Team from Gaza mediator Egypt heads to Israel

AFP | Jerusalem    

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

A delegation from mediator Egypt is travelling to Israel yesterday, a source close to the Israeli government told AFP, in what local media said is a bid to reignite stalled hostage-release negotiations.

The effort comes alongside preparations for a military push against Hamas in southern Gaza’s Rafah, and with spillover from the Gaza war leading to steppedup exchanges of fire over Israel’s northern border with Lebanon.

Israel’s army yesterday said missile fire near that border killed an Israeli civilian.

A Hamas official told AFP that any push into Rafah, where much of Gaza’s population is sheltering, would threaten negotiations.

Qatar, Egypt and the United States have mediated truce and hostage-release talks, so far without success since a one-week halt to the fighting in November.

That truce saw the exchange of 80 Israeli captives in return for 240 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

Since then, global criticism of the war’s toll on Palestinian civilians in Gaza has escalated, as have calls for Hamas there to release their captives.

Famine warning

The source told AFP that Egypt’s delegation was travelling to Israel “for security coordination”.

Several Israeli media outlets, citing unnamed officials, said yesterday that the war cabinet discussed a new plan for a truce and hostage release, ahead of the Egyptian delegation’s visit.

Aid groups warn any Rafah invasion would add to already-catastrophic conditions in Gaza where, according to the World Food Programme, famine is “a real and dangerous threat”.

Senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad told AFP that Israel “will not achieve what it wants” in Rafah.

After nearly seven months of war Israel had not achieved its goals, “whether eliminating Hamas or returning the captives”, he said.

Hamad warned that an invasion “will undoubtedly threaten the negotiations” and show “that Israel is interested in continuing the war”.

The official of the Islamist movement spoke by phone from Qatar where a number of senior figures from Hamas’s political bureau are based.

After mediators failed to secure a truce for Ramadan, which ended early this month, Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani said last week that Qatar was reassessing its role.

Opposition to a military operation in Rafah extended to protesting university students in the United States. “Stop the invasion!

Hands off Rafah!” said a sign among a pro-Palestinian encampment at George Washington University in the US capital.