Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh is expected in Egypt on Tuesday to discuss a ceasefire proposal drafted over the weekend in Paris by international mediators. Haniyeh said he has the proposal in hand and will "study" it, Reuters reported.
That deal would include a six-week ceasefire and a phased exchange of hostages for prisoners in Israeli jails.
Haniyeh said the group’s priority was to end Israel’s military offensive and achieve a full pullout of Israeli forces from Gaza, which Israel has said will only happen when a complete political and military dismantling of Hamas has been achieved.
That would leave the situation essentially unchanged, with an apparently unbridgeable gap between the two sides. Hamas has said it won’t release any captives until Israel agrees to a permanent end to the fighting. Hamas also refused an Israeli demand that its top leadership leave Gaza for exile elsewhere.
On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office called the talks about the proposal “constructive,” but repeated that Israel will only agree to a temporary ceasefire, even if it lasts several months, and that the fighting can only end in what he calls “total victory,” the elimination of Hamas as a political force in Gaza and a security threat to Israel.
It’s not apparent how the two sides can bridge this gap.
Qatar’s foreign minister said in Washington late Monday that there are few options for peace, and urged Israel and Hamas to accept the latest deal, hammered out Sunday in Paris with the help of Qatari and Egyptian mediators.
"It is the only opportunity available to calm the situation," Prime Minister Mohammed al-Thani said late Monday at a press conference with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Washington.
Underscoring the complex interconnectedness of the half-dozen crises percolating in the Middle East, Al-Thani said he was concerned that any U.S. retaliation for the deadly attack on a U.S. base in Jordan by an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq could upset Gaza peace talks.
"I hope that nothing would undermine the efforts that we are doing or jeopardize the process," Al-Thani said.
Blinken declined to give details of the framework agreement, telling journalists that “the less said, the better.” But he said that the proposal now on the table is “a compelling one” and that “there is some real hope going forward,” The New York Times reported.
In a bid to calm one of the relatively smaller regional flare-ups, Israeli Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar visited Cairo on Monday to meet Egyptian domestic intelligence chief Abbas Kamel, as Egypt said it feared an influx of Palestinian refugees if Israel attacked the southern tip of Gaza, news brief service Axios reported.
More than a million Palestinians are crammed into Rafah, at the Egyptian border with Gaza, and fighting there could push many of them into Egypt. Egypt has kept its border with Gaza largely sealed, and Axios reports that Egypt has threatened that a mass exodus of Palestinians into Egypt would prompt a break in the fragile relations between the Egyptians and Israelis.
Meanwhile, Israel got a rare rebuke from its allies in Britain, as the U.K. Foreign Minister David Cameron told the BBC that the last 30 years had been a story of failure for Israel because it had failed to provide security to its citizens. Only by recognizing that failure, he said, would there be peace and progress.
Cameron added that the U.K. is prepared to move up formal, diplomatic recognition of a Palestinian state, not as part of a final peace deal, but during the negotiations themselves.
At the same time, a new Palestinian leadership would have to be "stood up quickly" with "technocratic and good leaders" able to govern Gaza, he said.
"Together with that, almost most important of all, is to give the Palestinian people a political horizon so that they can see that there is going to be irreversible progress to a two-state solution and crucially the establishment of a Palestinian state,” Cameron said.