PALESTINIAN MILITANT GROUP Hamas has said its delegation will travel to Cairo on Saturday to resume talks on a ceasefire in the Gaza war with a “positive spirit”.
“The Hamas delegation will head to Cairo tomorrow, Saturday, to continue the talks,” the group said in a statement posted on its website.
“We emphasise the positive spirit with which the Hamas leadership dealt with the ceasefire proposal it recently received, and we are going to Cairo in the same spirit to reach an agreement.”
The group added that it is “determined” to achieve an agreement that involves “a complete cessation of the aggression, the withdrawal of the occupation forces, the return of the displaced, relief and reconstruction, and a serious exchange deal”.
A senior Hamas official said that a top leader in the group, Khalil al-Hayya, will lead the delegation.
Mediators the United States, Egypt, and Qatar have waited for a Hamas response to an Israeli proposal to halt the fighting for 40 days and exchange hostages for Palestinian prisoners.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the agency was “deeply concerned that a full-scale military operation in Rafah… could lead to a bloodbath”.
“The broken health system would not be able to cope with a surge in casualties and deaths that a Rafah incursion would cause,” an agency statement said.
Israeli air strikes killed several more people in Rafah overnight, Palestinian medics and the civil defence agency said.
One bereaved resident, Sanaa Zoorob, said her sister and six of her nieces and nephews were killed.
Two of the children “were found in pieces in their mother’s embrace”, Zoorob said, appealing for “a permanent ceasefire and a full withdrawal from Gaza”.
The war broke out after Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Israel’s devastating retaliatory campaign has killed at least 34,622 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Israel has weathered international backlash over the spiralling death toll.
Pro-Palestinian protests that have rocked US campuses for weeks were more muted today after a series of clashes with police, mass arrests and a stern White House directive to restore order.
But here in Ireland, as well as on campuses in Britain, France, Mexico, and Australia, are students are only getting started.
Trinity College Dublin’s students’ union has begun setting up tents outside the Book of Kells visitors’ experience, after they were fined €214,000 for blockading its entrance before.
With reporting by © AFP 2024
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