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A Hamas official on Friday accused Israel’s prime minister of stalling on a final ceasefire deal with Gaza, with the key issue being the presence of Israeli troops on the Egyptian border. Israel confirmed that talks were taking place in Cairo but said Hamas was not involved.
The United States said Friday that progress was made in the latest round of Gaza ceasefire talks after the presence of Israeli troops on the Egyptian border became a major sticking point.
The White House said CIA Director William Burns was among the U.S. officials taking part in the Cairo discussions, along with the heads of Israel’s spy agencies and security services.
“Progress has been made. We now need both sides to come together and work together to implement it,” said John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council.
He said initial talks that began Thursday evening were “essentially constructive,” adding that reports that diplomacy was “on the verge of collapse” were inaccurate.
Representatives of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which launched an unprecedented attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that sparked the war, did not attend the Cairo talks.
Hossam Badran, an Islamist movement official, told AFP on Friday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence that his troops remain on a strip of land known as the “Philadelphia Corridor” on the Gaza-Egypt border reflects “his refusal to reach a final deal.”
For months, Egypt and mediators Qatar and the United States have been trying to reach a deal to end the more than 10-month war between Israel and Hamas.
The optimism surrounding months of on-and-off ceasefire talks has proven to be unfounded.
Fighting in Gaza intensified, with witnesses reporting fighting in northern Gaza, heavy shelling in central areas and tank fire near the southernmost city of Rafah.
Tens of thousands of civilians were evacuated again this week from Deir el Balah and the southern city of Khan Yunis, according to evacuation orders issued by Israel ahead of the military operation.
The United Nations says the war has displaced nearly all of Gaza’s population, often multiple times, leaving them without shelter, clean water and other necessities as disease spreads.
– ‘This situation cannot continue’ –
“Civilians are exhausted, terrified, fleeing from one destroyed area to another with no end in sight,” Mohanad Hadi, the UN humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories, said late Thursday.
“This cannot continue,” he said.
The Israeli military said its forces had “eliminated” dozens of militants around Khan Yunis and Deir al-Balah in the past 24 hours.
According to AFP statistics based on official Israeli data, Hamas’ attack on southern Israel on October 7 killed 1,199 people, most of them civilians.
Israel’s retaliatory military action has killed 40,265 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip’s health ministry, which does not disclose the number of civilian and militant deaths. The United Nations Human Rights Office said most of the dead were women and children.
Palestinian militants also took 251 hostages, 105 of whom remained in Gaza, and the military said 34 had died.
This week, the Israeli military recovered the bodies of six hostages from a tunnel in the Khan Yunis area.
Netanyahu has frequently faced protests from supporters of the hostages, who have demanded a deal to bring them home.
Ella Ben Ami, whose father is among those detained in Gaza, said after meeting with Netanyahu on Friday that she felt “with a heavy and overwhelming heart that this (a ceasefire) is not going to happen anytime soon.”
“I fear for my father’s life, for the girls there and for everyone’s life,” she said in a statement released by the Hostage and Missing Families Forum campaign group.
– ‘Now is the time’ –
Diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire in Gaza and avert a larger war intensified after two senior Iran-backed militants were killed last month, triggering threats of retaliation from Tehran and its allies, who blamed Israel.
Since the outbreak of the Gaza war, there have been almost daily cross-border exchanges of fire between the Iran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah movement and the Israeli army.
“Now is the time for a hostage agreement and a ceasefire,” U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said as she accepted the Democratic presidential nomination in Chicago.
The basis for the negotiations is a framework presented by U.S. President Joe Biden in late May, which he described as an Israeli proposal.
The three-phase plan would initially exchange Palestinians for hostages in Israeli prisons, and Biden said the ceasefire would last six weeks.
Under the plan, Israeli troops would withdraw from “all densely populated areas in Gaza.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, visiting the Middle East this week, said Netanyahu endorsed U.S. proposals to bridge differences and reach a ceasefire.
Kirby said the United States still believes Netanyahu accepted the proposal and again called on Hamas to do the same.
Hamas official Badran reiterated on Friday that Hamas “accepts the initial outline of the Biden plan” and said Washington must pressure Netanyahu to cease fire.
He said Hamas would accept “at least the withdrawal of occupation forces, including in Philadelphia.”
Netanyahu, whose far-right coalition relies on support from members who oppose the truce, said his office had rejected “incorrect” media reports that he had agreed to an Israeli withdrawal from the Philadelphia corridor.
Netanyahu believes that control of the Egyptian border area is necessary to prevent Hamas from rearming.
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