Hamza Hendawi
The National / August 19, 2024
US Secretary of State visits Israel before heading to Egypt as mediators prepare for more talks in Cairo.
Israel has accepted a recent proposal put forward by the US to bridge gaps over a potential deal for a ceasefire with Hamas in exchange for the release of hostages, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday.
Blinken, who is on his ninth trip to the Middle East since October 7, spoke after meeting Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, earlier in the day.
“In a very constructive meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu today, he confirmed to me that Israel accepts the bridging proposal, that he supports it,” Blinken said.
He said that it is now up to Hamas to accept the proposal.
“The next important step is for Hamas to say yes, and then in the coming days, for all of the expert negotiators to get together to work on clear understandings on implementing the agreement,” Blinken said.
The current round of negotiations may be the “last opportunity” to reach a Gaza ceasefire and win the release of hostages held in the enclave, he said earlier, but sources familiar with the talks told The National a deal remained unlikely.
“This is a decisive moment, probably the best, maybe the last, opportunity to bring the hostages home, to bring a ceasefire and to put everyone on a better path to enduring peace and security,” Blinken said during a meeting in Tel Aviv with Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
Hamas has rejected the draft deal agreed by US, Egyptian and Qatari mediators in two days of talks in Doha last week. It said the latest proposals met all conditions set by Netanyahu.
“We hold Netanyahu fully responsible for foiling the efforts of the mediators and delaying reaching a deal,” Hamas said in a statement on Sunday night.
Netanyahu held a three-hour meeting with Blinken on Monday and “reiterated Israel’s commitment to the current American proposal on the release of our hostages, which takes into account Israel’s security needs”, the Israeli Prine Minister’s office posted on X.
Blinken said earlier that it was important for the ceasefire process not to be derailed as anticipation mounts that Iran will respond to the suspected Israeli strike that killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last month.
“And so we’re working to make sure that there is no escalation, that there are no provocations, that there are no actions that in any way move us away from getting this deal over the line, or for that matter, escalating the conflict to other places and to greater intensity,” he said.
Blinken was scheduled to hold talks with Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant before travelling to Egypt for a meeting on Tuesday with President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in New Alamein, the government’s summer seat on the Mediterranean.
Senior negotiators from the US, Egypt and Qatar are expected to gather in Cairo for more talks this week. The mediators remain hopeful that a deal can still be reached despite Hamas’s rejection of the latest proposals, but the sources who spoke to The National are skeptical that a breakthrough is within reach.
“The entire process is shrouded in fog now,” said one. “It does not look like Israel will stop the war anytime soon, and Hamas will at the end be left with the hostages as its most effective bargaining card.”
The mediators have been working from a three-phase process announced by US President Joe Biden on May 31 that involves Hamas freeing all the hostages held in Gaza in exchange for the release of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel; an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza; and a lasting ceasefire.
The UN Security Council approved the plan shortly after it was announced, but Hamas later proposed “amendments” while Israel asked for “clarifications”, with each side accusing the other of making new and unacceptable demands.
Hamas, for example, wants assurances that Israel will not resume the war after the first batch of hostages – around 30 of the most vulnerable – are released in the plan’s first six-week stage.
Israel, meanwhile, wants to ensure negotiations do not drag on indefinitely over the second phase, in which the remaining living hostages, including male soldiers, are to be freed.
Other unresolved differences include which prisoners Israel will release in exchange for the hostages, whether they will be sent into exile and the conditions under which Palestinians displaced by the war can return to homes in north Gaza.
Hamas is believed to hold 111 hostages, of whom the Israeli military says about 40 have died in captivity. The hostages are among about 250 people snatched by Hamas and its allies when they attacked southern Israel last October. They also killed about 1,200 people, mostly Israelis.
That attack, the deadliest against Israel since its foundation in 1948, triggered an Israeli response that has to date killed more than 40,100 Palestinians, wounded more than twice that number and displaced most of the enclave’s 2.3 million residents. Large swathes of built-up areas have also been razed to the ground.
The sources said that Egypt, which borders both Gaza and Israel, was increasingly frustrated with Israel over the latter’s capture in May of the Palestinian side of the Egypt-Gaza border crossing in Rafah and a strip that runs the length of their border known as the Philadelphi Corridor.
Bound to Israel by a milestone peace treaty signed in 1979, Egypt wants Israel to withdraw from both, citing an agreement reached a decade ago that prohibits the stationing of Israeli forces in either area.
Israel claims that underground tunnels linking Egypt and Gaza have been used to smuggle arms and dual-use material for Hamas. Egypt rejects that claim and says it destroyed all the tunnels nearly a decade ago.
Israel has offered to gradually withdraw its forces from the area but wants to retain the right to stage military operations there if its security necessitates that, a proposal rejected by Egypt.
The two sides are also at odds over who should run the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing.
Hamza Hendawi – Foreign Correspondent, Cairo
Willy Lowry contributed to this report from Washington
