HAMAS SET FOR TALKS ON TRUCE WITH DEAL IN BALANCE
▶ Group’s leaders to meet Egyptian officials and US and Qatari mediators
Senior Hamas officials are set to travel to Egypt this week for talks that will make or break the latest draft deal to halt fighting in Gaza, sources told The National.
The group’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh and senior aides Khalil Al Haya, Osama Hamdan and Moussa Abu Marzouq will hear the latest proposals from mediators from the US and Qatar, alongside Egyptian intelligence officials.
As The National reported yesterday, the deal envisages a truce of up to three months during which Israel and Hamas would carry out a detaineehostage swap, in which as many as 5,000 Palestinians held in Israeli jails may be freed.
But Hamas is standing by its demands for a permanent ceasefire and guarantees that Israel will withdraw its troops from Gaza and agree to stop military operations there.
Sources said Hamas had informed mediators of its rejection in principle of the draft.
Israel has not yet given its formal response.
Details were laid out in Paris, where CIA chief William Burns, his Egyptian and Israeli counterparts – as well as senior Qatari officials – have been meeting since Sunday.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has voiced hope for an agreement to halt the fighting in exchange for liberating the 132 hostages held by Hamas in the besieged enclave.
“Very important, productive work has been done and there is some real hope going forward,” he said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office emphasised there are “significant gaps, which the parties will continue to discuss”. The push for a truce has become increasingly important after the threat of famine forced Gazans in the northern part of the enclave to resort to grinding animal feed to make bread.
“For two months we have been deprived of white flour and the world is witnessing our struggle as we face literal starvation,” Sari Abu Khater, in Jabilia camp in northern Gaza, told The National.
After some western countries decided last week to pause funding for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Michael Fakhri, UN special rapporteur on the right to food, said “famine was inevitable” for the 2.3 million people in Gaza.
The Palestinian Authority’s Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, has called for an investigation into reports that about 30 bodies were buried in the north of the enclave.
The dead, blindfolded with hands bound, were discovered in a school.
The ministry accused Israeli forces of killing civilians and called for an an investigation team to carry out an inspection “of all areas to find out the truth about the genocide against the Palestinian people”.
Meanwhile, Al Amal Hospital in Gaza’s southern city of Khan Younis has been under “total siege” for a seventh day in a row.
The complex, run by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, has come under “direct fire” from Israeli forces, Osama Al Kahlout, who leads the agency’s operations room in southern Gaza, told The National.
Anyone who moves “even one metre” outside is being attacked by snipers and drones, he said.
It was early in the morning when a bearded man rang the doorbell of a rehabilitation ward in one of the main hospitals in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.
The man was granted access by a woman in her early twenties who sat alone at a pristine reception desk.
She asked the man which patient he had come to see but was hit on the head with the butt of a gun before she had a chance to scream.
More armed soldiers then flooded the room, disguised as patients, medical staff and family members.
Some stood guard. Others moved a few metres to the left.
Muffled shots left three Palestinian men, including a patient, dead.
The West Bank, where tension was high already, had just witnessed an Israeli undercover assassination inside a medical centre.
The Ibn Sina Hospital had been turned into a kill zone.
The three targets were Bassel Ghazzawi, 18, who was being treated for a spinal injury that left him paralysed, his brother, Mohammed Ghazzawi, 23, and Mohammed Jalamneh, 27.
The Israeli army said Mr Jalamneh was the primary target of the operation.
It alleged he was planning an attack on Israel and had been in contact with Hamas headquarters abroad. Israel said the brothers were also militants. The killings have shocked Palestinians and mark an escalation after about four months of war in Gaza.
Two staff members on the hospital ward say they now fear working at night.
“I view this as the Israelis warning hospitals, ‘Don’t treat wanted guys’,” one of the rehabilitation nurses said.
“How can we ever respect this? We don’t identify the people we treat or study their backgrounds. They are only our patients.”
A Gazan on the ward summed up the sense of terror among people at the hospital.
“In Gaza, you see [the Israeli military] in the air, but here you see them for real,” he said.
Nearby, a child peeked out from behind the corner. Another, in blue pyjamas, was hoisted into his father’s arms.
“I brought my two-year-old son to Jenin from Gaza for treatment before October 7,” he said.
“It is my bad luck that even here the war follows us. It’s not safe. There are kids running around the whole time.”
His little boy was sleeping on the opposite end of the ward from where the three were killed.
When The National visited, parents were not allowing their children to go anywhere near the room where it happened.
The site was too gruesome. In the room, specks of blood dotted the floor. Bassel’s pillow was marked by a bloodstain and had a hole in the middle.
A copy of the Quran was to the right, on the bedside table.
Bassel was asleep at the time of the attack, hospital staff have said, as were his brother and friend.
Easy-wipe sofas and chairs were covered in blood and there was more on the floor, ceiling and walls.
“We have shared rooms on this ward,” one of the nurses said, standing on the threshold of the room.
“Imagine if there was another patient sharing? They would have been killed, too.”
It is more than a day since the assassination, but staff at the hospital had yet not started cleaning the room. Uneaten food and sacks of clothes still lay around.
The mother of the Ghazzawi brothers might well have brought them.
She left the room just before her sons and their friend were killed, hospital staff said.
She soon returned and wailed at the side of her son’s bed and in the corridors of the hospital.
In the last conversation that the two nurses had with Bassel, three days before he was killed, the teenager invited them to his house to celebrate the day when he was discharged from the hospital.
His mother would cook for her son’s carers.
“His dream was to walk again. Step by step he was getting there,” one of the nurses said.
“What kind of planning could those three have been doing?
“What can a guy who can’t move his lower body do? What threat is he to Israel?”
Parents did not allow their children to go near the room where the men were killed. The site was too gruesome