Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Sunday that it was not clear yet whether a hostage deal would materialise from ongoing talks, declining to discuss specifics, but said Hamas needed to “come down to a reasonable situation”.
“They’re in another planet. But if they come down to a reasonable situation, then yes we’ll have a hostage deal. I hope so,” he told CBS’ Face the Nation.
Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said Netanyahu’s comments cast doubt over Israel’s willingness to secure a deal.
“Netanyahu’s comments show he is not concerned about reaching an agreement,” Abu Zuhri told Reuters, accusing the Israeli leader of wanting “to pursue negotiation under bombardment and the bloodshed (of Palestinians)”.
Negotiators from Israel, Qatar, Egypt and the US have agreed the “basic contours” of an arrangement during weekend talks in Paris, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN, but the final details still have to be hammered out.
Israeli media reported that the prospective deal would allow for the release of 30 or 40 hostages in exchange for up to 300 Palestinian prisoners, and a ceasefire lasting up to six weeks.
Both sides would continue negotiations during the pause for further releases and a permanent ceasefire, an Egyptian official told the Associated Press.
The break in fighting would cover the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which starts around 10 March this year, and the deal would include an increase in desperately needed aid.
After initial talks in Paris, follow-up discussions will be held in Doha and Cairo, Egyptian security sources told Reuters.
The UN rights chief has decried disinformation and other attacks that aim to “undermine the legitimacy” and work of the UN and other institutions, describing them as “profoundly destructive”.
Speaking at the opening of the UN human rights council’s main annual session, Volker Turk criticised widespread “disinformation that targets UN humanitarian organisations, UN peacekeepers and my office”.
Turk said:
The UN has become a lightning rod for manipulative propaganda and a scapegoat for policy failures.
This is profoundly destructive of the common good, and it callously betrays the many people whose lives rely on it.
During his opening speech, the UN high commissioner for human rights stressed that the UN was “uniquely equipped to enable states to discuss and resolve pressing global issues”.
“This convening power is particularly vital now, when the magnitude of conflict, planetary peril and digital transformation requires urgent solutions,” he said, in quotes carried by AFP.
Turk pointed to “the pain and the slaughter of so many people in the Middle East, Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, Haiti and so many other places around the world”, which he described as “unbearable”.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah said on Monday it had downed an Israeli Hermes 450 drone over Lebanese territory with a surface-to-air missile, the second time it has announced bringing down this type of unmanned aerial vehicle.
Reuters reports:
The Hermes 450 is an Israeli multi-payload drone made by Elbit Systems, an Israel-based weapons manufacturer.
The Israeli military said on Monday that two missile launches had targeted an Israeli Air Force UAV operating over Lebanon.
The first, it said, was intercepted by Israel’s ‘David’s Sling’ Aerial defence system but the drone “fell inside Lebanese territory” after a second launch.
Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, has said it has downed or seized control of several Israeli drones in the months since it began exchanging fire with the Israeli military across Lebanon’s southern border.
At least 29,782 Palestinians have been killed and 70,043 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Monday.
In the past 24 hours, 90 Palestinians were killed and 164 injured in Israeli strikes, the ministry added.
Most of the casualties have been women and children, the ministry has said, and thousands more bodies are likely to remain uncounted under rubble across Gaza.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has criticised the UN security council for failing to adequately respond to Israel’s war in Gaza and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which he said had “perhaps fatally” undermined its authority.
He said at the opening of the UN human rights council in Geneva:
The council’s lack of unity on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and on Israel’s military operations in Gaza following the horrific terror attacks by Hamas on 7 October, has severely - perhaps fatally - undermined its authority.
The council needs serious reform to its composition and working methods.
The US last week again vetoed a draft UN security council resolution blocking a demand for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Israel’s war in Gaza. It was the third US veto of a draft resolution since 7 October.
Washington was widely lambasted for using its veto again at a time when nearly 30,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2 million people are under threat of famine.
The US has drafted an alternative resolution, which calls for a temporary ceasefire “as soon as practicable”, and calls on Israel not to proceed with a planned offensive on Rafah, the southernmost Gazan city where more than a million Palestinians have sought refuge.
Explaining the veto, the US envoy, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said that Joe Biden was in the midst of negotiations with Israel, Egypt and Qatar aimed at clinching a comprehensive hostage deal.
Guterres, who described Rafah as the core of the humanitarian aid operation in the Palestinian enclave, said a full-scale Israeli assault there would have devastating consequences.
“An all-out Israeli offensive on the city would not only be terrifying for more than a million Palestinian civilians sheltering there; it would put the final nail in the coffin of our aid programmes,” he said.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) prime minister, Mohammad Shtayyeh, has told a press conference that he submitted his resignation to President Mahmoud Abbas.
Shtayyeh, an academic economist who took office in 2019, reportedly submitted his resignation at the opening of a government meeting in Ramallah in the West Bank on Monday.
He said he was resigning to allow for the formation of a broad consensus among Palestinians about political arrangements following Israel’s war in Gaza.
Shtayyeh said the next stage would “require new governmental and political arrangements that take into account the emerging reality in the Gaza Strip, the national unity talks, and the urgent need for an inter-Palestinian consensus”.
In addition, it would require “the extension of the Authority’s authority over the entire land, Palestine”.
The move comes amid growing US pressure on Abbas to shake up the PA as international efforts have intensified to stop the war and begin work on a political structure to govern the enclave afterwards.
Hamas has run Gaza since 2007, when it expelled the PA following its win in elections the previous year, and unlike the PA does not believe in a two-state solution since this would require the recognition of Israel.
The PA in the West Bank does recognise Israel, but is widely seen as in need of reform and democratic accountability.
Israel’s war in Gaza has displaced the vast majority of the population from their homes and left civilians facing acute shortages of food, water and medicine.
Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are hungry, some desperately so, and aid agencies describe “pockets of famine” in the territory.
“We have no food or drink for ourselves or our children,” Omar al-Kahlout told AFP, as he waited near Gaza City for aid trucks to arrive.
“We are trapped in the north and there is no aid reaching us - the situation is extremely difficult.”
Three UN agencies - the WFP, the World Health Organization and children’s agency UNICEF - said last week that food and safe water were “incredibly scarce and diseases are rife...resulting in a surge of acute malnutrition” in Gaza.
The food crisis is particularly serious in the north, where in January one in six children under the age of two were reported as acutely malnourished, and where “the situation is likely to be even graver today”, the agencies said.
Aid officials have said that between 1 January and 15 February, 77 missions were planned to deliver aid to the north of the Gaza Strip. Of these, the UN said “12 were facilitated by the Israeli authorities, three were partially facilitated, 14 were impeded, 39 were denied access and nine were postponed”.
Israel, which checks all trucks entering Gaza from both crossings, blames the UN for the fall-off in deliveries, and says it is prepared to speed up the clearance of aid.
The UN says it is becoming more difficult to distribute aid inside Gaza because of the collapse of security inside the strip.
Al Jazeera has reported from Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza’s second largest hospital and crucial to the territory’s crippled health services:
Despite the Israeli military’s statement that it has completed operations inside Nasser hospital, snipers are still in the vicinity of the hospital and, tragically, are still shooting at anything moving near it.
There is also still an ongoing blockade of relief convoys, stopping fuel or water supplies from reaching those inside the hospital.
The Israeli military previously conducted mass arrests of about 200 people in or around the hospital, including medical staff and patients. Their fate is unknown. Nobody knows where they are or what’s going to happen to them.
A man identified as a US air force member was left in a critical condition after setting himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC, authorities said.
The Metropolitan police department said it responded to an incident on International Drive around 1pm on Sunday to assist the Secret Service. Fire and emergency services said the man had serious burns.
“An adult male was transported by DC fire and EMS [emergency medical services] to a local hospital where they remain in critical condition,” the police department said on Twitter/X.
A video posted online showed a man in a uniform shouting “Free Palestine” as he burned while identifying himself as an active air force member.
The man was reportedly on fire for about a minute before law enforcement put it out.
You can read the full story here:
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Sunday that it was not clear yet whether a hostage deal would materialise from ongoing talks, declining to discuss specifics, but said Hamas needed to “come down to a reasonable situation”.
“They’re in another planet. But if they come down to a reasonable situation, then yes we’ll have a hostage deal. I hope so,” he told CBS’ Face the Nation.
Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said Netanyahu’s comments cast doubt over Israel’s willingness to secure a deal.
“Netanyahu’s comments show he is not concerned about reaching an agreement,” Abu Zuhri told Reuters, accusing the Israeli leader of wanting “to pursue negotiation under bombardment and the bloodshed (of Palestinians)”.
Negotiators from Israel, Qatar, Egypt and the US have agreed the “basic contours” of an arrangement during weekend talks in Paris, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN, but the final details still have to be hammered out.
Israeli media reported that the prospective deal would allow for the release of 30 or 40 hostages in exchange for up to 300 Palestinian prisoners, and a ceasefire lasting up to six weeks.
Both sides would continue negotiations during the pause for further releases and a permanent ceasefire, an Egyptian official told the Associated Press.
The break in fighting would cover the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which starts around 10 March this year, and the deal would include an increase in desperately needed aid.
After initial talks in Paris, follow-up discussions will be held in Doha and Cairo, Egyptian security sources told Reuters.
We are restarting our live coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza and the wider Middle East crisis.
Senior Hamas official, Sami Abu Zuhri, has said comments by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu cast doubt over Israel’s willingness to secure a ceasefire deal.
On Sunday, Netanyahu spoke to US media and said a deal would only delay Israel’s planned assault on Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, where an estimated 1.5 million displaced Palestinians have sought shelter.
More on that in a moment, first here’s a summary of the day’s other main events.
US Central Command (Centcom) said that the Houthis fired an anti-ship ballistic missile that likely targeted a US-flagged owned and operated tanker in the Gulf of Aden on Saturday evening. It said the missile missed and landed in the water, therefore not causing any damage or injuries. “Earlier in the evening, at about 9pm (Sanaa time), US Centcom forces shot down two one-way attack unmanned aerial vehicles over the southern Red Sea in self-defence. A third UAV crashed from an assessed in-flight failure,” it added in a post on X.
Israeli forces killed more than 30 Palestinian gunmen in Gaza City’s Zeitoun district, more than 10 in the central Gaza Strip and others in the southern city of Khan Younis, the military said on Monday in a summary of the last 24 hours’ operations.
The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, said that the “looming famine” and the blockage of food aid into parts of Gaza was a “man made disaster”. He said the last time the UNRWA was able to deliver food aid to northern Gaza was on 23 January. “Our calls to send food aid have been denied & have fallen on deaf ears. This is a man made disaster. The world committed to never let famine happen again. Famine can still be avoided, through genuine political will to grant access & protection to meaningful assistance,” Lazzarini wrote on X.
Benjamin Netanyahu convened the war cabinet late on Saturday for a briefing with negotiators who had been at ceasefire talks in Paris. This week, it will meet again to discuss preparations for an assault on Rafah. A deal might delay that operation, but would not prevent it, Netanyahu said in an interview with CBS.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN that negotiators from the US, Egypt, Qatar and Israel came to an understanding on the basic contours of a hostage deal during talks in Paris. The deal is still under negotiation, said Sullivan, who added there will have to be indirect discussions by Qatar and Egypt with Hamas.
The death toll in Gaza is likely to pass the grim milestone of 30,000 this week. Israeli strikes have killed 29,692 Palestinians in Gaza since October, two-thirds of them women and children, and injured 69,879, according to the Gaza health ministry.
Iran condemned the latest strikes by the US and the UK on Yemen, saying they were seeking to “escalate tensions and crises” in the region.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees has been forced to “stretch every dollar” and juggle its finances in order to continue work in Gaza after 18 donor countries suspended funding over allegations of links to Hamas. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is facing a shortfall of $450m from a budget of $880m.
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2024-02-26 09:49:56Z
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