In the event that the Gaza conflict escalates, the US government is working on contingency plans to bring Americans out of the region on a large scale if necessary. National Security Council communications director John Kirby said Tuesday in Washington: “It would be unwise and irresponsible for us not to think through a wide range of contingencies and options – and evacuations are certainly among them.”
Kirby said he couldn’t go into details. However, he emphasized that it was about careful preparation for possible developments. There are currently no active efforts to bring Americans home from the larger region. However, the US government is still working hard to get Americans out of the Gaza Strip.
The Washington Post, citing unnamed government officials, wrote that there are around 600,000 people with US citizenship in Israel as well as another 86,000 US citizens who are believed to have been in Lebanon at the time of the major Hamas attack. The fact that the Gaza war could spread to such an extent across the region that it would become necessary to bring so many people to safety is the worst case scenario and as such is less likely than other scenarios, it said. But “it would be irresponsible not to have a plan for everything,” the newspaper quoted one of the officials as saying.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had recently expressed great concern that the Gaza conflict could spread to other parts of the Middle East. According to the Pentagon, there have been several drone attacks or attempted attacks on US military bases in Syria and Iraq in the past few days. A US Navy destroyer in the northern Red Sea also shot down three cruise missiles and several drones on Thursday that the US said were launched by Houthi rebels in Yemen. Since the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, attacks from Lebanon on Israel have also increased.
