US says Gaza ceasefire deal ‘on the table’
AN AGREEMENT WOULD BRING THE FIRST EXTENDED TRUCE OF THE WAR
Adelegation from Hamas arrived in Cairo yesterday for crunch talks on a Gaza ceasefire, billed as a potential final hurdle towards an agreement that would halt the fighting for six weeks.
Washington said a ceasefire deal was already “on the table”, approved by Israel and awaiting only a sign-off from the militants. But the warring sides gave away little information on the state of any progress.
After the Hamas delegation arrived, a Palestinian official said the deal was “not yet there”. From the Israeli side, there was no official confirmation even that its delegation was attending.
Framework agreement
One source briefed on the talks had said Israel could stay away from Cairo unless Hamas first presented a full list of hostages who are still alive, a demand that a Palestinian source said Hamas had so far rejected as premature.
Still, a US official said: “The path to a ceasefire right now literally at this hour is straightforward. And there’s a deal on the table. There’s a framework deal.”
An agreement would bring the first extended truce of the war, which has raged for five months so far with just a week-long pause in November. Dozens of hostages held by the militants would be freed in return for hundreds of Palestinian detainees.
Aid to besieged Gaza would be ramped up to save the lives of Palestinians pushed to the verge of famine. Fighting would cease in time to head off a massive planned Israeli assault on Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are penned in against the enclave’s border fence. Israeli forces would pull back from some areas and allow Gazans to return to homes abandoned earlier in the war.
Aid to besieged Gaza would be ramped up to save the lives of Palestinians pushed to the verge of famine.
It took 10 years and three rounds of in vitro fertilisation for Rania Abu Anza to become pregnant, and only seconds for her to lose her five-month-old twins, a boy and a girl.
An Israeli strike hit the home of her extended family in the southern Gaza City of Rafah late Saturday, killing her children, her husband and 11 other relatives and leaving another nine missing under the rubble, according to survivors and local health officials.
She had woken up at around 10pm to breastfeed Naeim, the boy, and went back to sleep with him in one arm and Wissam, the girl, in the other. Her husband was sleeping beside them.
The explosion came an hour and a half later. The house collapsed.
Mother’s anguish
“I screamed for my children and my husband,” she said Sunday, as she sobbed and cradled a baby’s blanket to her chest. “They were all dead. Their father took them and left me behind.”
She closed her eyes, leaned her head against the wall and patted the bundle in a calming gesture that, finally, she’d had the chance to give.
Israeli air strikes have regularly hit crowded family homes since the start of the war in Gaza, even in Rafah, which Israel declared a safe zone in October but is now the next target of its devastating ground offensive.
The strikes often come without warning, usually in the middle of the night.
‘I swear I didn’t get enough of them’
Of the 14 people killed in the Abu Anza house, six were children and four were women, according to Dr Marwan Al Hams, director of the hospital where the bodies were taken. In addition to her husband and children, Rania also lost a sister, a nephew, a pregnant cousin and other relatives.
Farouq Abu Anza, a relative, said about 35 people were staying at the house, some of whom had been displaced from other areas. He said they were all civilians, mostly children, and that there were no militants among them.
Rania and her husband, Wissam, both 29, spent a decade trying to get pregnant. Two rounds of IVF had failed, but after a third, she learnt she was pregnant early last year. The twins were born on October 13.
Her husband, a day labourer, was so proud he insisted on naming the girl after himself, she said.
“I didn’t get enough of them,”
Of the 14 people killed in the Abu Anza house, six were children and four were women, according to Dr. Marwan Al Hams, director of the hospital where the bodies were taken. In addition to her husband and children, Rania also lost a sister, a nephew, a pregnant cousin and other relatives.
she said. “I swear I didn’t get enough of them.”
The carnage
Less than a week earlier, Hamas fighters had stormed into southern Israel in a surprise attack, killing some 1,200 people — mostly civilians — and taking around 250 hostages, including children and a newborn.
Israel responded with one of the deadliest and most destructive military campaigns in recent history. The war has killed over 30,410 Palestinians.
For the children who survive, the war has made life hellish, humanitarian workers say, with some in northern Gaza beyond the reach of care.
“The sense of helplessness and despair among parents and doctors in realising that lifesaving aid, just a few kilometres away, is being kept out of reach, must be unbearable, but worse still are the anguished cries of those babies slowly perishing under the world’s gaze,” Unicef regional director Adele Khodr said in a statement yesterday.
Until Saturday, the Abu Anza family had been relatively fortunate. Rafah has been spared the destruction of northern
Gaza and the southern city of Khan Younis. But Israel has said Rafah will be next, and the roughly 1.5 million people who have sought refuge there will be relocated, without saying where.
“We have no rights,” Rania said. “I lost the people who were dearest to me. I don’t want to live here. I want to get out of this country. I’m tired of this war.”