U.S. President Joe Biden said sunday he hopes to see a new Gaza cease-fire by early next week, as delegations from several countries work to negotiate the first halt in fighting since late November.
"My national security adviser tells me that we're close,” Biden told reporters in New York. “We're close. We're not done yet. My hope is by next Monday we'll have a cease-fire.”
Negotiators have been working toward an agreement that would pause fighting for six weeks. The deal would include the release of hostages held by Hamas militants in Gaza, as well as the release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed al-Ansari says Qatar is ‘optimistic’ that a deal on a ceasefire or a cessation of hostilities would be achieved before Ramadan, while US President Biden saying he hopes “by next Monday we will have a ceasefire”.
Sources told Al Jazeera that the deal may involve 400 Palestinian prisoners and 40 captives believed to be held in Gaza.
Israel launched a large-scale air and ground campaign in Gaza after Hamas gunmen killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel.
The attackers also took 253 people hostage, a number of whom have since been released.
The Hamas-run health ministry in the Gaza Strip says at least 29,878 people have been killed in the territory since then - including 96 deaths in the past 24 hours - in addition to 70,215 who have been wounded.
Officials from Egypt, Israel, Qatar and the US have been involved in negotiations to reach a pause in the fighting.
According to Reuters news agency, quoting an unnamed source close to the talks, Hamas is still studying a draft framework, drawn by France, which would include a 40-day pause in all military operations and the exchange of Palestinians held in Israeli jails for Israeli hostages, at a ratio of 10 to one.
US officials hope a multi-week pause in fighting could offer a path to ending the war. But Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stressed any truce deal would delay, not prevent, a ground invasion of Rafah in the far south of the Gaza Strip.
“I’ve set three war goals. The first is to release the hostages. The second is to destroy Hamas. And the third is to ensure that Gaza does not pose a threat to Israel in the future,” he said, speaking on CBS’s Face of the Nation. “Understand that unless we have total victory, we can’t have peace. We can’t leave Hamas in place.”
Netanyahu’s office on Monday said the military had shown Israel’s war cabinet its plan for evacuating civilians from Rafah, but no details have been released on where those displaced people could go.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu has faced increasing public pressure over the fate of hostages still held in Gaza, and from a resurgent anti-government protest movement.
That anger is likely to be on display on Tuesday, when Democratic voters in Michigan go to the polls to make their choice for the party’s presidential nominee. Some activists in Michigan, which is home to many Palestinian Americans, have urged voters to protest Mr. Biden’s stance on Gaza by voting for “uncommitted” in the primary.
The timing of Mr. Biden’s response to an unprompted question by a reporter could undercut that effort and help the president show strength in the primary.
Efforts to secure an end to the fighting have 8been in the works since the early days of the war, though the president and his aides have repeatedly defended Israel’s responsibility to respond to the worst terrorist attack in its history.
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