The Islamist group Hamas said on Wednesday that it had updated its response to the latest proposal to reach a truce with Israel in the Gaza Strip, after more than a month without progress since US President Joe Biden announced the guidelines for a possible agreement.
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“We have exchanged some ideas with our negotiating brothers to end the aggression against our Palestinian people,” the organization said in a statement.
We have exchanged some ideas with our negotiating brothers to end the aggression against our Palestinian people.
For its part, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, confirmed that Qatari mediators had conveyed to Israel Hamas’s “statements” regarding a possible agreement, and that Israel would evaluate them and respond accordingly.
According to a source close to Hamas, quoted by the Israeli daily Haaretz, This is a “positive document” that could advance negotiations towards the materialization of a truce agreement in Gaza, where in almost nine months of war more than 37,900 Gazans have died.
A Palestinian boy sits on the rubble of a house destroyed in Israeli attacks in al-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.
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In early June, after Biden publicly announced a draft truce that had Israeli approval, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his misgivings, saying there were “loopholes” in the proposal and stressing that Israel would not accept an end to the war as Hamas had been demanding since the end of the year.
The war broke out on October 7, when Islamist militants killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped 251 in southern Israel. The Israeli military estimates that 116 people remain captive in Gaza, 42 of whom are believed to have died.
In response, Israel launched an offensive in Gaza that has already left at least 37,953 dead, most of them civilians, according to the Ministry of Health of the Hamas government, which has ruled the territory since 2007.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated on Tuesday that the Gaza conflict, which began nearly nine months ago, will not end until they achieve their objectives: “the destruction of Hamas and the release of all hostages” kidnapped on October 7 during the attack by Islamist militants in Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
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Thousands of Palestinians evacuate southern Gaza Strip
On the ground, specifically in the southern Gaza Strip, Tens of thousands of people have been fleeing eastern parts of Rafah and Khan Yunis on foot since Monday, after the Israeli army ordered a new evacuation of
the area.
According to the UN, this order issued after the launching of rockets against Israel affects some 250,000 people and an area of 117 square kilometers.that is, one third of the Palestinian territory.
The warning is “the most important since October, when residents of northern Gaza were ordered to evacuate” during the first days of the war, the UN said.
Since then, at least “9 out of 10 people in Gaza have been displaced at least once,” or 1.9 million people, said Andrea De Domenico, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the Occupied Territories.
In addition, “96% of the population in Gaza, 96%! is in a situation of food emergency or catastrophic,” he stressed.
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