US secretary of state Antony Blinken said that “time is of the essence” to secure a Gaza ceasefire, as he wrapped up a Middle East tour with an agreement between Israel and Hamas still elusive.
The deal “needs to get done, and it needs to get done in the days ahead,” Blinken told reporters in Doha before departing for Washington, as he reiterated his call for Hamas to accept a “bridging proposal” for a deal, which he said Israel had accepted, and asked both parties to work towards finalising it.
Blinken and mediators from Egypt and Qatar have pinned their hopes on the bridging proposal which aims to narrow the gaps between the two sides in the 10-month-old war, after negotiations last week paused without a breakthrough. The US expects the ceasefire talks to continue this week.
Hamas is not directly participating in these negotiations and has said the latest proposal on the table veers too closely to Israel’s demands. However, on Tuesday, the militant group said comments by US president Joe Biden that they were backing away from an agreement with Israel were “misleading”.
The plan would involve an initial six-week ceasefire, during which a limited number of female, elderly and sick Israeli hostages would be freed in exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli jails. It would be indefinitely extendable while negotiators settled the second stage, in which soldiers and bodies would be returned, Israeli troops would begin to withdraw from Gaza and displaced Palestinian civilians would be allowed to return to their homes in the north of the strip.
One of the main sticking points to an agreement has been Hamas’s longstanding demand for a “complete” withdrawal of Israeli troops from all parts of Gaza, which Israel has reportedly rejected.
Blinken was asked in Qatar about Israeli troop withdrawal terms within the ceasefire framework and about a report in US publication Axios that quoted Netanyahu as saying he may have convinced Blinken that Israel should keep troops in the Philadelphi corridor, a strategic strip on the Gaza-Egypt border.
“The United States does not accept any long-term occupation of Gaza by Israel,” Blinken said. “More specifically, the agreement is very clear on the schedule and the locations of [Israel Defense Forces] withdrawals from Gaza, and Israel has agreed to that. So that’s as much as I know. That’s what I’m very clear about.”
On Tuesday, Netanyahu met the families of dead soldiers and hostages in Gaza. Some relatives told Israeli media that Netanyahu told them Israel will not abandon two strategic corridors in Gaza, the Philadelphi and Netzarim corridors. Netanyahu’s office did not comment about their account.
A White House spokesperson rejected as “totally untrue” that Netanyahu had told Blinken that Israel would never leave the Philadelphi and Netzarim corridors. Such statements are “not constructive to getting a ceasefire deal across the finish line”, the official said.
Earlier on Tuesday, Blinken flew from Israel to Egypt for talks with President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who told him that “the time has come to end the ongoing war”, according to an official Egyptian statement.
Egypt and Qatar are working alongside the US to broker a truce, which diplomats say would help avert a wider crisis that could draw in Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Fears of a regional escalation have mounted since Hezbollah and Iran vowed to respond after an attack last month, blamed on Israel, killed Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, shortly after an Israeli strike on Beirut killed a top Hezbollah commander.
In Gaza on Tuesday, at least 10 people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a school housing displaced families west of Gaza City, the territory’s civil defence authorities said. Israel said the school was being used as a Hamas base.
Elsewhere, Israel recovered the bodies of six hostages who were seized during Hamas’s 7 October attack. An overnight operation in Khan Younis in southern Gaza found the bodies of Yagev Buchshtab, Alexander Dancyg, Avraham Munder, Yoram Metzger, Nadav Popplewell and Chaim Peri, all civilians abducted from their homes in kibbutzim adjacent to Israel’s barrier wall with the Gaza Strip, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Tuesday.
The military gave no details about how or when the men died. Over the past few months, the families of all six had announced the men had been killed after being briefed on IDF intelligence findings.
Reuters, the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report