“Significant progress has been achieved in negotiations” between Hamas and Israel, Al-Qahera News reported citing a “senior source”. Egyptian negotiators “reached a mutually acceptable wording on most of the points of disagreement,” he added.
Cease fire or invasion of Rafah?
The proposal calls for a 40-day ceasefire and the release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the release of Israeli hostages abducted during an unprecedented raid by Hamas’ military arm into southern Israel on October 7, the trigger for that war.
But Hamas insists on demanding a permanent ceasefire, which the Israeli government rejects, threatening to order a ground operation in Rafah (south), which it says is the “last” stronghold of its battalions, but where more than a million have taken refuge Palestinians, the vast majority of them displaced by the bombing and fighting.
“We will do what is necessary to defeat, to crush our enemy, not excluding Rafah,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated this week, announcing that the operation in the city would take place “with or without a deal” for ceasefire.
For Husham Badran, a member of the Hamas politburo, Mr Netanyahu’s statements about the attack on Rafah “are clearly aimed at nullifying any possibility of an agreement”.
On the contrary, for US Secretary of State Blinken “the only obstacle” to the ceasefire “is Hamas”.
On the night of Friday into Saturday, AFP sources in hospitals spoke of Israeli airstrikes in Rafah and neighboring Khan Younis, which has been almost completely leveled following heavy fighting with Hamas that followed the Israeli ground operation there.
“Blood Bath”
According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, citing Egyptian sources, Israel is willing to give another week to the ceasefire talks, and if no agreement is reached it will go ahead with the operation it has been threatening for weeks to carry out in Rafah .
“A large-scale military operation in Rafah could lead to a bloodbath,” warned yesterday Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), which is preparing a crisis response plan as it would see a huge “increase in the number of the wounded and the dead”.
This plan “is nothing more than a band-aid,” said Rick Peppercorn, WHO representative in the Palestinian Territories. “The health system, which is already on its knees, will not be able to withstand the potential scale of destruction that the invasion would cause,” he added.
International humanitarian aid, heavily vetted by Israel, continues to trickle in, mainly through Egypt and the Rafah crossing, as the enclave’s population — 2.4 million people — is threatened with starvation.
Faced with the often insurmountable difficulties of delivering aid by road, several countries have airdropped food into the Gaza Strip, while the US military is building an artificial harbor off its coast to facilitate the transport of aid by sea, via Cyprus.
Israel’s main ally, the US, opposes the ground invasion of Rafah and has called for a “credible” plan to protect civilians if such an operation were to go ahead. US Foreign Minister Blinken said yesterday that this has not happened in Washington and warned that given this fact, the attack on Rafa would cause much heavier losses than what would be “acceptable”, according to him.
“The children were sleeping”
The war continues against the background of the already tense atmosphere in the US, where demonstrations, above all by students, against the war continue and multiply. The protests could, according to analysts, reduce President Joe Biden’s chances of re-election in November.
The war broke out on October 7, when an unprecedented raid by Hamas’s military arm in southern Israel killed 1,170 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data.
Another 250-plus people were abducted and taken to the Palestinian enclave. According to Israeli sources, 128 of them remain in the Gaza Strip, but at least 35 are believed to be dead.
The broad military operation launched by Israel in retaliation in the Palestinian enclave, vowing to wipe out Hamas, has killed at least 34,622 people, the vast majority of them women and children, according to the Palestinian Islamist movement’s health ministry.
Diplomatic activity is at its peak in Cairo as a delegation of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas arrived for talks on a Gaza truce proposal linked to the release of hostages, Al-Qahera News, an Egyptian intelligence-affiliated media outlet, reported.
“Significant progress has been achieved in negotiations” between Hamas and Israel, Al-Qahera News reported citing a “senior source”. Egyptian negotiators “reached a mutually acceptable wording on most of the points of disagreement,” he added.
Source ERTnews, APE-MPE, Reuters
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