Blinken to visit Middle East again

WASHINGTON  – AFP

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to the Middle East yet again in the coming days to press a new proposal involving the release of Israelis held in Gaza in return for a pause in attacks by Israel, the State Department said.

Blinken will visit Qatar and Egypt — the mediators of the proposal — as well as Israel, the occupied West Bank and Saudi Arabia starting Sunday, it added.

The trip — his fifth since Israel’s war on Gaza broke out — comes after Qatar’s foreign ministry spokesman Majed al-Ansari said there were hopes of “good news” about a fresh pause to the fighting “in the next couple of weeks”.

He said a truce proposal thrashed out in Paris earlier this week had “been approved by the Israeli side” and received a “positive” initial response from Hamas as well.

However, a source close to the group told AFP: “There is no agreement on the framework of the agreement yet — the factions have important observations — and the Qatari statement is rushed and not true.”

A Hamas source said it had been presented with a plan involving an initial six-week pause in fighting that would see more aid delivered into Gaza and exchanges of certain Israeli captives for Palestinians held in Israel.

The leaders of Hamas and its Gaza ally Islamic Jihad, Qatar-based Ismail Haniyeh and Ziyad al-Nakhalah, respectively, discussed the latest development and said any future ceasefire must lead to “a full withdrawal” of Israeli troops from Gaza, Haniyeh’s office said.