The head of American diplomacy Antony Blinken in Israel will discuss the truce in the Gaza Strip

After visiting Egypt and Qatar, US diplomat Antony Blinken will continue meeting with Israeli leaders this Wednesday as part of his fifth tour of the Middle East.

On the agenda is a truce in the fighting in the Gaza Strip, formulated at the end of January in Paris by American, Qatari and Egyptian officials. Hamas confirmed that it submitted its response to Egyptian and Qatari mediators on Tuesday, without elaborating.

A Palestinian source said the three-phase project included a six-week truce during which Israel would have to release 200 to 300 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 35 to 40 hostages held by Hamas and more humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip.

Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani said he was “optimistic” about reaching a truce, calling Hamas’s response, which included “some comments,” “generally positive.”

For its part, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that Hamas’s response was indeed “relayed by a Qatari intermediary to the Mossad,” Israel’s foreign intelligence agency.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done”

“Details are being carefully studied by officials involved in the negotiations,” added the service of the Israeli prime minister, who is due to speak with Antony Blinken four months after the start of the war.

“There is still a lot of work to be done to achieve a new truce. But we continue to believe that an agreement is possible and even necessary, and we will continue to work tirelessly to achieve it,” the head of American diplomacy explained before arriving in Israel. He said the new draft agreement, drawn up in Paris at the end of January, “opens up the prospect of lasting calm, the release of hostages and increased aid” in Gaza, which is in the grip of a major humanitarian crisis. “Obviously, this will benefit everyone,” he explained.

At the end of November, the first week-long truce allowed an increase in the flow of humanitarian aid and the release of about a hundred hostages from the approximately 250 taken into Gaza on October 7, as well as Palestinian prisoners.

The fact remains that if Hamas demands a complete ceasefire, Israel will refuse, arguing that its offensive in the Gaza Strip will end only after Hamas is destroyed and the hostages are released. “We are on the path to complete victory and will not stop. This is the position of the vast majority of the population,” Netanyahu said on Tuesday.

Rafah in the viewfinder

At the moment, hostilities continue. Eyewitnesses said bombing and fighting were still going on when the US Secretary of State’s plane landed in Tel Aviv, less than 100 kilometers south in the Gaza cities of Khan Younes and Rafah.

Since the start of the war, entire neighborhoods have been destroyed by Israeli bombing and 1.7 million of the small area’s roughly 2.4 million residents have been forced from their homes. More than 1.3 million displaced people now live in desperate conditions in Rafah, five times the city’s original population, helped by the closed border with Egypt, according to the UN.

Now this city could become Israel’s next target. On Monday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who is also due to meet with Antony Blinken on Wednesday, warned that the army would “reach places where it has not yet fought, all the way to Hamas’s last bastion, which is Rafah.” “An escalation of hostilities in Rafah could lead to large-scale civilian casualties. We must do everything in our power to avoid this,” Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA), said in Geneva.

Outside Gaza, tensions remain high in the region between Israel and its allies on the one hand, and Iran and its “axis of resistance” on the other, including, in addition to Hamas, the Lebanese Hezbollah, militias in Iraq and Houthi rebels in Yemen. .

On Tuesday evening, the Israeli army said it had obtained documents “proving” transfers of US$154 million from Iran to Hamas between 2014 and 2020. And at night, as a result of Israeli strikes in the Homs region in Syria, five were killed, including three civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH).