Talks are due to be held in Qatar on Thursday with a view to a truce between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, where more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in ten months of war, according to the Islamist movement.
This new round of indirect negotiations is being held at the call of the mediators, namely Qatar, the United States and Egypt, as fears of a military escalation in the Middle East grow.
A ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which have been fighting in the small coastal strip since the Palestinian movement attacked Israeli soil on October 7, is being strongly demanded by the international community.
US President Joe Biden said a ceasefire could prevent an Iranian attack in response to the assassination, which Tehran blames on Israel, of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in the Iranian capital on July 31.
Mr Biden acknowledged, however, that negotiations for a truce are becoming “difficult” after months of deadlock.
On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani called on all parties not to “undermine” them, a veiled warning to Iran, Hamas and Israel.
There is “no more time to lose,” said the American envoy Amos Hochstein in Beirut the same day, while a ceasefire could also put an end to the deadly exchanges of fire between the Israeli army and the Lebanese Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas and Tehran.
The new ceasefire talks are based on a plan announced by Joe Biden on May 31. The first phase includes a six-week truce accompanied by an Israeli withdrawal from densely populated areas of Gaza, and the release of hostages — taken during the Hamas attack — in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
They will be held in the presence of the director of the CIA, William Burns, according to an American source close to the negotiations, as well as the heads of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, and the Shin Bet, the internal security service, according to the office of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
“High alert”
“We will not go to new rounds of negotiations,” Bassem Naim, a member of the political bureau of Hamas, told AFP on Thursday, a movement that repeats that it wants the Biden plan to be implemented, without taking part in new discussions.
After the October 7 attack that killed 1,198 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data, Israel vowed to destroy Hamas, which has been in power in Gaza since 2007 and which it considers a terrorist organization, as do the United States and the European Union.
Of the 251 people abducted that day, 111 are still being held in Gaza, 39 of whom are dead, according to the army.
The October 7 attack led to the evacuation of thousands of Israeli families living near Gaza. Of the more than 50,000 evacuated residents, 80 percent had returned home between March and July, the office responsible for these families said Thursday.
The Israeli retaliatory offensive has left at least 40,005 dead, according to data released Thursday by the health ministry of the Hamas-run Gaza government, which did not provide details on the number of civilians and fighters killed.
Regional tensions have redoubled following the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, and that, on July 30, of Fouad Chokr, the military leader of Hezbollah, killed in an Israeli strike near Beirut.
Iran on Tuesday rejected a call from several Western countries to stop attacking Israel. Its allies in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen have also threatened to retaliate for the killings of Haniyeh and Shokr.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog said his country remained “on high alert.”
As part of ongoing efforts to de-escalate, the head of French diplomacy, Stéphane Séjourné, is expected in Beirut on Thursday.
“Give them back their dignity”
In the south of the Gaza Strip, a medical source at Nasser hospital reported one dead and three injured in a new Israeli bombardment in Khan Younis.
Israeli tanks also made an incursion into the south of Gaza City (north), while artillery fire and air strikes resonated, an AFP correspondent noted.
Five dead and several injured were taken to Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City after air raids, rescuers reported.
The Israeli army said on Thursday that it had dismantled more than 30 sites across the Gaza Strip housing Hamas infrastructure, including some equipped with explosives and weapons storage facilities.
Over the past day, soldiers have “identified and eliminated” around twenty activists in Rafah (south), according to the army.
The war has plunged the Palestinian territory, besieged by Israel, into a humanitarian disaster and led to the displacement of almost all of its 2.4 million inhabitants.
“A ceasefire for all the girls and women of Gaza is also about giving them back some of their dignity,” Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said on X on Thursday, deploring the fact that they “can often go months without taking a shower, going through several menstrual cycles without washing.”