A top Hamas official accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday of trying to derail a proposed Gaza truce and hostage release deal with his threats to keep fighting the Palestinian militant group.
“Netanyahu was the obstructionist of all previous rounds of dialogue… and it is clear that he still is,” senior Hamas official Hossam Badran told AFP by telephone.
Foreign mediators have waited for a Hamas response to a proposal to halt the fighting for 40 days and exchange hostages for Palestinian prisoners, which its chief Ismail Haniyeh has said the group was considering in a “positive spirit”.
A major stumbling block has been that, while Hamas has demanded a lasting ceasefire, Netanyahu has vowed to crush its remaining fighters in the far-southern city of Rafah, which is packed with displaced civilians.
The hawkish prime minister has insisted that he will send ground troops into Rafah, despite strong concerns voiced by ally Washington for the safety of the 1.2 million people sheltering in the city hard by the Egyptian border.
Badran charged that Netanyahu’s insistence on attacking Rafah was calculated to “thwart any possibility of concluding an agreement” in the negotiations brokered by Egyptian, Qatari and US mediators.
The Gaza war raged on unabated and Israeli air strikes killed several more people in Rafah overnight, Palestinian medics and the civil defence agency said.
One bereaved resident, Sanaa Zoorob, said her sister and six of her nieces and nephews were killed.
Two of the children “were found in pieces in their mother’s embrace,” Zoorob said, appealing for “a permanent ceasefire and a full withdrawal from Gaza”.
– Wave of campus protests –
The war broke out after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
The militants also took some 250 hostages, of whom Israel estimates 128 remain in Gaza.
The army says 35 of them are dead, including 49-year-old Dror Or, a resident from the badly-hit kibbutz Beeri, whose death was confirmed by authorities on Friday.
Israel’s devastating retaliatory campaign has killed at least 34,622 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Sustained bombardment has devastated the Gaza Strip, which the United Nations says will require a decades-long reconstruction effort on a scale not seen since World War II.
Israel has weathered an international backlash over the spiralling death toll and the suffering caused by months of siege.
Student protests have flared for weeks at about 40 US universities and colleges on a scale not seen since the Vietnam war protests of the 1960s and 70s, some spiralling into clashes with police and mass arrests.
Pro-Palestinian rallies have also swept campuses in Britain, France, Mexico, Australia and elsewhere.
US President Joe Biden — a strong supporter of Israel who has also urged Netanyahu to take greater steps to protect Palestinian civilians — insisted that “order must prevail” on campuses.
“There’s the right to protest but not the right to cause chaos,” the 81-year-old president said.
Turkey announced on Thursday that it was suspending all trade with Israel.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the move was intended to “force Israel to agree to a ceasefire and increase the amount of humanitarian aid to enter” Gaza.
– Famine threat remains –
Netanyahu faces regular protests demanding a deal to bring home the hostages, but also difficult political realities to stay in power.
He leads a fragile coalition with far-right and religious parties, some of whom have threatened to bring down the government if the army doesn’t enter Rafah.
Demonstrators accuse Netanyahu, who is on trial on corruption charges which he denies, of seeking to prolong the war.
Since the conflict erupted, an Israeli siege has further battered Gaza and pushed many of its 2.4 million people to the brink of famine.
US pressure has prompted Israel to enable more aid deliveries to Gaza, including through the reopened Erez crossing that leads directly into the worst-hit north.
Food availability has improved “a little bit”, said the World Health Organization’s representative in the Palestinian territories, Rik Peeperkorn.
But he warned that the threat of famine had “absolutely not” gone away.
The US-based charity World Central Kitchen has also resumed operations this week, after suspending them in the immediate aftermath of Israeli drone strikes that killed seven of its workers as they unloaded aid in Gaza on April 1.
The group’s kitchen manager Zakria Yahya Abukuwaik, preparing food in Rafah, said that “we realised after the kitchen closed that many mouths were left hungry”.
World Central Kitchen was involved in an effort earlier this year to establish a new maritime aid corridor to Gaza from Cyprus to help compensate for dwindling deliveries by land from Israel.
The project suffered a new blow when the US military announced that bad weather had forced troops working to assemble a temporary aid pier off the Gaza coast to relocate their work to the Israeli port of Ashdod.
“Forecasted high winds and high sea swells caused unsafe conditions for soldiers working on the surface of the partially constructed pier,” US Central Command said in a statement.
“The partially built pier and military vessels involved in its construction have moved to the Port of Ashdod, where assembly will continue, and will be completed prior to the emplacement of the pier in its intended location when sea states subside.”
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