HAMAS HAS ‘POSITIVE SPIRIT’
Group studying truce proposal, will send delegation to Egypt soon to complete talks
HAMAS says it is considering in a “positive spirit” a Gaza truce deal, while the United Nations warned rebuilding the devastated Palestinian territory would require efforts not seen since World War 2.
After months of stop-start negotiations, Hamas has sounded an optimistic tone about the latest hostages-for-ceasefire proposal, raising hopes an agreement may soon be reached, even as medics in the besieged strip reported fresh strikes on Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah yesterday.
Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh said the group would “soon” send a delegation to Egypt to complete ongoing ceasefire discussions with a deal that “realises the demands of our people”.
Haniyeh, leader of the group’s political wing, told Egyptian and Qatari mediators in calls on Thursday that Hamas was studying the latest proposal from Israel with a “positive spirit”.
The stakes of the truce talks were thrown into sharp relief on Thursday, when a UN report estimated it could take 80 years to reconstruct all the homes flattened over the course of the nearly seven-month war.
“The scale of the destruction is huge and unprecedented... This is a mission that the global community has not dealt with since World War 2,” Abdallah al-Dardari, the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) regional director for Arab states told a briefing in Jordan.
The UNDP assessment forecast that the socioeconomic toll inflicted would cost generations of Palestinians to come and called for an urgent ceasefire.
BUMPY ROAD TO A TRUCE
The only truce mediators have
been able to hammer out was a week-long deal in November, that saw the release of 105 hostages for 240 Palestinian prisoners.
Israel estimated that 129 captives seized by Hamas during the Oct 7 attack remain in Gaza. The military said 35 of them were dead, including 49-year-old Dror Or.
Israel confirmed Or’s death yesterday. Two of his children were among the hostages released during the November truce.
Hamas and Israel have been at loggerheads for months over the terms of any new deal.
The group has demanded a permanent ceasefire to end the war and the withdrawal of troops, which Israel has refused.
While Israel faces regular protests demanding the government bring home remaining captives, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to fight on.
With or without a truce, he has said he will send ground troops into Rafah, despite global concerns over the fate of around 1.5 million civilians sheltering there.
The truce offer under consideration includes a 40-day halt to fighting and the exchange of Israeli hostages for potentially thousands of Palestinian prisoners, according to Britain.
During his latest whirlwind visit to the Middle East, United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged the Palestinian group to accept what he termed an “extraordinarily generous” deal on the part of Israel.
“If Hamas actually purports to care about the Palestinian people and wants to see an immediate alleviation of their suffering, it will take the deal,” Blinken told reporters on Wednesday.
Until Haniyeh’s comments, Gaza-rulers Hamas had indicated a generally negative reception of the proposed truce.
The war started with Hamas’ Oct 7 attack on Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed at least 34,596 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamasrun territory’s Health Ministry.
‘UNPRECEDENTED LOSSES’
The UNDP estimated that up to April 12, at least five per cent of Gaza’s population had been killed or injured.
“The suffering in Gaza will not end when the war does,” UNDP chief Achim Steiner said.
“Unprecedented levels of human losses, capital destruction and the steep rise in poverty in such a short period of time will precipitate a serious development crisis.”
The humanitarian crisis and rising death toll in Gaza prompted demonstrations around the world, including in universities in the US, Canada and France.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog slammed the protests, charging that the US universities had been “contaminated by hatred and antisemitism”.
Colombia severed diplomatic ties with Israel on Wednesday, while Turkey on Thursday announced it was suspending trade.
Gaza’s 2.4 million inhabitants are threatened by famine, but international aid has only been able to trickle in.
Under US pressure, Israel has allowed increased aid deliveries in recent days, including through a reopened border crossing.
At south Gaza’s largest hospital, the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, which was heavily damaged in February, foreign aid and borrowed equipment helped to “almost completely” restore the emergency department, its director Atef al-Hout said.