Blinken in Israel voices hope for Gaza truce deal to free hostages

AFP | Jerusalem                                                     

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

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 said that “a new round of negotiations” would start on Thursday 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 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 six-week 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.”

Call for more aid

Blinken also made a new plea for more aid into 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. For now, the war raged on unabated in Hamas-ruled Gaza, where the health ministry said at least 123 people were killed in the past 24 hours and AFP journalists reported more heavy bombing of southern cities.

Humanitarian nightmare

UN Secretary-General Antonio 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.

Fear has grown among the more than one million Palestinians now crowded into Gaza’s far south, around the city of Rafah on the Egyptian border, as the battlefront has crept ever closer. “I am terrified that Israel will begin a ground operation in Rafah,” said Dana Ahmed, 40, who was displaced from Gaza City with her three children and now lives in a tent in Rafah.