US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to press for what he called an “essential” truce agreement as the Israel-Hamas war enters its fifth month.
The diplomat was due to meet Israel’s leaders as part of a Middle East crisis tour after earlier stops in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Qatar.
Pressure for a ceasefire has mounted as Israeli forces push towards the town of Rafah on Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, where more than half the besieged territory’s population has taken shelter.
For in-depth analysis and a deeper perspective on the Israel-Hamas war, the harrowing plight for the civilians in war-torn Gaza and the “day after” strategy envisioned by the US and its Middle East allies, FRANCE 24’s François Picard is joined by Hussein Ibish, Senior Resident Scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute (AGSIW) in Washington.
He is also a weekly columnist for The National (UAE) and a regular contributor to The New York Times and The Daily Beast.
The diplomat was due to meet Israel’s leaders as part of a Middle East crisis tour after earlier stops in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Qatar.
Qatar, which mediated a temporary ceasefire earlier in the conflict, said Hamas had given a response to a new proposed deal to pause the fighting.
Blinken said Hamas’s reply had been “shared” with Israel and he would discuss it there on Wednesday.
He also said there was still “a lot of work to be done” but that he believed “that an agreement is possible and indeed essential”.
Israel’s spy agency Mossad also received the Hamas response, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said, and “its details are being thoroughly evaluated”.
Netanyahu, who has yet to comment directly on the response, said on Tuesday: “We are on the way to total victory and we will not stop.”
Pressure for a ceasefire has mounted as Israeli forces push towards the town of Rafah on Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, where more than half the besieged territory’s population has taken shelter.
Ibish says that Egypt is trying to prevent Palestinians from emigrating, “by providing humanitarian aid and by putting a reconstruction process in place that will make Gaza livable after the war in short order so that these people don’t seek refuge in Sinai, just to get food, just to get a place to stay.”
FRANCE24
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