Israel proposed a temporary extension of ceased the fire to Gaza for the holidays of Ramadan and Easter, the prime minister’s office announced around midnight on Saturday while the initial phase of the truce was running away.
It seemed to be the effort of the Israeli government to clarify its opening position, since IT and HAMAS fight to go from the first phase of the ceased to cease in a second more complete phase as the agreement initially requested.
The Israeli announcement came after a cabinet meeting conducted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and participated in the Israeli Defense Minister, high defense officials and a negotiation team, according to the Prime Minister’s office.
But there is still a lot of uncertainty about what will happen after in Gaza. Previous Saturday, a Hamas spokesman told Al-Araby TV that the militant group had rejected the Israeli structure for an extension, reported Reuters.
Both Israel and Hamas have reasons to avoid another lap of fighting, at least for now. Hamas wants to give his strength the opportunity to recover, while Israel wants to bring home the remaining hostages. But the prospect of a global agreement seems remote.
And it is unlikely that Hamas accepts Israel’s offer without further negotiations, according to Aaron David Miller, An ex -analyst and negotiator of the Middle East of the State Department who is now a senior member at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The proposal, said, “allows the Israelis to recover the hostages without committing mutual commitments”.
According to Israel’s proposal, which attributed to the US correspondent to the Region, Steve Witkoff, half of the remaining hostages held in Gaza would be released to Israel on the first day of the agreement.
If, at the end of the temporary extension, a permanent respite had been reached, the rest of the hostages would have been returned.
Ramadan concludes at the end of March, while the Jewish Easter until April 20, which in this proposal would give Israel and Hamas about seven weeks to reach a global agreement.
“Hamas will not return all the hostages until he has ironclad guarantees that the Israelis will retire their strength and formally declare by the end of the war,” said Miller. “Nobody will give Hamas that guarantees,” he added.
Israel and Hamas accused each other that they had violated the agreed agreement, which was established in the last days of the Biden administration. Phase 1 of that agreement, which ended on March 1, allowed a six -week truce to negotiate the terms for the end of the war.
The terms of the agreement included the exchange of Israeli hostages for the Palestinian prisoners. In the last weekend, Israel delayed the release of hundreds of prisoners to protest for Hamas’s Israeli hostages in public glasses before delivering them.
The negotiations between Hamas and Israel who had to have been completed by this weekend have not yet been serious, although the officials of each part visited Cairo, the Egyptian capital, to discuss the next steps. Netanyahu said that Israel was ready to resume fighting if Hamas did not voluntarily disarmed.
Hamas avoided definitive requests for a resumption of hostilities, although the group refused to surrender.