The first night of the McCain Institute’s 2024 Sedona Forum at the Enchantment Resort on Friday, May 3, saw U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney [R-Utah] sit down with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to discuss the latest in the Israeli war against Hamas militants who control the Gaza Strip, the war in Ukraine and the economic and political threat to American hegemony and its allies posed by China.

Blinken declined to take questions from the press during the forum, organized by the McCain Institute, a nonprofit based at Arizona State University and named after the late U.S. Sen. John McCain [R-Ariz].

“In this moment, the best thing that can happen would be for the agreement that’s on the table that’s being considered by Hamas to have a ceasefire the release of hostages, the possibility of really surging humanitarian assistance to people who so desperately needed, that’s what we’re focused on,” Blinken said. “We await a response from Hamas. We await to see whether in effect they can take yes for an answer on the ceasefire and release of hostages. And the reality — in this moment the only thing standing between the people of Gaza and a ceasefire is Hamas.”

“Hamas said Monday it accepted an Egyptian-Qatari ceasefire proposal, but Israel said the deal did not meet its core demands and it was pushing ahead with an assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah,” the Associated Press reported on Monday, May 6. “Still, Israel said it would continue negotiations.”

Blinken’s visit came as domestic disputes over the conflict have increased, including demonstrations across American college campuses.

Seven people, mostly children, were killed overnight Friday during an Israeli airstrike in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, the Associated Press reported. The Biden administration has stated that it opposes an invasion of Rafah pending a plan to mitigate collateral damage.

“Absent a credible plan to genuinely protect the civilians who are in harm’s way, and keep in mind there [are] now 1.4 million or so in Rafah, many of them displaced from the north, absent such a plan we can’t support a major military operation going into Rafah because the damage it would do is beyond what’s acceptable,” Blinken said. “We haven’t seen such a plan yet.”

The death toll in Gaza has climbed to over 34,500 people since the war started on Oct. 7, ABC News reported on the day of the Sedona Forum. About 1,200 Israelis, primarily civilians, were killed and about 250 were kidnapped by Hamas during an attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7.

During the forum Blinken mentioned the specter of a wider regional conflict.

“About two weeks ago, Iran engaged in an unprecedented attack on Israel, the first direct attack from Iran to Israel,” Blinken said. “And some people said, ‘Well, it was designed so it wouldn’t do much damage, [it was] definitely calibrated.’ Nothing of the sort. More than 300 projectiles launched at Israel, including more than 100 ballistic missiles … It’s because Israel had very effective defenses, but also because the president of [the] United States managed to rally in short notice a collection of countries to help that damage was not done. And that also shows something in an embryonic form, the possibilities that Israel has for, again, being integrated, regional security architecture that can actually, I think, keep the peace effectively for years to come.”

Iran stated that the attack was retaliation for an Israeli airstrike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, on April 1.

During the forum, Blinken reiterated the Biden administration’s position that Israel has “a right to try and make sure that Oct. 7 never happens again, it has an obligation to … but we’ve also said also from day one how it does matters and here the damage that’s been done to so many innocent children women and men again in this crossfire of Hamas’s making has to be something that we focus on.”

Blinken did not suggest a course of action to limit civilian casualties during the forum.

“The way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative,” Blinken said of the war. “You have a social media environment in which context, history, facts get lost — and the emotion, the impact of images dominates.”

Discussion between Blinken and Romney then shifted to what Romeny referred to as ineffective public relations from Israel and the United States about the conflict.

“A small parenthetical point,” Romney said, appearing to cite the conflict as justification for congressional action to force TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company ByteDance to divest from the platform. “Which is, some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok … if you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”

TikTok’s position is that its algorithm is not artificially boosting pro-Palestine content.

“In the six months since Oct. 7, 2023, we have removed more than 3.1 million videos and suspended more than 140,000 livestreams in Israel and Palestine for violating our community guidelines, including content promoting Hamas, hate speech, violent extremism and misinformation,” a company spokesperson wrote in an April 6 blog post.

Video of the discussion posted by the U.S. Department of State