Peace mediators in Paris are working to secure a cease-fire in Gaza in hopes of averting an Israeli offensive on the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than a million displaced people are sheltering.
Israel says it will attack the city if no truce agreement is reached soon. Washington has urged its ally not to do so, warning that such an attack will cause vast civilian casualties.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh met Egyptian mediators in Cairo to discuss a truce this past week on his first visit since December. Israel has not publicly commented on the Paris talks, which are expected to continue through the weekend.
A Hamas official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, said the militant group did not offer any new proposal at the talks with the Egyptians and was waiting to see what the mediators would bring back from their talks with the Israelis.
“We discussed our proposal with them [the Egyptians] and we are going to wait until they return from Paris,” Reuters cited the Hamas official as saying.
Late on Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented his security Cabinet with an official postwar plan for Gaza in which Israel would have full security control over the enclave without Hamas leadership and without any governance by the Palestinian Authority based in the West Bank.
It calls — in cooperation with Egypt and in coordination with the United States — for Israel to control entry and exit from Gaza to Egypt through the southern border. It is not clear if Egypt has approved the plan. U.S. cable news network CNN quoted an Israeli official as saying Egypt was “aligned” with the United States regarding the plan, though Washington favors a role for a reformed Palestinian Authority in Gaza.
Media reports indicated Palestinian representatives who have seen the plan have rejected it. Parts of the plan also run counter to what Washington has envisioned for the region, which is a “two-state” solution involving an independent Palestinian state.
Similar cease-fire talks were held in Paris at the start of February, but they yielded no results. Hamas, which is still holding more than 100 hostages since it attacked southern Israel on October 7, said it would free the hostages as part of a truce that ensures Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza.
Netanyahu rejected the Hamas proposal, calling it “delusional.”
Gaza airstrikes
At least 22 Palestinians were killed Friday evening in an airstrike on a residential unit in central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah, said Gaza Health Ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qidra.
Health officials said many family members of Mahmoud Abu Zaeiter, a comedian with 1.2 million online followers, were among the dead.
There was no immediate comment from Israel, which says it is doing its best to minimize harm to civilians as it tries to eradicate Hamas militants from the war-torn enclave.
Earlier on Friday, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry reported more than 100 people killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza over the past 24 hours.
Reports from Gaza indicated Israel conducted airstrikes in the southern cities of Khan Younis and Rafah, with at least 104 deaths reported by the Health Ministry. The ministry said at least 29,514 Palestinians have been killed since the fighting began in October.
Israel’s bombardment has flattened much of Gaza and pushed its population of about 2.4 million to the brink of famine as disease spreads, according to the United Nations.
“We have reached the point of extreme poverty and hunger,” Zarifa Hamad, 62, a displaced woman living in a camp in northern Gaza, told AFP. “Children are dying of hunger.”
West Bank
The Israeli military said Friday that it carried out a drone strike in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin late Thursday, killing a suspected militant from the Islamic Jihad group.
A military statement said Yasser Hanoun was on his way to carry out a shooting. It gave no further details. Hanoun had been implicated in past Islamic Jihad shootings, the military said.
Violence has risen in the West Bank since the October 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel.
Hamas captured about 240 hostages during that attack, while killing 1,200 people. About 100 hostages were released during the cease-fire in November. The Israeli military has said it believes about 30 of the remaining hostages have since died or been killed, leaving about 100 still held by Hamas.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
