2023-11-27 08:38:01
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — International mediators were pushing to extend a ceasefire in Gaza that has stopped the deadliest violence in decades between Israelis and Palestinians but was set to expire following Monday, as Israel and Hamas prepared a fourth exchange of hostages held by militiamen and Palestinians imprisoned in Israel.
Israel has said it will extend the ceasefire by one day for every 10 additional hostages released. Hamas has also said it aims to extend the four-day agreement, which came into effect on Friday following weeks of indirect negotiations brokered by the United States, Qatar and Egypt.
However, Israel also says it remains committed to crushing Hamas’s military capabilities and ending its 16-year rule over the Gaza Strip. That would likely mean expanding its ground offensive from devastated northern Gaza to the south, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians crowd United Nations shelters and harsh conditions persist despite increased aid deliveries during the truce.
The release of dozens of people — most of them women and children — who were among the approximately 240 captured by Hamas in its sweeping Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel that sparked the war, has mobilized Israelis to demand their return. of others.
62 hostages have been freed, one was rescued by Israeli forces and two were found dead inside Gaza.
“We can take all the hostages back home. We have to keep pushing,” two relatives of Abigail Edan, a 4-year-old girl with dual Israeli and American citizenship who was freed on Sunday, said in a statement.
The hostages’ families have led mass demonstrations and accuse Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of not doing enough to bring them home. The growing pressure might force him to extend the truce and make additional concessions to Hamas. However, Israel also remains shocked by the October 7 attack and determined to eliminate the threat posed by the armed group.
“In the end we will return them all,” Netanyahu said of the hostages, dressed in bulletproof vests on a rare visit Sunday to troops in the Gaza Strip. “We will continue until the end, until victory. Nothing will stop us”.
More than 13,300 Palestinians have died since the war began, regarding two-thirds of them women and children, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza. The figure does not differentiate between civilians and combatants. More than 1,200 people have been killed on the Israeli side, most of them civilians killed in the initial attack. Some 77 soldiers have died in the Israeli ground operation.
The pause in fighting brought some relief to the 2.3 million people in Gaza following weeks of constant Israeli bombardment that has driven three-quarters of the population from their homes and leveled entire neighborhoods.
But many said it was not nearly enough.
Amani Taha, a widow and mother of three who fled northern Gaza to stay with a host family in the southern city of Rafah, said she had only gotten one canned meal from a U.N. distribution center since the start of the cease fire. She helped other families in the neighborhood cook over bonfires in exchange for food for her children, who were between 4 and 10 years old.
Supermarkets and gas stations were overwhelmed by crowds trying to get basic supplies, he said. “People were desperate and went out to buy as soon as they might,” he said. “They are extremely worried that war will return.”
Palestinians still in northern Gaza, where more than a million people lived before the war, emerged to find scenes of widespread destruction as building following building was knocked down or badly damaged. The Israeli army has banned Palestinians who fled from returning.
The United Nations says the truce allowed it to increase the delivery of food, water and medicine to its largest volume since the war began. But the 160 to 200 trucks a day were still less than half of what Gaza imported before the fighting, even though humanitarian needs have skyrocketed.
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Magdy reported from Cairo.
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