While efforts continue in Cairo to break the ceasefire negotiations, in which Israel refuses to participate; Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz will meet with US Vice President Kamala Harris in Washington this Monday. The meeting will take place a day after Biden’s deputy pressured Hamas to sign a ceasefire agreement. Gantz, a former general and centrist political rival of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, challenges the Israeli president with his trip, in which he will sit down with several senior White House officials.
An official from Likud, Netanyahu’s right-wing party, said Gantz did not have the prime minister’s approval for his meetings in Washington and that the president had a “tough talk” with the war cabinet member, underscoring the growing gap that exists within Israel’s leadership, almost five months after the start of the war between Israel and Hamas.
In her meeting with Gantz, Harris plans to push for a temporary ceasefire agreement that would allow the release of several categories of hostages held by Hamas. Israel essentially accepted the deal, according to a senior Biden administration official, and the White House has emphasized that the responsibility for joining it falls on Hamas.
“Given the immense scale of the suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate ceasefire for at least the next six weeks, which is what is currently on the table,” Harris said during a public appearance in Selma, Alabama, on Sunday. The agreement “will allow the hostages to be removed from Gaza and the strip to obtain a significant amount of aid,” Harris added. Furthermore, “it would allow us to build something more lasting to ensure that Israel is safe and respect the Palestinian people’s right to dignity, freedom and self-determination,” he concluded.
For his part, Gantz intends to strengthen ties with the United States, bolster support for Israel’s war and push for the release of Israeli hostages, according to an Israeli official, who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity. To do this, he will also meet with the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, and the White House national security advisor, Jake Sullivan.
The meetings in Washington also take place when the United States began a series of airdrops of aid to Gaza last weekend, a few days after more than a hundred Palestinians died while trying to obtain food from a convoy of trucks organized by Israel. Harris on Sunday called on Israel to “do more to significantly increase the flow of aid.”
Faced with more than 30,000 people dead and a catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza, representatives of Egypt, Hamas, Qatar and the United States have resumed negotiations in Cairo with a view to a truce, with “significant progress”, according to a network revealed on Sunday television station close to the Egyptian intelligence services.
Egypt, Qatar and the United States, acting as mediators, have been trying for weeks to obtain a truce agreement that would allow the release of hostages held in Gaza in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. Some 250 people were kidnapped during the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, which also killed at least 1,160 people. A truce in late November allowed the release of 105 hostages in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners. Today there are about 130 captives, but it is feared that around thirty may be dead.
“Egypt continues its intense efforts to reach a truce before Ramadan,” the Muslim holy month that begins this year on March 10 or 11, reported the AlQahera News channel. Qatar, one of the main mediators due to its closeness to Hamas, whose political leaders reside in Doha, will also meet with Blinken in Washington. The Qatari Prime Minister, Mohamed bin Abderrahman Al Thani, arrived in Washington this Monday for said meeting.
To accept an agreement, Hamas demands the return of displaced people to northern Gaza, an increase in humanitarian aid and a definitive ceasefire and Israeli military withdrawal from Gaza. Israel – which will not participate in the Cairo negotiations until Hamas provides a list of the hostages that would be released – rejects these conditions and assures that it wants to continue its military operations until the total elimination of Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2007.
Meanwhile, the Israeli army continued its air and ground bombardments on various sectors of the Palestinian territory that it has been besieging for almost five months. At least a hundred people were killed, most of them civilians, according to the Hamas Health Ministry. A block of buildings collapsed due to the impact of the bombs, crushing everyone sheltering inside. Furthermore, famine is “almost inevitable” according to the UN for 2.2 million of the 2.4 million inhabitants of this small, narrow territory on which Israel has already imposed an air and sea blockade for 17 years.
