refugee relief agency has warned that if it does not receive urgent shipments of fuel, it could be forced to halt its operations in Gaza within hours.
Several rounds of aid deliveries have reached Gaza from Egypt this week, but officials described the quantity as vastly insufficient to meet the needs of the Palestinians living with dire shortages of food, water and medicine. The deliveries have not included any fuel.
The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said nearly 600,000 people were sheltering in 150 of its facilities in Gaza after fleeing their homes.
"Our shelters are four times over their capacities — many people are sleeping in the streets as current facilities are overwhelmed," UNRWA said on X.
With the death toll mounting in Gaza, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called Tuesday for a cease-fire in Gaza, although he also condemned the Hamas attack on Israel.
Israel rejected Guterres' cease-fire demand and called for his resignation after he said the Hamas attack on Israel did not occur in a vacuum, because "the Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation" by Israel.
In Washington, White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby also rejected an immediate cease-fire, saying it would only benefit Hamas militants. However, Kirby did not rule out a humanitarian pause to allow more aid to be moved into Gaza to assist hundreds of thousands of displaced people.
With Israel planning a ground assault into Gaza, Kirby warned of more bloodshed and civilian casualties to come.
"This is war. It is combat. It is bloody. It is ugly, and it's going to be messy," he told reporters at the White House. "And innocent civilians are going to be hurt going forward. I wish I could tell you something different. I wish that that wasn't going to happen."
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
