The Qatari, American and Egyptian mediators on Saturday called on Israel and Palestinian Hamas to “finalize” a ceasefire agreement based on the plan announced by President Joe Biden on 8e months of their war in the Gaza Strip.
In the Palestinian territory, Israeli bombardments by air and land continued to target the city of Rafah (south), which became the epicenter of the war triggered by an unprecedented attack by the Islamist movement Hamas against Israel on October 7.
As mediators in the conflict, “Qatar, the United States and Egypt jointly call on Hamas and Israel to finalize the agreement based on the principles outlined by President Joe Biden […]which brings together the demands of all parties,” said the three countries in a joint press release.
3 phase plan
On Friday evening, Mr. Biden announced a road map he said was proposed by Israel which aims to achieve, in stages and under conditions, a permanent ceasefire, and he called on Hamas to accept it.
The first phase, he said, would be a ceasefire with an Israeli withdrawal from densely populated areas of Gaza for six weeks.
The end of the fighting would be accompanied in particular by the release of certain hostages kidnapped during the October 7 attack and held in Gaza, especially women and the sick, and the release of Palestinians detained by Israel.
The contours of phase two of the plan will be negotiated during the six-week ceasefire, according to Mr. Biden. In the event of successful negotiations, the fighting stops definitively and all the hostages still held in Gaza return home, including soldiers. And Israeli forces are completely withdrawing from the territory.
“Biden is our only hope”
A few hours after Mr. Biden’s statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a point of twice reaffirming Israel’s “conditions” for a permanent ceasefire as part of this plan: the “destruction” of the Hamas, the “release of all hostages” and “the assurance that Gaza will no longer pose a threat” to the Israeli state.
And Hamas, in power in Gaza since 2007, simply said that it considered “positively” the road map announced by Mr. Biden, after having reiterated its demands for a permanent ceasefire and a total Israeli withdrawal from Gaza before any agreement, conditions rejected by Israel.
Mr. Netanyahu is caught in the crossfire. On the one hand, his far-right ministers, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, threatened to leave his government if he went ahead with the deal. On the other hand, thousands of Israelis took to the streets again to demand the release of the hostages.
“Biden is our only hope,” a demonstrator in Tel Aviv, Abigail Zur, told AFP.
The Hamas attack on October 7 resulted in the deaths of 1,189 people, the majority of them civilians according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures. Of the 252 people kidnapped during the attack, 121 are still being held in Gaza, of whom 37 are dead, according to the army.
In response, Israel promised to destroy this movement, which it considers terrorist, along with the United States and the European Union. Its army has besieged the small, overpopulated Palestinian territory and launched a massive offensive that has left 36,379 dead so far, including 95 in the past 24 hours, according to data from the Health Ministry of the Hamas-led Gaza government. .
“The bombings have not stopped”
Despite protests from the international community which is concerned about civilians in Rafah, the Israeli army, whose forces advanced this week to the center of this town bordering Egypt, continued its offensive there.
Operations are concentrated in the west of the city, in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood, where residents have reported air raids, tank fire and the movement of military vehicles.
“All night long, aerial and artillery bombardments did not stop for a moment in western Rafah,” a resident told AFP.
Intense artillery fire was also reported by witnesses in eastern and central Rafah, where the army launched its offensive on May 7 in order, it said, to destroy the last Hamas battalions.
The army said it was carrying out “targeted operations” in Rafah. His soldiers “located numerous weapons and openings of underground tunnels there”.
“Jabalia wiped off the map”
Since the start of the Rafah offensive, a million people have fled to the crowded coastal area of al-Mawasi, further west. Life has become “apocalyptic” in certain areas of the southern Gaza Strip, the UN has warned.
It warns of a risk of famine in the Palestinian territory, where the majority of the approximately 2.4 million inhabitants have been displaced, and affirms that there is no longer a safe place in Gaza.
Adding to the humanitarian catastrophe, the Rafah crossing with Egypt, crucial for the entry of international aid, has been closed since Israeli forces took control of it from the Palestinian side on May 7.
A meeting dedicated to this passage is planned for Sunday in Egypt with the United States and Israel, according to Egyptian media.
Elsewhere in the Palestinian territory, residents returning to the Jabalia camp (north) after the end of a new Israeli ground operation said they were shocked by the scale of the destruction.
“Jabalia has been wiped off the map,” denounced Souad Abou Salah, originally from the camp. “It’s like an earthquake hit the camp,” exclaimed Mohammad al-Najjar.