The United States said Friday progress had been made at the latest round of Gaza truce talks, after the presence of Israeli troops on the Egyptian border emerged as a major sticking point.
The White House said CIA chief William Burns was among US officials taking part in the discussions in Cairo, joining the heads of Israel’s spy agency and security service.
“There has been progress made. We need now for both sides to come together and work towards implementation,” US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said.
Preliminary talks which began on Thursday evening “were constructive in nature”, he said, adding that reports that the diplomacy was “near collapse” were inaccurate.
Representatives of Palestinian militant group Hamas, whose unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel triggered the war, were not taking part in the Cairo talks.
An official from the Islamist movement, Hossam Badran, told AFP Friday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence that his troops remain on a strip of land along the Gaza-Egypt border called the Philadelphi Corridor reflects “his refusal to reach a final agreement”.
Egypt with fellow mediators Qatar and the United States have for months tried to reach a deal to end more than 10 months of war between Israel and Hamas.
Previous optimism during months of on-off truce talks has proven unfounded.
Fighting raged on in Gaza, where witnesses reported combat in the north of the territory, heavy shelling in the centre, and tank fire in the far south near Rafah city.
The United Nations said tens of thousands of civilians have been on the move again this week from Deir el-Balah and the southern city of Khan Yunis after Israeli evacuation orders, which precede military operations.
The war has displaced virtually all of Gaza’s population, often multiple times, leaving them deprived of shelter, clean water and other essentials as disease spreads, the UN says.
‘This cannot continue’
“Civilians are exhausted and terrified, running from one destroyed place to another, with no end in sight,” Muhannad Hadi, the UN humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories, said late Thursday.
“This cannot continue,” he said.
The Israeli military said that over the previous 24 hours troops had “eliminated dozens” of militants around Khan Yunis and Deir el-Balah.
Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,199 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed 40,265 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, which does not give details of civilian and militant deaths. The UN rights office says most dead are women and children.
Palestinian militants also seized 251 hostages, of whom 105 remain in Gaza including 34 the military says are dead.
The Israeli military recovered the remains of six hostages from a tunnel in the Khan Yunis area this week.
Netanyahu faces regular protests by hostage supporters demanding a deal to bring home the captives.
Ella Ben Ami, whose father is among those held in Gaza, said after meeting Netanyahu on Friday that she “left with a heavy and difficult feeling that this (ceasefire deal) isn’t going to happen soon”.
“I fear for my father’s life, for the girls who are there, and for everyone,” she said in a statement released by campaign group the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.
‘Now is the time’
Diplomatic efforts to reach a Gaza truce and avert a wider war intensified following the killings of two senior Iran-backed militants last month that sparked threats of reprisals from Tehran and its allies, who blamed Israel.
Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah movement and Israeli forces have exchanged near-daily cross-border fire since the Gaza war began.
Accepting her Democratic party’s presidential nomination in Chicago, US Vice President Kamala Harris said “now is the time to get a hostage deal and a ceasefire deal done”.
The basis of talks has been a framework which US President Joe Biden outlined in late May, and which he described as an Israeli proposal.
The three-phase plan would initially see hostages exchanged for Palestinians in Israeli jails during what Biden called a “full and complete ceasefire” lasting six weeks.
Israeli forces would withdraw from “all populated areas of Gaza”, under the plan.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited the Middle East this week and said that Netanyahu was onboard with a US proposal to bridge gaps and reach a ceasefire.
Kirby said that the United States continued to believe that Netanyahu accepted the proposal and appealed again to Hamas to do the same.
Badran, the Hamas official, on Friday reiterated that Hamas “accepted the Biden plan” as originally outlined and said Washington must pressure Netanyahu for a ceasefire.
He said Hamas will accept “nothing less than the withdrawal of occupation forces, Philadelphi included”.
The office of Netanyahu, whose hard-right coalition relies on the support of members opposed to a truce, rejected as “incorrect” media reports that “Netanyahu has agreed that Israel will withdraw” from the Philadelphi Corridor.
Netanyahu sees control of the strip along the Egyptian border as necessary to prevent Hamas rearming.
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