Renewed efforts for truce deal
US SECRETARY of State Antony Blinken on a visit to Israel yesterday voiced hope for a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal but cautioned that more negotiations were needed.
“There’s 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 week-long truce in November, he said.
As Blinken met Israeli leaders in Jerusalem, an Egyptian official told AFP that “a new round of negotiations” would start today in Cairo aimed at achieving “calm in the Gaza Strip”, now in its fifth month of war.
A Hamas source with knowledge of the matter said the Palestinian militant group had agreed to the 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 pause to fighting and a hostage-prisoner exchange, as well as more aid for Gaza, but negotiations have continued since.
The US top envoy, on his fifth
Middle East tour since the October 7 attack, met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other leaders of his war cabinet.
On the eve of their talks, Netanyahu had said that Israel’s overall war aim remained unchanged: “We are on the way to the total victory and we will not stop”.
Blinken also made a new plea for more aid to 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,” Blinken said, “and the steps that are being taken – additional steps that need to be taken – are the focus of my own meetings here.”
Blinken later travelled to the occupied West Bank where he met Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that if Israel presses into Gaza’s far-southern Rafah, it “would exponentially increase what is already a humanitarian nightmare with untold regional consequences”.
“It is time for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire and the unconditional release of all hostages”, he added in a speech to the General Assembly.
AFPTV footage showed frantic scenes of Palestinians running for their lives, many screaming, as gunfire rang out from advancing Israeli forces in a Gaza City neighbourhood.
Israel vowed to eliminate Hamas and launched air strikes and a ground offensive that have killed at least 27 708 people, mostly women and children, according to the Gaza health ministry.
Fear has grown among the more than one million Palestinians crowded into Gaza’s far south, around Rafah on the Egyptian border, as the battlefront has crept ever closer.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said this week that the army would “reach places where we have not yet fought... right up to the last Hamas bastion, which is Rafah”.
The Israeli army has pushed steadily south through the coastal territory, with the heaviest combat raging in Khan Yunis in recent weeks.
The US has strongly backed Israel with munitions and diplomatic support but it has also urged steps to reduce the number of civilian casualties.
On Tuesday, the US House of Representatives rejected a Republican-led bill on Tuesday that would provide $17.6 billion to Israel, as Democrats said they wanted a vote instead on a broader measure that would also provide assistance to Ukraine, international humanitarian funding and new money for border security. There were 179 votes against the bill and 249 for it, meaning it could not receive the two-thirds majority needed to pass.
Amid the Gaza war, Iran-backed groups in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen have launched attacks in support of Hamas, and Israel, the US and its allies have launched strikes on them.
Israel has also traded deadly cross-border fire with Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement and bombed Iranlinked targets in Syria. |