US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday urged Hamas to accept a Gaza truce plan despite an Israeli warning that the army would keep fighting the Palestinian militant group after any ceasefire.
Mediators have proposed a truce deal that would halt fighting for 40 days and exchange dozens of hostages for many more Palestinian prisoners.
Hamas has said that it would respond “within a very short period” to the proposal.
Photo: AFP
“Hamas needs to say yes and needs to get this done,” Blinken said while in Israel on his seventh Middle East crisis tour since the war broke out in October last year.
“If Hamas actually purports to care about the Palestinian people and wants to see an immediate alleviation of their suffering, it should take this deal,” he said.
Blinken spoke after visiting the Nir Oz kibbutz, which Hamas attacked on Oct. 7 last year, as well as Israel’s Kerem Shalom border crossing with Gaza and Ashdod port, which Israel says will be used for aid shipments.
Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan told reporters that the movement’s position on the truce proposal was “negative” for the time being, but that discussions were still under way.
The group’s aim remains an “end to this war,” senior Hamas official Suhail al-Hindi told reporters — a goal at odds with the stated position of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu has vowed to send Israeli ground forces into Rafah.
“We will enter Rafah and we will eliminate the Hamas battalions there with or without a deal,” Netanyahu said this week.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that an Israeli assault on Rafah would “be an unbearable escalation, killing thousands more civilians and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee.”
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant that any Rafah operation must “include a credible plan to evacuate Palestinian civilians and maintain the flow of humanitarian aid,” the Pentagon said on Wednesday.
Talks on a potential truce and hostage release deal to pause the bloodiest ever Gaza war have been held in Cairo, involving US, Egyptian and Qatari mediators.
Al-Hindi, speaking by telephone from an undisclosed location, said that there is “great interest from Hamas and all Palestinian resistance factions to end this insane war on the Palestinian people, which has consumed everything.”
However, “it will not be at any cost,” he said, adding that the group “cannot under any circumstances raise the white flag or surrender to the conditions of the Israeli enemy.”
Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sameh Shoukry called on all sides to “show the necessary flexibility” to achieve a deal “that stops the bloodshed of Palestinians.”
Analysts doubted that Hamas would sign up to another temporary ceasefire, knowing that Israeli troops could resume their onslaught as soon as it is over.
“I’m pessimistic about the option of Hamas agreeing to a deal that doesn’t have a permanent ceasefire baked into it,” said Mairav Zonszein, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS