2024-03-24 07:15:22
Netanyahu’s government is facing internal pressure to reach a hostage exchange deal.
2 hours ago
The United States presented a “proposal to bring views closer” regarding the number of Palestinian detainees that Israel would release for each hostage released by Hamas in any new truce in Gaza, an Israeli official familiar with the ongoing negotiations in the Qatari capital, Doha, said on Saturday.
An Israeli delegation headed by Mossad chief David Barnea is visiting Doha to conduct indirect negotiations with Hamas, which CIA Director William Burns is helping Qatari and Egyptian officials mediate.
Through any agreement, Hamas wants to reach a permanent end to the fighting, while Israel plans to continue the war until Hamas’s military capabilities and ability to rule Gaza are dismantled.
Reuters news agency quoted an Israeli official who requested anonymity as saying: “During the negotiations, large gaps emerged regarding the issue of (the proportion of) prisoners who will be released for each of the forty hostages whose possible return is being discussed.”
He added: “The United States put forward a proposal to bring viewpoints closer to the table, and Israel responded positively to it. Hamas’ response is still pending.”
The Israeli official did not provide details about the American proposal.
The US Embassy in Israel did not immediately comment.
In response to a question about the ratio of hostages to prisoners, Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas official, told Reuters, “A proposal submitted by the movement this month, under which Israel would release between 700 to 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for female, minor, elderly, and infirm prisoners.” Israel described this as “unrealistic.”
Abu Zuhri pointed out Israel’s refusal to agree to stop its attack, withdraw forces, and allow displaced Palestinians to return to their homes in the northern Gaza Strip.
Abu Zuhri said: “What America and the occupation (Israel) want is to restore the prisoners without committing to stop the aggression, which means resuming war, killing and destruction, and we cannot accept that.”
Israel expressed its willingness to suspend its attack for six weeks and allow more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza in exchange for the release of the 40 hostages. This would leave behind 90 hostages out of 253 held by Hamas in its attack on October 7, which ignited the war.
Meanwhile, the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Hamas movement, announced in a statement on Saturday that one of the Israeli hostages held by the movement, aged 34, died as a result of “lack of medicine and food.”
“It’s time to silence the guns”
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Guterres renewed his call for a ceasefire during his visit to the Egyptian side of the Rafah land crossing.
Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General António Guterres renewed his call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
This came during his visit to the Rafah land crossing on the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip on Saturday.
Speaking from the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing, Guterres said: “It is time to silence the guns,” and called on Israel to provide “full and unrestricted” access to humanitarian goods throughout Gaza.
A UN-backed food security assessment said this week that “1.1 million people in Gaza are suffering from catastrophic hunger and starvation.”
He added, “A man-made famine in the north is imminent, between now and next May.”
Guterres said, “The stopping of detained relief trucks on the Egyptian side of the border with the Gaza Strip in a long line is an infuriating act.”
He added in statements to reporters in front of the Rafah crossing gate, which is the entry point for aid into Gaza, that “the United Nations will continue to work with Egypt to facilitate the flow of aid to the Strip.”
He said: “Here, from this crossing, we see everything that breaks the heart and we see the cruelty of the heart at its most intense. A long line of relief trucks prohibited from entering on one side of the gates, and the specter of famine stretching out on the other side.”
He added: “This is more than tragic. It is infuriating behavior.”
Guterres’s visit comes at a time when Israel is facing international pressure to allow more humanitarian aid into the devastated Gaza Strip, due to the war that has been ongoing between Israel and Hamas for more than five months.
Israel, which threatens to eliminate Hamas and fears that the movement will divert aid, kept all its land crossings to the Gaza Strip closed except for one crossing. It opened the Kerem Shalom crossing near Rafah at the end of December, and denies accusations from Egypt and United Nations relief agencies that it is disrupting humanitarian aid shipments, saying that “the United Nations is failing to distribute aid inside Gaza.”
Israel Katz criticized Israeli Foreign Minister Guterres, in a post on social media, for blaming Israel “without denouncing in any way the Hamas terrorists who plunder humanitarian aid.”
Fighting rages
On the ground, fighting intensified on Saturday in the vicinity of Al-Shifa Hospital in the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli army said that its forces killed more than 170 militants during their ongoing raid, which the Palestinian Ministry of Health says also led to the death of five wounded.
The armed wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad said that fighters from the two movements were waging battles with Israeli forces in the vicinity of Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City, but Hamas denied any presence inside the hospital.
Israeli forces entered the Shifa complex in the early hours of Monday morning, and are combing the sprawling complex, which the army says is connected to a network of tunnels used as a base for Hamas and other Palestinian fighters.
Meanwhile, eight Palestinians were killed and others were injured, on Saturday evening, after Israeli aircraft bombed a house in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, according to the Palestinian News Agency (Wafa).
Israeli artillery also bombed the southeast of Khan Yunis governorate, south of the Gaza Strip.
Palestinian medical sources said, “Israeli forces committed 7 massacres in the Gaza Strip during the past 24 hours, leaving 72 dead and 114 injured.”
She pointed out that the death toll in the Gaza Strip has risen to 32,142, most of them children and women, and the injuries to 74,412, while thousands of victims are still under the rubble, since the start of the Israeli war on Gaza on the seventh of last October.
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