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.
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