US and UK pressure Hamas to accept Israel’s “generous” ceasefire proposal

The United States and the United Kingdom are urging Hamas to accept Israel’s latest proposal for a ceasefire in Gaza, which both governments consider “very generous.” The heads of diplomacy of those two countries, Antony Blinken and David Cameron, who met this Monday in Riyadh, believe that the ball is on the Palestinian side and that it is the fundamentalist group that governs in Gaza that has to take the step. to unblock the situation.

On the horizon, according to the British minister in the capital of Saudi Arabia, there appears a 40-day ceasefire and the possibility that those kidnapped in the Strip will be exchanged for up to thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. “Stopping attacks against the Palestinian population is not generous (…) when a crime is stopped, it cannot be said that it is a generous action on the Israeli part,” responded Osama Hamdan, Hamas spokesman, in statements to the Al Jazeera network. .

The head of American diplomacy was forceful regarding the responsibility of Hamas: “The only thing standing between the people of Gaza and a ceasefire is Hamas. “They have to decide and they have to decide quickly.” Blinken also said he was hopeful that “they will make the right decision.” This truce would allow the release of hostages from the Strip and, as Israel’s Foreign Minister acknowledged this weekend, even postpone the ground invasion of Rafah—the city in southern Gaza where most of the Gazans gather— by his troops.

Blinken, whose country is against this operation, has insisted that the United States does not know how Israel intends to keep safe the hundreds of thousands of refugees who are crowded into that town with hardly any shelter or food. “We have not yet seen a plan that gives us confidence about how civilians can be effectively protected,” the Secretary of State said, Al Jazeera reports.

In the midst of a triangulation of balances that has not been achieved for months, Hamas is waiting to respond to the Israeli plan. That could happen over the next few hours through a delegation sent to Cairo, where he would be maintaining contacts with Egyptian and Qatari negotiators. The offer is “extremely, extremely generous,” Blinken has emphasized without revealing details, the Reuters agency reports. Israel “does not want a complete ceasefire and is not serious about withdrawing from Gaza,” Hamdan concludes. “If there are positive responses, I think we can move forward,” he added in his statements to Qatari television.

For Blinken, the delay on the Palestinian side in giving approval only prolongs the conflict. This is how he interpreted it after a meeting with his Turkish colleague, Hakan Fidan, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “I hope that Hamas accepts this agreement and, honestly, all the pressure in the world and all the eyes in the world should be on them today while they are told ‘accept that agreement,” Cameron said during a meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF). , according to its acronym in English) in the Saudi capital, which Blinken has also attended.

Discount in offer

In recent days, after receiving an Egyptian delegation, Israel has hinted that, in a first phase of the truce, it would agree to reduce the number of captives to be released from 40 to 33, according to local media reports and recalled this Monday the American newspaper The New York Times. Behind this reduction, the media adds, could be the number of captives who would already be dead, according to the official Israeli sources consulted. In this first phase, women (both civilians and soldiers), older and injured or sick kidnapped people would be released.

“We are aware that there is a concrete agreement on the table, do not miss another opportunity to bring back my Omri and everyone. “You owe us,” Lishay Lavi-Miran, wife of Omri Miran, the hostage protagonist of one of the two propaganda videos broadcast last week by Hamas to pressure the Israeli Government, claimed at a press conference this Monday in Tel Aviv. The families continue to demand daily that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prioritize the humanitarian route over the war route.

“We have been fighting for more than six months! I’m fed up! It is you who have to lead the fight for his return, not us. It was not during my term when this disaster took place, the greatest failure in the history of the country,” Shir Siegel, the daughter of hostage Keith Siegel, said at that same event, also recorded by the fundamentalists.

Israel believes that most of the around 130 hostages remaining in the Strip (of the 250 captured on October 7) have been transferred to Rafah. That town in the Strip, bordering Egypt and the only one that has not been assaulted by the Israeli military, has become the hot potato of the war. The parents of 400 Israeli soldiers have expressed their fear that this assault will finally be ordered, which, they believe, would be “a death trap,” reports Haaretz referring to the meeting they held with two of the war cabinet ministers, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot. A son of Eisenkot has died in Gaza during the current war.

Rafah hosts around 1.5 million displaced Palestinians, but also, according to the authorities of the Jewish State, the last active Hamas battalions. For this reason, they argue, they cannot give up this ground operation that is not supported even by their most direct ally, the United States.

The meeting in Riyadh, which has become a forum for debate on the possible end of the war since Sunday, is also attended by delegations from Arab countries in the region and the high representative of Foreign Policy of the European Union, the Spanish Josep Borrell. The head of European diplomacy commented that several countries of the 27 EU hope to recognize Palestine as a State by the end of May (Spain is one of those that have promised this recognition). Blinken, for his part, will continue his trip through Jordan and Israel in what is his seventh visit to the region during the current conflict, which began when Hamas murdered around 1,200 people in Israeli territory and kidnapped around 250 on October 7. The military response of the Jewish State has already caused more than 34,000 deaths of Gazans. As a backdrop to negotiations that have been fruitless for months, underlying the Palestinian side’s desire for the pact to free the hostages to end the war versus the Israeli desire to resume attacks once the hostages – alive or dead—are back.

Follow all the international information onFacebook andxor inour weekly newsletter.

_