 "Israel-Hamas truce on table: What is in the proposed peace plan?")
Can Israel and Hamas give peace a chance?
That’s what many are now asking that a deal to call a truce is seemingly on the table after a senior Hamas delegation travelled to Egypt for the latest round of negotiations.
The United States and the United Kingdom are pushing for Hamas to accept the deal.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking from the World Economic Forum in the Saudi capital Riyadh, asked Hamas to sign on to the deal.
“Hamas has before it a proposal that is extraordinarily, extraordinarily generous on the part of Israel,” Blinken said. “The only thing standing between the people of Gaza and a ceasefire is Hamas. They have to decide and they have to decide quickly. “I’m hopeful that they will make the right decision.”
David Cameron, the British foreign secretary, also called Israel’s truce offer “generous”.
“I hope Hamas do take this deal and frankly, all the pressure in the world and all the eyes in the world should be on them today saying ’take that deal’,” Cameron said.
Cameron is among several foreign ministers in Riyadh, including from the US, France, Jordan and Egypt, as part of a diplomatic push to bring an end to the Gaza war.
But what is actually in the deal?
Let’s take a closer look:
According to The Guardian, Israel is offering to release Palestinians from its jails in exchange for 33 hostages.
It is also proposing “period of sustained calm.”
Impact Shorts
More ShortsIsrael has said it would be willing to talk about allowing Palestinians to return to their homes in the northern half of the Gaza strip.
It is also willing to consider removing troops from the military corridor that now divides Gaza.
Hamas, meanwhile, has called for a permanent ceasefire.
A senior Hamas leader told the newspaper there were no “major issues” with the truce plan.
The Washington Post quoted an Israeli official in the know as saying that Tel Aviv last week presented a new offer that “broke new ground.”
“There is hope,” an unnamed Hamas official in Turkey told the newspaper.
The deal is the same that failed to go through numerous rounds of talks after the one-week ceasefire ended in November.
The one-week November truce witnessed 80 Israeli hostages exchanged for 240 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
Egypt, Qatar and the United States have spent months trying to secure a new agreement between the combatants.
A French diplomatic source told Reuters the number of hostages to be released had been agreed upon, but that issues remained on the longer term nature of truce.
“We’re not far off from a deal, but that’s not the first time,” the source said.
Hamas has said it is considering the plan.
The Islamist group, whose envoys returned from Cairo talks to their base in Qatar, would “discuss the ideas and the proposal,” said a Hamas source.
“We are keen to respond as quickly as possible,” the source added.
Sources in Egypt, a key mediator alongside the United States and Qatar, told Al-Qahera News, a site linked to Egyptian intelligence services, that Hamas envoys were due to “return with a written response”.
‘Serious questions for mediators’
But hurdles remain.
Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith said that though Israel has a delegation set to leave for Egypt, it depends on Hamas’ response to the offer.
“It’s understood that the Israelis are asking for fewer than 40 of the 130 or so captives being held by Hamas, and in return for that, they’ll release Palestinian prisoners, and they’ll move to a second phase of a truce, which will offer this period of sustained calm,” he said.
“So, the question is whether this offer of a period of ‘sustained calm’ will be enough for Hamas, considering they’ve been asking for this permanent ceasefire,” Smith said.
Senior Hamas spokesperson Osama Hamdan disagreed with Blinken and Cameron’s assessment of the deal as generous.
“Stopping the attacks against Palestinians is not generous. The attack itself is a crime, so when you stop a crime, you can’t claim that it’s a generous action from the Israeli side,” Hamdan was quoted as saying by Al Jazeera.
Hamas has “serious questions for the mediators,” he added.
Hamdan said it is clear Israel does not want a “complete ceasefire”.
Netanyahu, meanwhile, has insisted that the invasion of Rafah will happen regardless of a deal.
BREAKING: Netanyahu says Israel will invade Rafah with or without a hostage deal
— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) April 30, 2024
‘Can’t support major military operation’
Washington has strongly backed its ally but also pressured it to refrain from a ground invasion of Gaza’s far-southern city of Rafah, which is packed with displaced civilians, and to do more to protect the territory’s 2.4 million people.
Blinken reiterated that the US, Israel’s main diplomatic supporter and weapons supplier, could not back an Israeli ground assault on Rafah if there was no plan to ensure that civilians would not be harmed.
“We’ve said clearly, and for some time now on Rafah that, in the absence of a plan to ensure that civilians will not be harmed, we can’t support a major military operation,” Blinken was quoted as saying by The Guardian.
“We have not yet seen a plan that gives us confidence that civilians can be effectively protected.”
Blinken met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and discussed the urgent need to reduce tensions in the region, the US Department of State said in a statement.
President Joe Biden – facing strong criticism abroad and rising fury on US university campuses – urged the Egyptian and Qatari leaders Monday “to exert all efforts to secure the release of hostages held by Hamas”.
Biden called this “the only obstacle” to securing relief for civilians who have been trapped for almost seven months in the bloodiest Gaza war.
Blinken also said the U.S. and Saudi Arabia had done “intense work together” over the past few months towards a normalisation accord between the kingdom and Israel. That goal has been disrupted by the Gaza war.
“To move forward with normalisation, two things will be required: calm in Gaza and a credible pathway to a Palestinian state,” he said.
In return for normalisation, Arab states are pushing for Israel to accept a pathway to Palestinian statehood on land it captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
But Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu is a long-standing opponent of Palestinian statehood however, as are many members of his government, considered the most right-wing in Israeli history.
Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan bin Abdullah also said on Monday that an accord between Washington and Riyadh over normalisation was “very, very close”.
China meanwhile said that rival Palestinian groups Hamas and Fatah had met in Beijing recently for “in-depth and candid talks on promoting intra-Palestinian reconciliation”.
Hamas seized sole control of Gaza in 2007 after fighting with Fatah, which maintains partial administrative control in the Israeli-occupied West Bank through the Palestinian Authority.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian said “the two sides fully expressed their political will to achieve reconciliation through dialogue and consultation” without specifying when they had met.
Anger about the unprecedented Palestinian suffering has sparked weeks of large-scale protests at universities across the United States and elsewhere, including in France.
New York’s Columbia University, the epicentre of the protest movement, began suspending student demonstrators on Monday after they defied an ultimatum to disperse.
‘Demand entire world call lasting truce’
An AFP correspondent reported several air strikes in Gaza City, Khan Yunis and Rafah as well as overnight artillery shelling.
Gaza’s civil defence agency said it had recovered six bodies from a building in Gaza City and was searching for more.
The Israeli military said “fighter jets struck a number of terror targets in central Gaza, including a weapons storage facility”.
“Two terrorists were identified advancing toward the troops in the area, and an IDF aircraft quickly struck and eliminated the terrorists,” it said.
Palestinians in Rafah mourned the latest victims as children were being pulled out from the rubble of a building.
“Civilian individuals with no ties to Hamas or any other group were struck by a rocket, torn apart,” said Umm Louay Masri.
At Rafah’s Al-Najjar hospital, grief-stricken relatives jostled over the dead, whose bodies were shrouded in white.
“We demand the entire world call for a lasting truce,” said one bereaved relative, Abu Taha.
A total of 253 hostages were seized in a Hamas attack on southern Israel on 7 October in which about 1,200 Israelis were also killed, according to Israeli counts.
Israel retaliated by imposing a total siege on Gaza and mounting an air and ground assault that has killed about 34,500 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities.
Palestinians are suffering from severe shortages of food, fuel and medicine in a humanitarian crisis brought on by the offensive that has demolished much of the territory.
More than a million displaced Gaza residents are crammed into Rafah, the enclave’s southernmost city, having sought refuge there from Israeli bombardments. Israel says the last Hamas fighters are holed up there and it will open an offensive to root them out soon.
With inputs from agencies
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