Israel ready for Rafah as ceasefire call fails
Jerusalem: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has dismissed Hamas’s demand for a ceasefire and ordered troops to prepare to move on the city of Rafah in Gaza’s far south, where more than one million Palestinians have sought refuge.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking in Tel Aviv hours after meeting Mr Netanyahu, said he still saw “space for agreement to be reached” and that he had warned the Israeli leader against actions and talk that “inflame tensions”.
Mr Netanyahu had told a televised briefing that he had ordered troops to “prepare to operate” in Rafah and that a “total victory” by Israel over Hamas was just months away.
But he warned that accepting the Palestinian militant group’s “bizarre demands” for a ceasefire would not lead to the return of hostages, charging that “it will only invite another massacre”.
In Beirut, a senior Hamas official responded, saying Mr Netanyahu’s “insistence on continuing the aggression totally confirms that the goal … is genocide against the Palestinian people”.
The official, Osama Hamdan, urged “all resistance factions … to continue the fight” and to be cautious of Israeli “treachery during the final quarter-hour of this confrontation”.
Earlier, US envoy Mr Blinken, on his fifth Middle East tour since the war broke out, had expressed hope for a ceasefire and hostage release deal, even as he cautioned that there was “a lot of work to be done”.
“But we are very much focused on doing that work and hopefully being able to resume the release of hostages that was interrupted” after a weeklong truce in November, Mr Blinken said after meeting Mr Netanyahu in Jerusalem.
An official from mediator Egypt said “a new round of negotiations” would start on Thursday in Cairo aimed at achieving “calm in the Gaza Strip”.
A Hamas source with knowledge of the matter said the Palestinian militant group had agreed to the Cairo talks, with the goal of “a ceasefire, an end to the war and a prisoner exchange deal”.
Last week, a Hamas source said the proposed new truce calls for a six-week pause and a hostage-prisoner exchange, as well as more aid for Gaza, but talks have continued since.
Mr Blinken also made a new plea for more aid into Gaza, whose 2.4 million people have endured a crippling siege and severe shortages of clean water, food, fuel and medical supplies.
“We all have an obligation to do everything possible to get the necessary assistance to those who so desperately need it,” Mr Blinken said, “and the steps that are being taken – additional steps that need to be taken – are the focus of my own meetings here.”
Mr Blinken also travelled to the occupied West Bank where he met Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.
For now, the war which entered its fifth month on Wednesday, raged on unabated in Hamas-ruled Gaza, where the health ministry said at least 123 people were killed in the past 24 hours.