The prospects for a new pause in Israel’s war with Hamas are bleak amid PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to hold off on a threatened assault on the Gaza city of Rafah. Despite a direct appeal from US President Joe Biden earlier this week, Netanyahu insisted the operation would go ahead regardless of whether further releases of Israeli hostages were agreed with Hamas.
Netanyahu said that foreign countries calling on Israel to spare the city, where over a million Palestinians have sought refuge, were effectively telling the country to “lose the war” against Hamas. Truce efforts had intensified this week as Qatar and fellow mediators Egypt and the US scrambled to secure a ceasefire before Israeli troops enter the last major population centre in the Gaza Strip.
Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, who has met with negotiators from both Israel and Hamas this week, said efforts for a ceasefire had been complicated by the insistence of “a lot of countries” that any new truce involve further releases of hostages. “The pattern in the last few days is not really very promising,” he said at the Munich Security Conference. His assessment came as Hamas threatened to suspend its involvement in truce talks unless relief supplies are brought into the north of the Gaza Strip.
‘Negotiations cannot be held while…’
“Negotiations cannot be held while hunger is ravaging the Palestinian people,” a senior source in the Palestinian militant group told AFP. Earlier, Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh reiterated the group’s demands, which Netanyahu dismissed as “ludicrous”. They include a complete pause in fighting, the release of Hamas prisoners and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, with Qatar-based Haniyeh saying Hamas would “not agree to anything less”.
Netanyahu also rejected moves by some Western governments towards unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state, without waiting for a negotiated peace deal between the two sides. “After the terrible massacre of October 7, there can be no greater reward for terrorism than that and it will prevent any future peace settlement,” he said. The hawkish premier was speaking as thousands of Israelis protested in Tel Aviv, accusing his government of abandoning Israeli hostages.
Israel said it had taken 100 people into custody at one of Gaza’s main hospitals Saturday after troops raided the complex, with fears mounting for patients and staff trapped inside. At least 120 patients and five medical teams are stuck without water, food and electricity in Nasser Hospital in Gaza’s main southern city of Khan Yunis, according to the health ministry. Israel has for weeks concentrated its military operations in Khan Yunis, the hometown of Hamas’s Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar, the alleged architect of the October 7 attack that triggered the war.
Intense fighting
Fierce combat is underway around Nasser Hospital, one of the Palestinian territory’s last major medical facilities that remains even partly operational. The power was cut and the generators stopped after the raid, leading to the deaths of six patients due to a lack of oxygen, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
The Israeli army said troops entered the hospital on Thursday, acting on what it said was “credible intelligence” that hostages seized in the October 7 attack had been held there. It later acknowledged it had found no firm evidence that they had. The army has insisted it made every effort to keep the hospital supplied with power, including bringing in an alternative generator. The raid has been criticised by medics and the United Nations.
The Gaza war began with Hamas’s October 7 attack which resulted in the deaths of about 1,160 people in Israel, mostly civilians. Militants also took about 250 people hostage, 130 of whom are still in Gaza, including 30 who are presumed dead, according to Israeli figures. Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza has killed at least 28,858 people, according to the territory’s health ministry.
(With agency inputs)
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