By Simon Lewis
CAIRO (Reuters) -U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday warned against the risk of escalation in the Middle East after the detonation of thousands of Hezbollah pagers threatened to derail his latest regional diplomacy push.
News of the blasts broke as the top U.S. diplomat traveled to Cairo to meet senior Egyptian officials hoping to advance efforts to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and improve ties with Egypt.
Militant group Hezbollah promised to retaliate against Israel, accusing it of detonating pagers across Lebanon on Tuesday killing at least 12 people, including two children, and wounding nearly 3,000.
Israel has declined to respond to questions about the explosions.
Asked about the blasts, Blinken said the United States was still gathering facts but it was in no one's interest for conflict to spread.
"It's imperative that all parties refrain from any actions that could escalate the conflict," Blinken said at a news conference alongside his Egyptian counterpart.
He did not say who the U.S. believes was behind the blasts.
Blinken said he was focused on securing a ceasefire deal that would bring calm, including to Israel's northern border with Lebanon, and that 15 out of 18 paragraphs of a deal had been agreed by all sides.
Making progress involved long waits for messages to be passed between the parties that left time for incidents to disrupt the talks, Blinken said.
"We've seen that in the intervening time, you might have an event, an incident - something that makes the process more difficult, that threatens to slow it, stop it, derail it - and anything of that nature, by definition, is probably not good in terms of achieving the result that we want, which is the ceasefire," Blinken said.
He cited Hamas' execution of six Israeli hostages last month. He did not name Israel, which is believed to have targeted members of groups aligned against it in Lebanon, Syria and Iran that have set back the talks.
President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi told Blinken in their meeting on Wednesday morning that Egypt opposed attempts to "escalate the conflict and expand its scope regionally" and called for all parties to act responsibly, the Egyptian presidency said in a statement.
Blinken will head from Cairo to Paris on Thursday for a meeting with the foreign ministers of France, Italy and Britain to discuss the Middle East and Ukraine and other issues, a State Department official said. Blinken will also meet French President Emmanuel Macron, the official said.
Blinken will not visit Israel on this trip, the first time he has skipped a stop in Washington's closest regional ally since Hamas sparked the war in Gaza nearly a year ago.
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Tuesday that was because Washington aimed to discuss bilateral issues with Egypt on this trip and the Gaza ceasefire proposal that U.S. and mediators have been working on was still not ready to present to Israel.
(Reporting by Simon Lewis; additional reporting by Nayera Abdallah, Aiden Lewis and Ahmed Elimam; Editing by Humeyra Pamuk, Cynthia Osterman, Ros Russell and Sharon Singleton)
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