GAZA STRIP: Israeli negotiators were in Cairo Friday for talks on a Gaza truce, a spokesman said, but a dispute over the presence of Israeli troops on Gaza’s southern border remained among sticking points.
Mossad spy agency chief David Barnea and Ronen Bar, head of the Shin Bet domestic security service, were in the Egyptian capital and “negotiating to advance a hostage (release) agreement”, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman Omer Dostri told AFP late on Thursday.
Egypt with fellow mediators Qatar and the United States are trying to reach a deal that would end more than 10 months of war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas in Gaza.
Top US diplomat Antony Blinken visited the region this week to emphasise that time is running out for a deal which “needs to get done in the days ahead”.
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“This cannot continue,” he said.
The Israeli military recovered the remains of six hostages from a tunnel in the Khan Yunis area this week, and on Thursday said bullets had been found in their bodies.
The bullets indicated they had been shot. An investigation continues into the circumstances of their deaths, a military spokesman said.
Accepting her Democratic party’s presidential nomination in Chicago, US Vice President Kamala Harris said “now is the time to get a hostage deal and a ceasefire deal done”.
The basis of talks has been a framework which US President Joe Biden outlined in late May, and which he described as an Israeli proposal.
The three-phase plan would initially see hostages exchanged for Palestinians in Israeli jails during what Biden called a “full and complete ceasefire” lasting six weeks.
Israeli forces would withdraw from “all populated areas of Gaza”, under the plan. ‘We are in the Egyptian capital and negotiating to advance a hostage (release) agreement’
– Netanyahu spokesman, Omer Dostri
During his regional tour, Blinken said Netanyahu had accepted a US “bridging proposal” for a truce that “is very clear on the schedule and the locations” of the Israeli withdrawal.
Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, however, reported that “the Americans understood the mistake” Blinken had made in his remarks about Netanyahu accepting the proposal.
The office of Netanyahu, whose hard-right coalition relies on the support of members opposed to a truce, rejected as “incorrect” media reports that “Netanyahu has agreed that Israel will withdraw” from the Philadelphi corridor.
The Prime Minister sees control of the corridor along the Egyptian border as necessary to prevent Hamas rearming.
Hamas has said it supports the plan Biden initially outlined. But it also said the US bridging proposal “responds to Netanyahu’s conditions” and accused him of “obstructing an agreement”.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed 40,265 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, which does not give details of civilian and militant deaths. The UN rights office says most dead are women and children.
Palestinian militants also seized 251 hostages, of whom 105 remain in Gaza including 34 the military says are dead.
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