US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Israel on Friday where he is expected to stress the urgency of increasing humanitarian aid to Gaza as the UN Security Council is due to vote on a resolution to an “immediate ceasefire” in the Palestinian territory.
After five and a half months of war between Israel and the Islamist movement Hamas in the besieged Gaza Strip, on the verge of famine, Washington is also seeking to convince its ally to avoid a ground offensive on the overpopulated town of Rafah, fearing heavy civilian losses.
The United Kingdom, a permanent member of the Security Council, and Australia called on Friday for an “immediate end to the fighting” in the Gaza Strip, to allow “the delivery of aid and the release of hostages” kidnapped in Israel on October 7 during the bloody Hamas attack.
While diplomats are busy, clashes continue across the Palestinian territory, notably in and around al-Chifa hospital, the largest in the territory, where the Israeli army claimed Friday to have killed more than 150 fighters Palestinians and arrested hundreds of suspects since the start of the week.
This large-scale operation launched on Monday against this hospital complex pushed hundreds of civilians to flee.
“The gap is narrowing” in the negotiations for a truce associated with a release of hostages, Mr. Blinken assured Thursday. “If it is difficult to reach” an agreement, “it is always possible,” he added.
In parallel with these talks, the United States for the first time presented a draft resolution to the UN Security Council on an “immediate ceasefire linked to the release of hostages” held in Gaza since the beginning of the war.
The text, consulted by AFP and which must be put to a vote on Friday, underlines “the need for an immediate and lasting ceasefire to protect civilians on all sides, to allow the provision of essential humanitarian aid” .
The outcome of the vote is, however, uncertain as Russia calls for a clearer “call” to silence the guns.
Rafah, a “mistake”
The United States has already vetoed several Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire, saying it would have benefited Hamas.
But faced with the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, Washington is intensifying its efforts to reach a truce, deliver aid and avoid a ground offensive on Rafah, a town on the Egyptian border where, according to the UN, approximately 1.5 million Palestinians, the majority displaced by the war in the rest of the territory.
“There are better ways to deal with the threat from Hamas,” Mr. Blinken said Thursday, calling a possible ground invasion of Rafah “a mistake.”
Despite international pressure, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says an offensive on Rafah is necessary to militarily “defeat” Hamas in Gaza and avoid another October 7.
War broke out that day when Hamas commandos infiltrated from Gaza carried out an unprecedented attack in southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of at least 1,160 people, most of them civilians, according to one count. from AFP established from official Israeli data.
According to Israel, around 250 people have been kidnapped and 130 of them are still hostages in Gaza, of whom 33 are believed to have died.
In retaliation, Israel vowed to destroy Hamas, in power in Gaza since 2007, which it considers a terrorist organization along with the United States and the European Union.
His army launched an offensive which left 31,988 dead in Gaza, according to the latest report from the Islamist movement’s Ministry of Health.
Mossad and CIA in Qatar
On his sixth tour of the Middle East since the start of the war, Blinken met with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi in Cairo on Thursday to discuss ways to achieve a ceasefire.
Discussions on a truce continue in Doha between representatives of the United States, Qatar and Egypt. The head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, David Barnea, is scheduled to meet there on Friday with CIA Director William Burns, Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdelrahman, Al-Thani and Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel .
After demanding a definitive ceasefire, Hamas changed its position last week by accepting the principle of a six-week pause in the fighting. But disputes seem to persist over the exchange of Israeli hostages held in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners imprisoned in Israel.
“Children are dying of hunger”
Israel has imposed a complete siege on the Gaza Strip since the start of the war and strictly controls aid which arrives mainly from Egypt via Rafah. However, these tight controls, according to the UN, have the effect of reducing the number of trucks entering the territory.
“Children are starving. They are deprived of food,” the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child expressed alarm on Thursday. “Even crumbs are hard to find,” he says.
In order to relieve the population, several countries are organizing food airdrops and have opened a maritime corridor from Cyprus to Gaza. But aid remains insufficient to meet the needs of the 2.4 million inhabitants of Gaza and reaches only with great difficulty in the north, where more than 300,000 people live according to the UN.
“Here are our children, do you see their condition? We don’t know how to feed them,” a Palestinian woman fleeing fighting in the al-Chifa hospital area told AFP on Thursday. “We have been besieged for three days, we cannot give them anything to eat or drink.”