UPDATED 12:52 P.M.
RIYADH (Reuters) -U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday urged Hamas to swiftly accept an Israeli proposal for a truce in the Gaza war and the release of Israeli hostages held by the Palestinian militant group.
Hamas negotiators were expected to meet Qatari and Egyptian mediators in Cairo on Monday to deliver a response to the phased truce proposal which Israel presented at the weekend.
“Hamas has before it a proposal that is extraordinarily, extraordinarily generous on the part of Israel,” Blinken said at a meeting of the World Economic Forum in the Saudi capital Riyadh.
“The only thing standing between the people of Gaza and a ceasefire is Hamas. They have to decide and they have to decide quickly,” he said. “I’m hopeful that they will make the right decision.”
A source briefed on the talks said Israel’s proposal entailed a deal for the release of fewer than 40 of the roughly 130 hostages believed to be still held in Gaza in exchange for freeing Palestinians jailed in Israel.
A second phase of a truce would consist of a “period of sustained calm” – Israel’s compromise response to a Hamas demand for a permanent ceasefire.
A total of 253 hostages were seized in a Hamas attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7 in which about 1,200 Israelis were also killed, according to Israeli counts.
Israel retaliated by imposing a total siege on Gaza and mounting an air and ground assault that has killed about 34,500 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities.
Palestinians are suffering from severe shortages of food, fuel and medicine in a humanitarian crisis brought on by the offensive that has demolished much of the territory.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Cameron, who was also in Riyadh for the WEF meeting, also described the Israeli proposal as “generous”.
It included a 40-day pause in fighting and the release of potentially thousands of Palestinian prisoners as well as Israeli hostages, he told a WEF audience.
“I hope Hamas do take this deal and frankly, all the pressure in the world and all the eyes in the world should be on them today saying ‘take that deal’,” Cameron said.
Cameron is among several foreign ministers in Riyadh, including from the U.S., France, Jordan and Egypt, as part of a diplomatic push to bring an end to the Gaza war.
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Blinken reiterated that the United States – Israel’s main diplomatic supporter and weapons supplier – could not back an Israeli ground assault on Rafah if there was no plan to ensure that civilians would not be harmed.
More than a million displaced Gaza residents are crammed into Rafah, the enclave’s southernmost city, having sought refuge there from Israeli bombardments. Israel says the last Hamas fighters are holed up there and it will open an offensive to root them out soon.
Blinken also said the United States and Saudi Arabia had done “intense work together” over the past few months towards a normalisation accord between the kingdom and Israel – a goal that has been disrupted by the Gaza war.
“To move forward with normalisation, two things will be required: calm in Gaza and a credible pathway to a Palestinian state,” he said.
In return for normalisation, Arab states are pushing for Israel to accept a pathway to Palestinian statehood on land it captured in the 1967 Middle East war – something Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected.
Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan bin Abdullah also said on Monday that an accord between Washington and Riyadh over normalisation was “very, very close”.
(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk, Alexander Cornwell and Pesha Magid; Additional reporting by John Irish and Maha El Dahan; Writing by Andrew Mills and Michael Georgy; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Mark Heinrich)
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RIYADH (Reuters) – The U.S. has seen measurable progress in the humanitarian situation in Gaza, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday, but he cautioned that it still wasn’t sufficient and vowed to press Israeli officials later this week to do more.
Blinken’s remarks during a Middle East trip to check in on humanitarian aid to Gaza come about a month after Biden issued a stark warning to Netanyahu, saying Washington’s policy could shift if Israel fails to take steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers.
Speaking at the opening of a meeting with the six-country Gulf Cooperation Council in Riyadh, Blinken cited the opening of new border crossings and higher amount of humanitarian aid as evidence of progress.
“But, it is not enough. We still need to get more aid in and around Gaza. We need to improve de-confliction with the humanitarian assistance workers,” Blinken said, referring to a mechanism that will ensure Israel does not strike aid groups.
“We finally have to make sure that we’re not just focusing on inputs but on impact. All of this is going to be focus of the next few days for me, as I travel onto Jordan and Israel,” Blinken said.
The top U.S. diplomat is on a tour of the Middle East, his seventh since the region plunged into conflict on Oct. 7 when Palestinian Hamas militants attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people and abducting 250 others according to Israeli tallies.
In response, Israel has launched a relentless assault on Gaza, killing more than 34,000 Palestinians, health authorities there say, in a bombardment that has reduced the densely populated enclave to a wasteland. More than one million people risk famine, the United Nations warns, after six months of war.
Following Riyadh, Blinken will head to Jordan and then Israel, where the focus of his trip will shift largely to how to sustain increased humanitarian aid into Gaza and identifying what the remaining obstacles are to doing so.
“I’ll have a chance to meet with humanitarian groups, with the Israeli Government, to hear from them where more work is needed, and to continue to press for tangible, immediate, and sustained progress.”
A spiraling humanitarian crisis has prompted calls from Israel’s Western and Arab partners to do more to facilitate the entry of aid to the enclave, where most people are homeless, many face famine, and where civilian infrastructure is devastated and disease widespread.
The amount of humanitarian aid going into the Gaza Strip will be ramped up in coming days, Israel’s military said on Sunday, citing new corridors that use an Israeli seaport and border crossings into the Palestinian enclave.
(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk, Editing by William Maclean)
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