Beirut, Lebanon:

A senior Palestinian Hamas official said Saturday in Beirut that negotiations for an agreement with Israel on a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal had not made any progress.

A plan presented last month by US President Joe Biden, which he said was proposed by Israel, included a six-week truce accompanied by an Israeli withdrawal from densely populated areas and the release of some hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. 

According to US news site Axios, “three sources with direct knowledge” said Washington had presented a “new language for parts of” the proposed deal.

On Saturday, Osama Hamdan, a Hamas official based in Lebanon, confirmed that the Islamist movement had received the latest proposal on June 24, but that it included “nothing new”.

“We can say that there is no real progress in the negotiations to stop the (Israeli) aggression so far”, he said at a press conference.

The plan presented by Biden has so far failed to result in a deal, with both sides sticking to their demands.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he will continue the war until Hamas is totally defeated and all hostages are freed.

Hamas insists on a permanent ceasefire and a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip.

Hamdan said the proposals were “merely a waste of time and provide additional time for the occupation (Israel) to practise genocide”.

He also said Hamas was being pressured to accept Israel’s deal “as it is without modification”.

The war started with Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel which resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.

The militants also seized hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza although the army says 42 are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 37,834 people, also mostly civilians, according to data from the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Khan Yunis:

Lying bedridden in her room at the recently reopened Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis in Gaza, Alaa Abu Ahmed is relieved that she can finally restart her medical treatment.

Displacement because of fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas militants in the Palestinian territory interrupted Abu Ahmed’s treatment for a chronic condition.

Over a week in February, the hospital was attacked when Khan Yunis was the focus of fighting and soldiers raided it, saying Hamas was holding Israeli hostages there.

Now hallways are filled with still-wrapped boxes of equipment, and some semblance of order is returning to the facility.

While air strikes, bombardment and fighting continue to rock other areas of Gaza, in Nasser the beds have been straightened, the debris cleared and white coats bearing Doctors Without Borders (MSF) logos mix with the blue uniforms of local medics.

The international NGO has just resumed work at the hospital, the most important in the southern Gaza Strip.

“Thank God MSF was able to start working again at Nasser Hospital and I returned for treatment,” Abu Ahmed said.

“My condition has improved, but I did spend some time afraid that what happened at Al-Shifa hospital would repeat itself,” she added of the territory’s largest hospital, in Gaza City.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Al-Shifa has been reduced to an “empty shell” by fighting.

Humanitarian catastrophe

Just 13 out of 36 hospitals in the territory are “partially” functional, according to WHO, after unrelenting Israeli bombardment began in October.

When Israel withdrew its troops from Khan Yunis in early April, after months of fierce battles with Hamas created a humanitarian catastrophe, MSF returned to Nasser and resumed operations in mid-May, focusing on orthopaedic surgery and the burns unit.

In one bed lay a girl with a burned face, in another a silent boy with a bandaged leg watched over by a relative. A girl wearing a red dress cried as a doctor examined her.

The repeated evacuation or closure of hospitals because of fighting or Israeli leaflets ordering Gazans to leave the area “greatly handicap the delivery of medical care to the Palestinian population”, said Aurelie Godard, who oversees MSF activities in Gaza.

Now MSF is preparing to reopen the Nasser’s maternity and neonatal intensive care units.

“Evacuating or reopening is difficult every time. Especially for the patients, because they have to know where to find us; they have to know what services and what care is available in what place,” Godard said.

“It’s difficult for us, because obviously there’s all the equipment, the medicines, the machines… to transport, to repair sometimes,” she added.

‘Living in a desert’

WHO said Friday it had received no medical equipment in Gaza since May 6, the eve of Israel’s offensive on Rafah city in Gaza’s far south which led to the closure of the main aid entry points into the territory.

Since then almost no aid has made it into Gaza, the UN and NGOs say.

The Israeli military cut off electricity to Gaza at the beginning of the war, triggered by an unprecedented Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, and international organisations fear a total depletion of fuel to run generators.

More and more people are leaving Rafah, where the UN says Israel’s offensive has forced around 800,000 people to flee, hoping to find refuge in Khan Yunis.

Near Nasser hospital, plastic containers are piled up at water distribution points.

“People just appear to be alive on the outside,” said Mohammed Baroud, who was displaced from Rafah to Khan Yunis.

He said “everything is destroyed” in the area around Nasser Hospital.

“Water is not available. We search for even a few drops of water,” he said, adding that to get that they have to come a long way.

“Water is very scarce,” he said. “It’s like living in a desert.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Jerusalem:

The US military said aid deliveries began Friday via a temporary pier in Gaza aimed at ramping up emergency humanitarian assistance to the war-ravaged Palestinian territory.

“Today at approximately 9 a.m. (Gaza time), trucks carrying humanitarian assistance began moving ashore via a temporary pier in Gaza,” the US Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a statement, adding that no US troops went ashore.

“This is an ongoing, multinational effort to deliver additional aid to Palestinian civilians in Gaza via a maritime corridor that is entirely humanitarian in nature,” it said.

The pier was successfully anchored on Thursday, with around 500 tonnes of aid expected to enter the Palestinian territory in the coming days.

Photos released on Thursday by CENTCOM showed humanitarian aid being lifted onto a barge in the nearby Israeli port of Ashdod.

The Palestinian territory is facing famine after an Israeli siege brought dire shortages of food as well as safe water, medicines and fuel for its 2.4 million people.

The arrival of occasional aid convoys has slowed to a trickle since Israeli forces took control last week of the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing.

The UN has said that opening up land crossing points and allowing more trucks convoys into Gaza is the only way to stem the spiralling humanitarian crisis.

The Gaza war broke out after Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s devastating military retaliation has killed at least 35,272 people, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Smoke billows after an explosion in northern Gaza, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, as seen from Israel, May 12, 2024. REUTERS/Amir Cohen
| Photo Credit: Amir Cohen

Israeli air strikes pound northern, central and southern parts of the enclave during the night and into Sunday morning; UN chief calls for an immediate ceasefire; Biden says truce can be achieved ‘tomorrow’ if Hamas agrees to release hostages

Israel struck Gaza on Sunday and troops were battling militants in several areas of the Hamas-run territory, where the Health Ministry said the death toll in the war had exceeded 35,000 people.

More than seven months into the Israel-Hamas war, UN chief Antonio Guterres urged “an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, the unconditional release of all hostages and an immediate surge in humanitarian aid” into the besieged Gaza Strip.

“But a ceasefire will only be the start,” Mr. Guterres told a donor conference in Kuwait. “It will be a long road back from the devastation and trauma of this war.”

As Egyptian, Qatari and U.S. mediation efforts towards a truce appeared to stall, U.S. President Joe Biden said on Saturday a ceasefire could be achieved “tomorrow” if Hamas released the hostages held in Gaza since the October 7 attack that sparked the conflict.

Israeli air strikes pounded parts of northern, central and southern Gaza during the night and into Sunday morning.

Latest figures

The Health Ministry in the territory said that at least 63 people had been killed over the last 24 hours, bringing the overall death toll from Israel’s bombardment and offensive in Gaza to at least 35,034 people, mostly women and children.

Months after Israel said it had dismantled Hamas’s command structure in northern Gaza, fighting has resumed in recent days in Jabalia refugee camp and Gaza City’s Zeitun neighbourhood.

‘Hamas rebuilding’

Military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said late on Saturday that “in recent weeks we have identified attempts by Hamas to rebuild its military capabilities in Jabalia, and we are acting to destroy these attempts”.

He also said there was an operation in Zeitun.

On Saturday, the Israeli military expanded an evacuation order for eastern Rafah and said 300,000 Palestinians had left the area.

People walk past a poster of a hostage kidnapped during the deadly October 7 attack by Palestinian Islamist group Hamas from Gaza, pasted along with other items on a light pole in Tel Aviv, Israel, May 7, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Families of hostages held in Gaza have urged the United States and other governments with citizens among the captives to pressure Israel to strike a deal with Hamas for their return.

Following indications on Monday of progress in talks towards a truce in the seven-month war, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said it had appealed to a number of countries to “exert your influence on the Israeli government” and push for an agreement.

“At this crucial moment, while a tangible opportunity for the release of the hostages is on the table, it is of the utmost importance that your government manifest its strong support for such an agreement,” the group said in a message sent to the Ambassadors of all countries with citizens among the hostages seized by Palestinian militants on October 7.

“This is the time to exert your influence on the Israeli government and all other parties concerned to ensure that the agreement comes through which will finally bring all our loved ones home.”

During the October 7 attack that sparked the brutal war in Gaza, Palestinian militants seized around 250 hostages, who included foreigners and dual nationals, among them U.S., Thai, French, British and Russian citizens.

Hostage families have been among those pressing through repeated protests for Israel to reach a deal with Hamas to bring home the captives.

No breakthrough

Despite months of shuttle diplomacy, mediators have so far failed to broker a new truce like the week-long ceasefire that saw 105 hostages released last November, the Israelis among them in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

Previous negotiation efforts had stalled in part because of Hamas’s demand for a lasting ceasefire and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vows to crush its remaining fighters in Rafah.

Jerusalem:

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Tuesday Israel was prepared to “deepen” its Gaza operation if truce talks fail to secure the release of hostages Hamas holds in the Palestinian territory.

Israel is prepared to “make compromises” to get hostages out of Gaza, Gallant said after touring the Rafah area following an Israeli incursion at the Rafah border crossing in the territory’s south.

But “if that option is removed, we will go on and deepen the operation”, he warned in a statement.

Gallant’s comments came after Israeli negotiators arrived in Cairo for the latest effort towards a hostage release and ceasefire in the seven-month-old war.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement he had instructed Israel’s delegation to “stand firm on the conditions necessary for the release” of hostages held in Gaza since Hamas’s October 7 attack, and on “essential requirements for guaranteeing Israel’s security”.

The new talks come after Hamas announced late Monday it had accepted a ceasefire plan proposed by Egyptian and Qatari mediators, and said the ball was now in Israel’s court.

Despite months of shuttle diplomacy, mediators have so far failed to broker a new truce like the week-long ceasefire that saw 105 hostages released last November, the Israelis among them in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

Previous negotiation efforts had stalled in part because of Hamas’s demand for a lasting ceasefire and Netanyahu’s vows to crush its remaining fighters in Rafah.

On Tuesday, Netanyahu said he had given the order late Monday to seize Rafah crossing, and that “within hours, our forces raised the Israeli flags at the Rafah crossing and took down the Hamas flags”.

“Seizing the passage in Rafah today is a very important step,” he said — “an important step on the way to destroying the remaining military capabilities of Hamas”.

Netanyahu maintained Tuesday that “this morning we denied Hamas a passage that was essential for establishing its reign of terror in the (Gaza) Strip”.

Gallant indicated that the limited Rafah incursion, launched after Israel ordered Palestinians in the east of the city to evacuate ahead of a long-threatened ground operation, could be lengthy.

“This operation will continue until we eliminate Hamas in the Rafah area and the entire Gaza Strip, or until the first hostage returns,” he said in his statement.

If hostages are not returned, Gallant said Israel would expand its operations “all over the Strip, in the south, in the centre and in the north”.

“Hamas only responds to force, so we will intensify our actions, and the military pressure will result in us crushing … Hamas.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Hamas announced on May 6 it has accepted an Egyptian-Qatari proposal for a ceasefire to halt the seven-month-long war with Israel in Gaza, hours after Israel ordered about 100,000 Palestinians to begin evacuating from the southern city of Rafah, signalling that a long-promised ground invasion there could be imminent.

There was no immediate comment from Israel on the deal, and details of the proposal have not yet been released. In recent days, Egyptian and Hamas officials have said the cease-fire would take place in a series of stages during which Hamas would release hostages it is holding in exchange for Israeli troop pullbacks from Gaza.

It is not clear whether the deal will meet Hamas’ key demand of bringing about an end to the war and complete Israeli withdrawal.

Hamas said in a statement its top leader, Ismail Haniyeh, had delivered the news in a phone call with Qatar’s prime minister and Egypt’s intelligence minister. After the release of the statement, Palestinians erupted in cheers in the sprawling tent camps around Rafah, hoping the deal meant an Israeli attack had been averted.

Israel’s closest allies, including the United States, have repeatedly said that Israel shouldn’t attack Rafah. The looming operation has raised global alarm over the fate of around 1.4 million Palestinians sheltering there.

Aid agencies have warned that an offensive will worsen Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe and bring a surge of more civilian deaths in an Israeli campaign that in nearly seven months has killed 34,000 people and devastated the territory.

U.S. President Joe Biden spoke Monday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and reiterated U.S. concerns about an invasion of Rafah. Biden said that a cease-fire with Hamas is the best way to protect the lives of Israeli hostages held in Gaza, a National Security Council spokesperson said on condition of anonymity to discuss the call before an official White House statement was released.

Hamas and key mediator Qatar said that invading Rafah will derail efforts by international mediators to broker a cease-fire. Days earlier, Hamas had been discussing a U.S.-backed proposal that reportedly raised the possibility of an end to the war and a pullout of Israeli troops in return for the release of all hostages held by the group. Israeli officials have rejected that trade-off, vowing to continue their campaign until Hamas is destroyed.

Netanyahu said Monday that seizing Rafah, which Israel says is the last significant Hamas stronghold in Gaza, was vital to ensuring the militants can’t rebuild their military capabilities and repeat the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that triggered the war.

Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an army spokesman, said about 100,000 people were being ordered to move from parts of Rafah to a nearby Israel-declared humanitarian zone called Muwasi, a makeshift camp on the coast. He said that Israel has expanded the size of the zone and that it included tents, food, water and field hospitals.

It wasn’t immediately clear, however, if that material was already in place to accommodate the new arrivals.

Around 450,000 displaced Palestinians already are sheltering in Muwasi. The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, said it has been providing them with aid. But conditions are squalid, with few bathrooms or sanitation facilities in the largely rural area, forcing families to dig private latrines.

After the evacuation order announcement Monday, Palestinians in Rafah wrestled with having to uproot their extended families once again for an unknown fate, exhausted after months living in sprawling tent camps or crammed into schools or other shelters in and around the city. Few who spoke to The Associated Press wanted to risk staying.

Mohammed Jindiyah said that at the beginning of the war, he had tried to hold out in his home in northern Gaza after Israel ordered an evacuation there in October. He ended up suffering through heavy bombardment before fleeing to Rafah.

He’s complying with the order this time, but was unsure now whether to move to Muwasi or another town in central Gaza.

“We are 12 families, and we don’t know where to go. There is no safe area in Gaza,” he said.

Sahar Abu Nahel, who fled to Rafah with 20 family members including her children and grandchildren, wiped tears from her cheeks, despairing at a new move.

“I have no money or anything. I am seriously tired, as are the children,” she said. “Maybe it’s more honorable for us to die. We are being humiliated.” Israeli military leaflets were dropped with maps detailing a number of eastern neighborhoods of Rafah to evacuate, warning that an attack was imminent and anyone who stays “puts themselves and their family members in danger.” Text messages and radio broadcasts repeated the message.

UNRWA won’t evacuate from Rafah so it can continue to provide aid to those who stay behind, said Scott Anderson, the agency’s director in Gaza.

“We will provide aid to people wherever they choose to be,” he told the AP.

The U.N. says an attack on Rafah could disrupt the distribution of aid keeping Palestinians alive across Gaza. The Rafah crossing into Egypt, a main entry point for aid to Gaza, lies in the evacuation zone. The crossing remained open Monday after the Israeli order.

Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, condemned the “forced, unlawful” evacuation order and the idea that people should go to Muwasi.

“The area is already overstretched and devoid of vital services,” Egeland said. He said that an Israeli assault could lead to “the deadliest phase of this war.” Israel’s bombardment and ground offensives in Gaza have killed more than 34,700 Palestinians, around two-thirds of them children and women, according to Gaza health officials. The tally doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants. More than 80% of the population of 2.3 million have been driven from their homes, and hundreds of thousands in the north are on the brink of famine, according to the U.N.

Tensions escalated Sunday when Hamas fired rockets at Israeli troops positioned on the border with Gaza near Israel’s main crossing for delivering humanitarian aid, killing four soldiers. Israel shuttered the crossing — but Shoshani said it wouldn’t affect how much aid enters Gaza as others are working.

Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes on Rafah killed 22 people, including children and two infants, according to a hospital.

The war was sparked by the unprecedented Oct. 7 raid into southern Israel in which Hamas and other militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250 hostages. After exchanges during a November cease-fire, Hamas is believed to still hold about 100 Israelis captive as well the bodies of around 30 others.

The mediators over the cease-fire — the United States, Egypt and Qatar — had appeared to scramble to salvage a cease-fire deal they had been trying to push through the past week. Egypt said it was in touch with all sides Monday to “prevent the situation from … getting out of control.” CIA Director William Burns, who had been in Cairo for talks on the deal, headed to meet the prime minister of Qatar, an official familiar with the matter said. It wasn’t clear whether a subsequent trip to Israel that had been planned would happen. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door negotiations.

In a fiery speech Sunday evening marking Israel’s Holocaust memorial day, Netanyahu rejected international pressure to halt the war, saying that “if Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone.” On Monday, Netanyahu accused Hamas of “torpedoing” a deal by not budging from its demand for an end to the war and a complete Israeli troop withdrawal in return for the hostages’ release, which he called “extreme.”

Doha:

Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh on Sunday accused Israel’s prime minister of sabotaging efforts by mediators involved in ongoing talks aimed at a truce and hostage exchange in Gaza.

Qatar-based Haniyeh said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to “invent constant justifications for the continuation of aggression, expanding the circle of conflict, and sabotaging efforts made through various mediators and parties”.

Qatari, Egyptian and US mediators met a Hamas delegation in Cairo on Saturday in the latest bid to halt the devastating almost seven-month-old war that has triggered worldwide protests.

A senior Hamas source close to the negotiations told AFP there would be “a new round” of talks on Sunday.

Negotiators seeking to halt the devastating war have proposed an initial 40-day pause in the fighting and an exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners.

Haniyeh said Hamas had approached the talks with “seriousness and positivity” but questioned “the meaning of an agreement if a ceasefire is not its first result”.

Earlier Netanyahu had rejected Hamas’s demand to end the war.

Israel was “not ready to accept a situation in which the Hamas battalions come out of their bunkers, take control of Gaza again, rebuild their military infrastructure, and return to threaten the citizens of Israel”, he said.

Egypt, Qatar and the United States have been trying to mediate an agreement between Israel and Hamas for months.

The Qatar-based leader of Hamas’s political office said the United States had “provided cover for this occupation, should be the one to stop it instead of supplying it with weapons of destruction and extermination”.

Haniyeh added that Hamas “remains eager to reach a comprehensive and interconnected agreement in stages, ending the aggression, ensuring withdrawal, and achieving a serious prisoner exchange deal”.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Tulkarem:

The Israeli army said troops killed five Palestinian “terrorists” barricaded in a building during a 12-hour siege in the occupied West Bank on Saturday.

An AFP photographer saw a heavy military deployment in the village of Deir al-Ghusun, near the northern town of Tulkarem.

Troops deployed a bulldozer to flatten a building and carried at least one body out of the rubble, the photographer reported.

Israeli forces “engaged in an extensive 12-hour counterterrorism operation in the Tulkarem area,” the army and the Shin Bet security service said in a joint statement.

They said troops had come under fire after entering the village to “neutralise a terrorist cell” and had “retaliated” with “live ammunition, shoulder-fired missiles and other weaponry”.

An army drone registered two hits on the building before sappers moved in to “dismantle” it.

“The confrontation ended with the elimination of five terrorists, and the seizure of military gear and weapon components,” the joint statement said.

A member of a counterterrorism unit of Israel’s border police was wounded in the operation, it added.

The already restive West Bank has seen a surge in violence since the Israel-Hamas war erupted on October 7. At least 496 Palestinians have been killed in the territory by Israeli troops or settlers, according to an AFP tally.

The Gaza war started with an unprecedented Hamas attack on southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive against Hamas has killed at least 34,654 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them women and children, according to the Hamas-ruled territory’s health ministry.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

A view of New Rafah in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, where local residents displaced during security operations in recent years will be housed, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in the nearby Gaza Strip, in Rafah, Egypt
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Hamas said on May 2 that it was sending a delegation to Egypt for further ceasefire talks, in a new sign of progress in attempts by international mediators to hammer out an agreement between Israel and the militant group to end the war in Gaza.

After months of stop-and-start negotiations, the ceasefire efforts appear to have reached a critical stage, with Egyptian and American mediators reporting signs of compromise in recent days. But chances for the deal remain entangled with the key question of whether Israel will accept an end to the war without reaching its stated goal of destroying Hamas.

The stakes in the ceasefire negotiations were made clear in a new U.N. report that said if the Israel-Hamas war stops today, it will still take until 2040 to rebuild all the homes that have been destroyed by nearly seven months of Israeli bombardment and ground offensives in Gaza. It warned that the impact of the damage to the economy will set back development for generations and will only get worse with every month fighting continues.

The proposal that U.S. and Egyptian mediators have put to Hamas — apparently with Israel’s acceptance — sets out a three-stage process that would bring an immediate six-week cease-fire and partial release of Israeli hostages, but also negotiations over a “permanent calm” that includes some sort of Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, according to an Egyptian official. Hamas is seeking guarantees for a full Israeli withdrawal and complete end to the war.

Hamas officials have sent mixed signals about the proposal in recent days. But on May 2, its supreme leader, Ismail Haniyeh, said in a statement that he had spoken to Egypt’s intelligence chief and “stressed the positive spirit of the movement in studying the cease-fire proposal.”

The statement said that Hamas negotiators would travel to Cairo “to complete the ongoing discussions with the aim of working forward for an agreement.” Mr. Haniyeh said he had also spoken to the prime minister of Qatar, another key mediator in the process.

The brokers are hopeful that the deal will bring an end to a conflict that has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, caused widespread destruction and plunged the territory into a humanitarian crisis. They also hope a deal will avert an Israeli attack on Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have sought shelter after fleeing battle zones elsewhere in the territory.

If Israel does agree to end the war in return for a full hostage release, it would be a major turnaround. Since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack stunned Israel, its leaders have vowed not to stop their bombardment and ground offensives until the militant group is destroyed. They also say Israel must keep a military presence in Gaza and security control after the war to ensure Hamas doesn’t rebuild.

Publicly at least, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to insist that is the only acceptable endgame.

He has vowed that even if a cease-fire is reached, Israel will eventually attack Rafah, which he says is Hamas’ last stronghold in Gaza. He repeated his determination to do so in talks on May 1 with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was in Israel on a regional tour to push the deal through.

The agreement’s immediate fate hinges on whether Hamas will accept uncertainty over the final phases to bring the initial six-week pause in fighting — and at least postpone what it is feared would be a devastating assault on Rafah.

Egypt has been privately assuring Hamas that the deal will mean a total end to the war. But the Egyptian official said Hamas says the text’s language is too vague and wants it to specify a complete Israeli pullout from all of Gaza. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to talk about the internal deliberations.

On May 1 evening, however, the news looked less positive as Osama Hamdan, a top Hamas official, expressed skepticism, saying the group’s initial position was “negative.” Speaking to Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV, he said that talks were still ongoing but would stop if Israel invades Rafah.

Mr. Blinken hiked up pressure on Hamas to accept, saying Israel had made “very important” compromises.

“There’s no time for further haggling. The deal is there,” Mr. Blinken said on May 1 before leaving for the U.S.

An Israeli airstrike, meanwhile, killed at least five people, including a child, in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. The bodies were seen and counted by Associated Press journalists at a hospital.

The war broke out on Oct. 7. when Hamas militants broke into southern Israel and killed over 1,200 people, mostly Israelis, taking around 250 others hostage, some released during a cease-fire on November.

The Israel-Hamas war was sparked by the Oct. 7 raid into southern Israel in which militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250 hostages. Hamas is believed to still hold around 100 hostages and the remains of more than 30 others.

Since then, Israel’s campaign in Gaza has wreaked vast destruction and brought a humanitarian disaster, with several hundred thousand Palestinians in northern Gaza facing imminent famine, according to the U.N. More than 80% of the population has been driven from their homes.

The “productive basis of the economy has been destroyed” and poverty is rising sharply among Palestinians, according to the report released on May 2 by the United Nations Development Program and the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia.

It said that in 2024, the entire Palestinian economy — including both Gaza and the West Bank — has so far contracted 25.8%. If the war continues, the loss will reach a “staggering” 29% by July, it said. The West Bank economy has been hit by Israel’s decision to cancel the work permits for tens of thousands of laborers who depended on jobs inside Israel.

“These new figures warn that the suffering in Gaza will not end when the war does,” UNDP administrator Achim Steiner said. He warned of a “serious development crisis that jeopardizes the future of generations to come.”