Gunpowder is once again smelling in the Middle East as this week saw a dramatic escalation of tensions between Israel and Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon. However, the Biden administration is taking a tougher approach than usual, with top US officials keeping their distance for fear of things getting worse, the Associated Press reports.

The explosions of the buzzers and radios and also the Israeli air strike targeting a high-ranking Hezbollah official in Beirut, they threaten to spark an all-out war between Israel and its enemies in the Middle East by condemning once and for all the already faltering ceasefire negotiations in the Hamas conflict in Gaza.

Despite the fact that two Biden administration officials again appealed for calm during the week, Israel simply dynamited the already explosive situation. The stance reinforces the impression that the hardline government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is paying less and less attention to the mediation efforts of its key ally, although it depends on the US for weapons and military support.

“The United States is like a deer in the headlights right now,” said Brian Katulis, senior fellow for US foreign policy at the Middle East Institute think tank in Washington. “In terms of words and deeds… it does not lead events, but reacts to events.”

There has been no publicly acknowledged US contact with Netanyahu since senior White House official Amos Hochstein visited Israel last Monday to warn of the escalation. The first wave of bomb blasts – for which Israel did not claim responsibility – struck the very next day.

But negotiations for a cease-fire in Gaza were at such a sensitive point that Foreign Secretary Anthony Blinken only visited Egypt on his trip to the Middle East this week.

Questioned o Joe Biden if the US still has hope for a deal in Gaza – which the administration calls critical to calming the regional conflict – the US president responded on Friday that his team was pushing for it.

“If I ever said it wasn’t realistic, we might as well walk away,” Biden told reporters. “A lot of things don’t seem realistic until we complete them,” he said.

However, the White House and the State Department declined to comment publicly on the mechanisms against Hezbollah members who went off on Tuesday and Wednesday, killing at least 37 people and injuring thousands of others, including civilians, in what analysts believe was a highly sophisticated Israeli operation. Nor did they evaluate the Israeli air strike on Fridayor in a densely populated part of Beirut – the deadliest such strike in the Lebanese capital in years – that killed Hezbollah’s second-most important commander.

When negotiators appear to be making progress on a Gaza deal, there is often an “event, something that makes the process more difficult, that threatens to slow it down, stop it, derail it,” Blinken said in Egypt, responding to questions from journalists about the bomb blasts,

A high-level contact with Netanyahu is likely when he travels to New York for a gathering of world leaders at the UN General Assembly next week, US officials familiar with the matter told The Associated Press to discuss the administration’s strategy. But officials also acknowledge that the situation has become so precarious that taking a particular stance publicly either critical of Israel or supportive would likely do more harm than good.

In Washington, the representative of the State Department Matthew Miller deflected a question about whether the Biden administration’s months of Middle East visits without any ceasefire agreement had made Blinken and other officials look like “furniture” in regional capitals.

“So far, we’ve been able to prevent it from turning into a regional war,” Miller said only.

US officials have rejected claims that they have abandoned either the Gaza ceasefire.

“We would be the first to acknowledge … that we are no closer to achieving that than we were a week or so ago,” Homeland Security spokesman John Kirby said Friday.

“But no one is giving up,” he stressed, reiterating that the US is working with fellow mediators Qatar and Egypt to draft a final proposal on Gaza to be submitted to Israel and Hamas.