The United States said on Friday that progress had been made in the latest round of Gaza ceasefire talks after the presence of Israeli troops on the Egyptian border emerged as a key issue.
The White House said CIA chief William Burns was among U.S. officials taking part in the discussions in Cairo, joining the heads of Israel’s spy agency and security service.
US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said, “Progress has been made. Now both sides need to come together and work towards implementation.”
He said initial talks that began on Thursday were “constructive in nature,” and added that reports that diplomacy was “close to a breakdown” were inaccurate.
The intelligence chiefs of Egypt and Qatar were also attending, an Egyptian source close to the talks told AFP.
“These discussions are taking place in Cairo…in preparation for a detailed round of talks that will begin on Sunday,” the source said.
“Washington is discussing with mediators new proposals to bridge the gap between Israel and Hamas and implement the plan.”
US President Joe Biden on Friday held telephone talks with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Qatar Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani to discuss upcoming talks, according to the White House.
The Egyptian source said Sunday’s talks would be “an important step in preparing an agreement that will be announced when Washington is able to put pressure on (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu.”
Representatives of Hamas, whose unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7 sparked the war in Gaza, were not attending the Cairo talks.
Hosam Badran, an official in the Islamist movement, told AFP on Friday that Netanyahu’s insistence that his troops remain in a strip along the Gaza-Egypt border known as the Philadelphia Corridor showed “his refusal to reach a final agreement”.
Egypt, Qatar and the United States have for months been trying to reach a deal to end the more than 10-month-long war between Israel and Hamas.
The hopes expressed earlier during months of ceasefire talks have proven unfounded.
Fighting continued on Friday, with witnesses reporting fighting in northern, central and southern Gaza.
Gaza’s civil defense agency said on Saturday that an overnight attack on a house west of the southern town of Khan Younis killed 11 people – including four women and four children – and wounded several others.
‘Tired and scared’
Thousands of civilians are once again fleeing Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis, following Israeli evacuation orders ahead of military operations, the UN said.
The United Nations says the war has displaced nearly Gaza’s entire population, often multiple times, leaving them without shelter, clean water and other essentials as disease spreads.
“Civilians are exhausted and frightened, fleeing from one destroyed place to another, and there seems to be no end in sight,” Muhannad Hadi, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories, said late Thursday.
Hamas’ attacks on southern Israel on October 7 killed 1,199 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed 40,265 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, though the ministry does not give a breakdown of civilian and militant deaths. The U.N. human rights office says most of the dead were women and children.
Palestinian militants have taken 251 people hostage, 105 of whom remain in Gaza, 34 of whom the army says are dead.
This week the Israeli military recovered the remains of six hostages from a tunnel in the Khan Younis area.
Netanyahu faces regular protests by hostage supporters demanding he bring them back home.
Ella Ben Ami, whose father is a hostage, said after meeting Netanyahu on Friday that she returned with a “heavy and difficult feeling that this (ceasefire deal) is not going to happen soon,” according to a statement from the Hostage & Missing Families Forum campaign group.
‘now is the time’
Diplomatic efforts to broker a ceasefire in Gaza and avert a wider war were intensified after the killing of two senior Iran-backed militants last month, prompting Tehran and its allies to threaten retaliation for actions they blamed on Israel.
There has been almost daily cross-border firing between Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah movement and Israeli forces since the Gaza war began.
Lebanon said Israeli strikes killed eight people, including a child, in the south on Friday, while Hezbollah said the other seven dead were fighters.
Three Iran-backed fighters were killed in Israeli strikes on central Syria on Friday, a war monitor said.
“It is time to conclude a hostage-taking and a ceasefire agreement,” US Vice President Kamala Harris said as she accepted the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in Chicago.
The basis for the talks is the framework Biden outlined in late May, which he described as the Israeli proposal.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited the Middle East this week and said Netanyahu agreed with the US proposal to bridge differences and reach a ceasefire.
National Security Council spokesman Kirby said Washington believed Netanyahu had accepted the offer and called on Hamas to do the same.
Hamas official Badran reiterated on Friday that the group “accepts the Biden plan” as originally outlined, and said Washington should pressure Netanyahu.
He said Hamas “would accept nothing less than the withdrawal of occupation forces, including from Philadelphia.”
Netanyahu’s hard-right coalition relies on the support of opponents of the ceasefire, and his office has dismissed as “false” media reports that the prime minister had “agreed that Israel would withdraw” from the Philadelphia corridor.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
