Israel has provisionally accepted a six-week phased hostage and ceasefire deal which would begin with the release of wounded, elderly and female hostages, but it was still unclear on Saturday whether Hamas would accept it, US officials have claimed.
Talks took place in Doha, the Qatari capital, on Saturday and were expected to move to Cairo on Sunday as the scale of looming starvation pushed the US to start air-dropping food into the enclave.
The US said an extended ceasefire was the most direct route to getting large-scale aid deliveries into Gaza, and suggested that agreement was close. “The path to a ceasefire right now, literally at this hour, is straightforward,” a senior US official said. “And there’s a deal on the table. There’s a framework deal. The Israelis have more or less accepted it. And there will be a six-week ceasefire in Gaza starting today, if Hamas agrees to release the default defined category of vulnerable hostages: the sick the wounded, elderly and women. “We’re working around the clock to see if we can get this in place here over the coming week,” the official said. He said Israel had “basically” accepted the deal, but did not specify whether it still had reservations or what those were.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz said the country’s negotiators expect a Hamas response to its proposed hostage-exchange deal on Sunday or Monday. The key issue is the identity of hostages who will be released, and the ratio of Palestinian prisoners to be released in exchange for each of them, Haaretz added, citing a senior diplomat.
At least 576,000 people in Gaza are “one step away from famine” according to the UN, and one in six children under the age of two in northern Gaza are suffering from acute malnutrition and wasting. Doctors have registered a 10th child as having died from starvation in a Gaza hospital, the UN health agency said, and the real number of deaths “is likely to be higher”.
The decision to parachute in aid has been fiercely criticised by aid agencies, human rights groups and many diplomats, who say it is expensive and ineffective.
The EU’s diplomatic service warned that supplies would have “minimal” impact on the crisis in Gaza, in a statement issued on Saturday: “Air drops should be the solution of last resort as their impact is minimal and not devoid of risks to civilians.” A plane only carries the equivalent of one or two truckloads of food. Distribution cannot be controlled, with packages likely to be monopolised by those strong enough to chase and fight for them, and easily diverted.
Critics point out that President Biden has opted not to use Washington’s leverage as Israel’s principal arms supplier, and most important international ally, to force it to open up more land access for aid. Emile Hokayem, director for regional security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, called the US air drops “virtue signalling and an admission of impotence on the part of the US”.
US officials said that three C-130 planes dropped 66 pallets of food, containing a total of 38,000 meals in mid-afternoon local time on Saturday, the first of a series of air drops coordinated with Jordan. They will do almost nothing to address the scale of need. In north Gaza, where hunger is so widespread that people have been eating animal food for weeks, there are 300,000 people. The US aid parachute even if shared equally here would just provide a single meal to one in every 10 residents.
US officials said the current aid bottleneck was not about getting trucks through the crossings into Gaza but distributing the assistance in conditions of lawlessness and widespread looting by criminal gangs and desperate civilians. The solution, the officials said, is to flood Gaza with aid by opening up more crossings as well as sea routes to the coastal strip.
The US vice-president Kamala Harris will meet the Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz at the White House on Monday. The talks are expected to span topics including reducing civilian casualties, securing a temporary ceasefire, the release of hostages and increasing aid to the territory, a White House official said.
So far Washington has been unable to persuade Israel to open more than two crossings in the very south of Gaza, and Israeli red tape has kept aid flows to a trickle. But US officials said they were hopeful about progress. They said a ceasefire deal would be key.
“The ball is in the court of Hamas,” a senior US official said, adding that other countries, including Egypt, had “work to do” in persuading Hamas to accept the deal. “That was the focus of the president’s calls this week. But I would just say that it’s a complicated deal. It is more complex than the first deal in November that was a five-day deal extended day by day. This is a six-week deal and has the potential to extend from there.”
Hamas has indicated its negotiating position could be influenced by the deaths of 115 Gazans who were killed after Israeli troops opened fire near a crowd of people scrambling to get food from an aid convoy. The EU said the Israeli army had killed “many civilians” and called for an impartial international investigation. “The firing by Israeli soldiers against civilians trying to access foodstuff is unjustifiable,” the statement said.
Israel says its forces opened fire in self-defence and did not target the crowd. It says the majority of the dead were killed in the crowd crush or run over by trucks.
UN officials visiting al-Shifa hospital the day after the attack said they saw many survivors with gunshot wounds, matching interviews with doctors treating the injured and eye-witness accounts of the incident.
“This hospital is treating more than 200 people who were injured yesterday,” Georgios Petropoulos, the Gaza head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a video posted on social media. “We have seen gunshot wounds, we have seen amputees and we have children as young as 12 who were injured.
“These events cannot be allowed to go on. We need to have safe secure passage throughout Gaza to reach the people who need humanitarian aid. We need every single crossing into Gaza opening.”
Biden and Hamas leaders said the aid convoy deaths could complicate negotiations for a ceasefire and hostage release deal. But Egyptian security sources said the incident had pushed both sides to intensify their efforts, in order to preserve progress made so far, Reuters reported.
Palestinian foreign minister Riyad al-Maliki said during a speech at the Antalya Diplomatic Forum on Saturday: “We hope that we will be able to achieve a ceasefire before Ramadan.”
