Doha, Qatar.- US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Doha on Tuesday in a diplomatic effort to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and an agreement on the release of hostages, while major points of disagreement between Israel and Hamas persist.
Blinken met earlier in the day in Cairo with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, whose country has spent months helping to mediate on-again, off-again Gaza talks alongside the United States and Qatar.
After their meeting, Sisi said the time had come to end the 10-month-old Gaza war and warned of the possibility of the conflict spreading across the region. Blinken’s visit to the region also included meetings in Israel on Monday. There, he said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had accepted a US “bridge proposal” aimed at bridging differences between the two sides after talks last week broke down without making any progress, and urged Hamas to accept it as well.
A senior Biden administration official told reporters traveling with Blinken that the United States expects ceasefire talks to continue this week.
The Palestinian militant group has not explicitly rejected the proposal, but Hamas said it nullifies what was previously agreed, without specifying how, and accused Israel and its U.S. ally of mulling over negotiations in bad faith. At stake is the fate of tiny, crowded Gaza — where Israel’s military campaign has killed more than 40,000 people since October, according to Palestinian health officials — and the hostages still held there. The Gaza war began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas gunmen stormed Israeli communities, killing about 1,200 people and kidnapping about 250 hostages, according to Israeli counts. On Tuesday, the Israeli military reported it had recovered the bodies of six hostages in southern Gaza. Israeli officials say 109 hostages remain in the Palestinian territory, about a third of whom are believed to have died. In Gaza, Israeli forces battled Hamas-led militants in central and southern areas, and Palestinian health officials said at least 39 people had been killed Tuesday in Israeli strikes, including on a school housing displaced people. The Israeli military said it had targeted Hamas militants embedded in the school. Officials from the United States, Hamas, Israel, Egypt or Qatar have not spelled out the substance of the proposal or how it differs from previous versions.
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