‘Netanyahu main obstacle to achieving deal’
Next week, 30 delegates from across the United States representing voters who cast ballots in protest of Democrats’ pro-Israel policies will be heading to the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago.
Initially, the movement aimed to encourage primary voters across the country to cast their “uncommitted” ballots to protest Joe Biden’s “ironclad” support for Israel, but now that the primary season is over, it has set its sights on the DNC.
Biden wants a ceasefire but Netanyahu is ‘trying to extend the conflict’
Sultan Barakat, professor of public policy at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, says mediators involved in the ongoing truce talks claim that they were “bridging” the gaps in the ceasefire proposal, which indicates that neither side has accepted its original framework.
He told Al Jazeera that the most important aspect of the current talks is the potential to “defuse the retaliation from Iran” after the assassination last month of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in return for a ceasefire in Gaza.
An added aspect that would be of concern for Israel is the potential that captives in Gaza may be killed not just by their own bombing campaigns but by Hamas’s guards, as occurred earlier in the week.
US President Joe Biden wants a ceasefire to allow Kamala Harris to “regain some of the Muslim and Arab votes”.
In contrast, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to continue the war, he said, adding that his strategy has to be to ramp up attacks on Gaza every time there are truce talks, making it very difficult for Palestinians “even to accept to consider an end to this war”.
40,074 killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7
Israeli military attacks have killed 69 people and injured 136 more in the last 48 hours, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza.
This brings the enclave’s casualty toll since October 7 to 40,074 killed and 92,537 wounded, it said.
Hamas official dismisses Biden ceasefire optimism as ‘illusion’: Report
A senior Hamas official has dismissed Biden’s optimism after the American leader said a Gaza ceasefire was closer after talks in Doha.
“To say that we are getting close to a deal is an illusion,” Hamas political bureau member Sami Abu Zuhri said in a statement sent to AFP. “We are not facing a deal or real negotiations, but rather the imposing of American diktats.”
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Let’s bring you up to speed:
- Israeli air attacks have continued in central and southern Gaza. One strike killed six people, two of them children, in a home in Nuseirat, according to the Wafa news agency.
- Palestinians in az-Zawayda are mourning the death of 15 people, including nine children, killed from an overnight Israeli strike.
- A new Israeli order tells residents of parts of Maghazi camp to flee, further shrinking Gaza’s “humanitarian zone” for the second day in a row.
- Hezbollah claimed a series of rocket and drone attacks in northern Israel, injuring several Israeli soldiers and sparking fires in open areas.
- An Israeli air strike hit a motorbike near southern Lebanon’s Tyre, injuring one person, reports Lebanon’s an-Nahar media.
- An Israeli delegation has stayed in Doha to try to “bridge remaining gaps” with mediators after two days of ceasefire talks wrapped up in the Qatari capital, reports Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Jamjoom from the city.
- Mediators are more optimistic than when the talks began, but are awaiting detailed responses from Israel and Hamas representatives, said Jamjoom.
Mediators suggest gaps could ‘narrow’ in ceasefire talks
At the moment, you still have a technical team from Israel in Doha trying to work through these details before another meeting in Cairo before the end of next week.
In the statement released last night after these two days of ceasefire talks, the mediators, the US, Qatar and Egypt, all said that they believe these gaps could be narrowed, hopefully, within the coming week.
Before the talks started in Doha, many diplomats close to the talks expressed reservations and scepticism about how exactly it [a deal] could be accomplished.
That’s because every iteration of the talks in the last few months has not led anywhere.
But if you look at the language in the statement released about this proposal presented by the US and supported by Egypt and presented to Israel and Hamas, the mediators felt confident that enough had been done and that perhaps these gaps could be narrowed even more in the days ahead.
This is the final chance to effect a ceasefire deal before a wider regional war could occur, and everybody wants to prevent that.
This was high-stakes diplomacy. It was done at a crucial time, and right now, indications are that the mediated countries believe that they could potentially narrow these gaps even further within the coming week and maybe finally reach some kind of ceasefire.
