Israel and Hamas appear to be inching closer towards a deal for a ceasefire and a release of some of the hostages still being held by the militant group in Gaza, while the UN children’s agency has warned that 17,000 children have been left without families or been separated from them by the conflict.
Qatar, which has been mediating between Israel and Hamas, indicated that the militant group had given its initial support for a deal after weeks of delicate and secretive negotiations.
However, while an aide to Hamas’s political leader said the group had received details of the proposed deal, it had yet to reply.
A Qatari official later clarified to Reuters that there was “no deal yet” and that although “Hamas has received the proposal positively”, Qatar was “waiting for their response”.
Taher al-Nono, an adviser to the Qatar-based Hamas politburo chief, Ismail Haniyeh, said: “We cannot say the current stage of negotiation is zero and at the same time we cannot say that we have reached an agreement.”
Haniyeh was expected to travel to Cairo for talks with Egyptian officials on the issue of a ceasefire.
The latest movement on the talks came as an Israeli minister, Amichai Chikli, compared the UK’s foreign secretary, David Cameron, to Neville Chamberlain and accused him of “appeasement” for suggesting again that the UK could recognise Palestinian statehood after a Gaza ceasefire and before a final-status agreement.
The reported outline of the proposal envisages a lengthy ceasefire of about six weeks in which Palestinians in Gaza would be allowed to move around the strip freely, while hostages would be released in three phases in exchange for Palestinian prisoners being held in Israel.
According to reports in the Hebrew media and elsewhere, women, children and sick and elderly prisoners being held by Hamas would be released first, then female soldiers in the second phase, which would also result in an increase in humanitarian aid being allowed into Gaza by Israel.
In the final, most sensitive phase, male soldiers and the bodies of dead hostages would be released.
Despite tentative optimism among US officials that the two sides might be edging closer to an agreement, any deal faces considerable obstacles from both. Hamas is understood to be asking for up to 150 Palestinian prisoners to be released in exchange for each hostage as well as eyeing the release of senior figures, such as Marwan Barghouti.
Later a Hamas official in Beirut, Osama Hamdan, also reiterated that any deal short of a permanent ceasefire was likely to be rejected.
Israeli ministers have been quick to voice opposition to the length of the proposed ceasefire, arguing that it would make it more difficult for Israel to return to offensive operations against Hamas. According to a report on Israel’s Channel N12, ministers at a cabinet meeting on Thursday night opposed a ceasefire of longer than a month.
Amid mounting international concern about the increasingly desperate humanitarian situation in Gaza, where more than half of the population of 2.3 million have been displaced south to Rafah on the Egyptian border, Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, suggested on Thursday that Rafah itself could be the next target of operations.
“The Khan Younis Brigade of the Hamas organisation is dismantled; we complete the mission and will continue to Rafah,” Gallant said in a message posted on social media.
With hundreds of thousands of people crammed into the city, many living in tents in unsanitary conditions and with little access to aid or medical care, on Friday the UN’s humanitarian office described Rafah as a “pressure cooker of despair”.
“I want to emphasise our deep concern about the escalation of hostilities in Khan Younis, which has resulted in an increase in the number of internally displaced people seeking refuge in Rafah in recent days,” said Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “Rafah is a pressure cooker of despair, and we fear for what comes next.”
Gaza residents have said Israeli forces have pounded areas around hospitals in Khan Younis and stepped up attacks close to Rafah.
Laerke said: “Khan Younis has also come increasingly under attack and it’s been shocking to hear about the heavy fighting in the vicinity of the hospitals, jeopardising the safety of medical staff, the wounded and sick, as well as thousands of internally displaced people seeking refuge there. Agencies are indeed struggling to respond under these circumstances.”
In separate comments, Unicef said it estimated that 17,000 children in Gaza were unaccompanied or had been separated from their families during the conflict, which began on 7 October after attacks by Hamas gunmen in southern Israel.
It said nearly all children in the strip were thought to require mental health support. “They present symptoms like extremely high levels of persistent anxiety, loss of appetite. They can’t sleep, they have emotional outbursts or they panic every time they hear a bombing,” said Jonathan Crickx, Unicef’s chief of communication for the occupied Palestinian territories.
“Before this war, Unicef was considering already that 500,000 children were in need of mental health and psychosocial support in Gaza,” Crickx added. “Today we estimate that almost all children are in need of that support – and that’s more than 1 million children.”
