Blinken meets Israeli PM for talks on Gaza truce plan
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Wednesday to push for a ceasefire as the Gaza war enters its fifth month.
Israel and Hamas have been weighing a proposal, brokered by US, Qatari and Egyptian mediators, that would be expected to temporarily halt the fighting and see Gaza hostages freed and Palestinian prisoners released.
“There’s still a lot of work to be done,” Blinken said in Doha late on Tuesday after earlier stops in Saudi Arabia and Egypt on his fifth Middle East crisis tour since the Oct 7 attack sparked the war.
“But we continue to believe that an agreement is possible and indeed essential, and we will continue to work relentlessly to achieve it,” the US top diplomat told reporters.
For now, the war raged on unabated in Hamas-ruled Gaza, where the health ministry said at least 100 people were killed overnight and AFP journalists reported more heavy bombing of southern cities.
Israeli forces, in their campaign to destroy Hamas, have pushed steadily south, with the heaviest combat raging in the city of Khan Yunis in recent weeks.
Fear has grown among the more than one million Palestinians now crowded into Gaza’s far south, around the city of Rafah on the Egyptian border, as the battlefront has crept ever closer.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant warned earlier this week that the army “will reach places where we have not yet fought ... right up to the last Hamas bastion, which is Rafah”.
The UN aid coordination office OCHA voiced alarm about looming major combat in the densely crowded area.
“Intensified hostilities in Rafah in this situation could lead to large-scale loss of civilian lives, and we must do everything possible within our power to avoid that,” said its spokesman Jens Laerke.
The bloodiest ever Gaza war started with Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on Oct 7, which resulted in the deaths of about 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Militants also seized around 250 hostages. Israel says 132 remain in Gaza, of whom 29 are believed to have died.
Israel vowed to eliminate Hamas and launched air strikes and a ground offensive that have killed at least 27,585 people, mostly women and children, according to the Gaza health ministry.
The campaign has devastated swathes of Gaza and displaced the majority of its 2.4 million people who have also endured dire shortages of food, water, fuel and medicine.
The humanitarian situation in long-blockaded Gaza has become “beyond catastrophic,” the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said on Tuesday.