Blinken crisscrosses Middle East to broker Gaza ceasefire deal

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken crisscrossed the Middle East on Tuesday as part of Washington’s latest diplomatic push to secure a Gaza ceasefire and a hostage release deal as major areas of dispute remained between Israel and Hamas.

Blinken first met with Egypt’s President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi in the coastal town of Alamein. Egypt has been helping mediate the on-off Gaza talks for months along with the US and Qatar.

Sisi said after their meeting that it was time to put an end to the ten-month-old war in Gaza and warned of the conflict expanding in the region.

The top US diplomat, who is on his ninth visit to the region since war broke out between Israel and Hamas in October, later travelled to Doha and is expected to meet with Qatari Minister of State Mohammed bin Abdulaziz Al-Khulaifi.

A plan for Blinken to meet with the Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad al Thani has been scrapped, a senior US official said, as al-Thani is not feeling well.

On Monday, Blinken confirmed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had accepted a US “bridging proposal” aimed at narrowing the gaps between the two sides, after talks last week paused without a breakthrough, and urged Hamas to accept it too.

A senior Biden administration official told reporters travelling with Blinken that the US expects ceasefire talks to continue this week.

The Palestinian militant group has not explicitly rejected the proposal. But Hamas said it overturns what was previously agreed, without giving specifics, and accused Israel and its US ally of spinning out negotiations in bad faith.

At stake is the fate of tiny, crowded Gaza, where Israel’s military campaign has killed more than 40,000 people since October according to Palestinian health authorities, and of the remaining hostages being held there.

The war in Gaza began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas gunmen stormed into Israeli communities, killing around 1,200 people and abducting about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

On Tuesday, Israel’s military said it had recovered the bodies of six hostages from southern Gaza. According to Israeli authorities, 109 hostages now remain in the Palestinian territory, around a third of them believed to be dead.

In Gaza, Israeli forces battled Hamas-led militants in central and southern areas, and Palestinian health authorities said at least 39 people had been killed on Tuesday in Israeli strikes, including on a school housing displaced people.

Israel’s military said it had struck Hamas militants embedded in the school.

Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said it was still waiting for polio vaccines to arrive after the disease was discovered in the territory, where most people now live in tents or shelters without proper sanitation. It echoed a call by the UN last week for a ceasefire to allow the vaccination campaign.

Blinken has called the latest push for a deal “probably the best, possibly the last opportunity”, and said his meeting with Netanyahu was constructive. He said it was incumbent on Hamas to accept the bridging proposal.

Officials from the US, Hamas, Israel, Egypt or Qatar have not spelled out what is in the proposal or how it differs from previous versions.

Hamas rejected US comments that it was backing away from a deal, saying Egyptian and Qatari mediators knew it had dealt positively towards the negotiations and that it was Netanyahu who had obstructed an agreement with new demands.

It said it was still committed to terms it agreed with mediators in July based on a proposal made by the US in May.

Netanyahu denies obstructing a deal.

Months of on-off talks have circled the same issues, with Israel saying the war can only end with the destruction of Hamas as a military and political force and Hamas saying it will only accept a permanent, not temporary, ceasefire.

The US official said even if Hamas were to agree on the bridging proposal immediately, there would have to be additional conversations to iron out details on implementation of the deal.

“As these conversations will continue, part of the next step – if Hamas were to also accept this bridging proposal – is that discussions will continue on some of the more technical and implementing details,” the official said.

There are disagreements over Israel’s continued military presence in Gaza, particularly along the border with Egypt, the free movement of Palestinians inside the territory and the identity and number of Palestinian prisoners to be freed in a swap.

Egypt is particularly focused on a security mechanism for the Philadelphi Corridor, the narrow border strip between Egypt and Gaza that Israeli forces seized in May.

Both Hamas and Egypt oppose Israel keeping troops there, but Netanyahu has insisted they are needed to stop weapons being smuggled into Gaza. The senior US official disputed an Axios report that quoted Netanyahu as saying he may have convinced Blinken on the point.

Egyptian security sources said the US has proposed an international presence in the area, a suggestion the sources said could be acceptable to Cairo if limited to a maximum of six months.

“The ceasefire in Gaza must be the beginning of broader international recognition of the Palestinian state and the implementation of the two-state solution, as this is the basic guarantor of stability in the region,” Sisi said after meeting Blinken.