Israel could accept a truce agreement with Hamas that provides for the release of at least 33 hostages, including women, the elderly and the wounded. Or enter Rafah with the army. At this crossroads, the talks between Israel and the Egyptian delegation for an agreement on the hostages and a ceasefire in Gaza concluded on Friday. Speaking to the media, Israeli sources described the talks as “very good”, which had led to “progress”.
A senior Israeli official told Israeli TV channel Channel 12 (Keshet 12) that “this is the last opportunity” to reach an agreement “before the army enters Rafah.” Israel therefore made it clear to the Egyptians that it will not allow Hamas to waste time in preventing the military operation in the city on the southern border of the Strip.
“We will not allow Hamas to talk about 20 hostages as it did” previously, the source stressed to Channel 12. The official then added that the Jewish state is willing to make important concessions such as the return of the Palestinians to northern Gaza and the withdrawal of the army from the Netzarim Corridor which cuts the Strip in two.
The number of 33 hostages involved in the negotiation does not seem accidental. According to Israeli intelligence, this would be the figure of those kidnapped still alive out of the 133 who were still in the hands of Hamas since last October 7, the day of the attack.
In recent weeks, US officials had also told the US newspaper Wall Street Journal that they feared that many of the Israeli hostages in Gaza were dead.
The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, spokesperson for the American opposition to the blitz in Rafah without a prior, massive and necessary displacement of civilians, is also about to return to Israel once again to discuss the entire dossier. The head of the State Department will not arrive until Tuesday, while over the weekend the war in Gaza will be on the agenda of Arab, American and European diplomats and UN officials gathered at the World Economic Forum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile, the conflict intensifies on the northern border of Israel: the armed forces of the Jewish State have announced that they have killed a leading member of the Jamaa Islamyia, Mosab Khalaf, in a targeted raid with drones while he was driving his car on a highway near in Meidoun, in the Western Beqaa district, one of Hezbollah’s strongholds in southern Lebanon
