Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that Israel will proceed with an offensive on the southern Gaza city of Rafah even if renewed efforts at internationally brokered talks with Hamas result in the release of hostages and a ceasefire.
Mediators led by Egypt have made fresh attempts to broker a truce in recent days after it became clearer that Israel is preparing for its long-threatened ground operation in Rafah. The city on the Egyptian border is the only part of the Palestinian territory that has not faced ground fighting, and more than half of the strip’s 2.3 million population has sought shelter there.
Speaking in Jerusalem on Tuesday, the Israeli prime minister said: “The idea that we will halt the war before achieving all of its goals is out of the question. We will enter Rafah and we will eliminate the Hamas battalions there – with or without a deal, in order to achieve total victory.”
This week’s talks in Cairo are widely viewed as the last opportunity to salvage a diplomatic solution to free Israeli hostages and a pause or end to the war. A Hamas delegation left the Egyptian capital on Monday, saying they would return again with a written response to Israel’s latest ceasefire proposal. On Tuesday, Israeli officials said they would wait for the Palestinian militant group’s response before sending a delegation.
Netanyahu’s latest comments, made during a meeting with members of two right wing groups representing hostage families and bereaved soldiers’ families, came hours before the arrival of the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, on a visit to advance the truce talks. It was not immediately clear whether they would impact Hamas’s response.
Speaking in Jordan before flying to Israel, Blinken said the “focus” is on improving the humanitarian situation in Gaza and reaching a ceasefire deal that brings Israeli hostages home. He said Israel has offered a “strong proposal” and called on Hamas to respond.
“No more delays. No more excuses. The time to act is now,” he said. “We want to see in the coming days this agreement coming together.”
About 1,200 Israelis were killed and another 250 taken hostage in Hamas’s 7 October attack that triggered the war. More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s ensuing retaliatory operation in Gaza, which has left desperate civilians without healthcare, food or water and reduced most of the coastal territory to ruins.
A ceasefire at the end of November saw 100 hostages freed in exchange for about 240 Palestinian women and children held in Israeli jails, but collapsed after a week. Israel estimates that 129 hostages remain in Gaza, including 34 who are believed to be dead. Multiple rounds of talks over the past five months have ended in failure.
Netanyahu’s ministers have publicly sparred on whether to go forward with a truce proposal: far right members of his coalition have threatened to quit the government if Israel is seen to “surrender” to Hamas’s demands, while centrists have said they will quit if a hostage deal isn’t struck.
Despite optimistic comments from Egyptian officials, the two sides still appear to remain far apart on the same issues that have plagued the other rounds of negotiations: Hamas’s demand that Israeli troops completely withdraw from Gaza and end the conflict, and the numbers and identities of Palestinian prisoners to be released.
“We can’t tell our people the occupation will stay or the fight will resume after Israel regains its prisoners,” a Palestinian official from a group allied with Hamas told Reuters. “Our people want this aggression to end.”
Last week Hamas broadcast several proof-of-life videos of hostages, a move widely interpreted as a good faith gesture.
Israel – under domestic pressure over the fate of the hostages and facing international criticism over the humanitarian crisis its war has caused in Gaza – has made major compromises in the latest proposal. The amendments are believed to include: an initial release of just 33 hostages; willingness to discuss allowing displaced Palestinians to return to north Gaza; and a second phase of a truce that would involve a “period of sustained calm”.
Israel has repeatedly said a ground operation in Rafah, where it believes Hamas’s leadership and four battalions of fighters are camped out, is necessary to achieve “total victory” over the group. Israeli news site Ynet reported on Tuesday that the Israeli military has approved battle plans and is ready to push into Rafah within 72 hours if no deal is finalised.
But the long-threatened plan to attack the border town has drawn intense opposition from Israel’s allies, including the US, which says the overcrowded conditions could lead to thousands of civilian casualties as well as further disrupting aid deliveries entering from Egypt.
A spokesperson for the US state department said on Tuesday that Washington has not seen a credible Israeli plan for a military operation in Rafah that would address its concerns.
On Tuesday, UN aid chief Martin Griffiths warned that the Israeli assault on Rafah was “on the immediate horizon”, adding that a ground operation there would “be nothing short of a tragedy beyond words.”
António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, said there has been “incremental progress” toward averting “an entirely preventable, human-made famine” in the northern half of Gaza, but much more is urgently needed.
He specifically called on Israel to follow through on a promise to open “two crossing points between Israel and northern Gaza, so that aid can be brought from Ashdod port and Jordan.”
Blinken on Tuesday saw off a first Jordanian truck convoy of aid heading to Gaza through Erez, a crossing point on the strip’s northern border that before the war was the only civilian route between the Palestinian territory and Israel.
Meanwhile, the UK said it was not ready to restore funding to the Palestinian relief agency Unrwa and revealed it did not believe that the international criminal court had jurisdiction to issue arrest warrants against Israeli leaders for potential war crimes.
The foreign secretary, David Cameron, said no UK decision on restoring funding will be made until the outcome of a UN internal investigation into Israeli allegations that 12 Unrwa staff took part in the Hamas assault on 7 October. No deadline has been set for the end of the investigation that started as soon as allegations of Unrwa employee involvement was made in January.
Fifteen countries suspended funding in the wake of the allegations, but most have since restored that funding after the receipt of Unrwa assurances that it will strengthen its commitment to neutrality in line with a report published last week by the former French foreign minister, Catherine Colonna.
Cameron said the UK delay reflected concerns that Unrwa “is properly policed, properly run, with proper oversight and that its staff appropriately vetted, and what happened on October the 7th with their participation couldn’t happen again”.
