Lebanon Christian leader says ending political deadlock key to war truce

JERUSALEM: Israel is ready to negotiate a lasting deal with Hamas to end the Gaza war when a temporary halt to hostilities begins, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday.

But Netanyahu said the militants must first give up their weapons and their hold on the Palestinian territory, warning that failure to reach a deal on Israel’s terms would lead to further conflict.

His comments as Gaza’s civil defense agency said eight children — killed as they queued for nutritional supplements outside a health clinic — were among 66 people who died in Israeli strikes across the territory Thursday.

The UN children’s agency said one victim was a one-year-old boy who according to his mother had uttered his first words only hours earlier.

Efforts to secure a 60-day halt in the 21-month war have dominated Netanyahu’s talks with US President Donald Trump in Washington.

Indirect negotiations have been taking place between the two sides in Qatar, and the militants have agreed to free 10 of the 20 hostages still alive in captivity since the October 7, 2023 attack which sparked the war.

Sticking points include Hamas’s demand for the free flow of aid into Gaza and Israel’s military withdrawal from the territory. It also wants “real guarantees” on a lasting peace, the group said.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said “progress has been made” but admitted in an interview with Austrian newspaper Die Presse that ironing out “all complex issues” would likely take “a few more days.”

There was no agreement on the number of Palestinian prisoners to be released in exchange for hostages, he told the newspaper.

He said that “initially, eight hostages are to be released, followed by two more on the 50th day” of the 60-day ceasefire. “Additionally, 18 bodies of hostages are to be handed over,” he was quoted as saying.

Saar said a lasting ceasefire would be discussed but added: “There are still major differences, especially regarding the question of how Hamas will be prevented from controlling Gaza after the war.”

He said Israel was ready to grant Hamas leaders safe passage into exile.

‘Fundamental conditions’

Netanyahu, who is under domestic pressure to end the war as military casualties mount, said disarming and neutralizing Hamas were “fundamental conditions” for Israel.

“If this can be achieved through negotiations, great,” he said. “If it cannot be achieved through negotiations within 60 days, we will have to achieve it through other means, by using... the force of our heroic army.”

Senior Hamas official Bassem Naim told AFP that it would not accept “the perpetuation of the occupation of our land” or Palestinians being herded into “isolated enclaves” in the densely populated territory.

The group was particularly opposed to Israeli control over Rafah, on the border with Egypt, and the so-called Morag Corridor between the southern city and Khan Yunis, he added.

Israel announced this year that the army was seizing large areas of Gaza to be incorporated into buffer zones cleared of their inhabitants.

Naim said the group also wanted to end the delivery of aid by a US and Israel-backed group, a system which has seen scores of people killed while seeking food rations.

The Palestinian territory’s civil defense agency said eight children were among 17 people killed in an Israeli strike outside a medical clinic in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.

“The ground shook beneath our feet and everything around us turned into blood and deafening screams,” said Yousef Al-Aydi, who was in the queue for nutritional supplements when he heard a drone approaching then a blast.

Rabih Torbay, the head of US medical charity Project Hope which runs the facility, called it “a blatant violation of humanitarian law.”

Israel’s military said it had struck a Hamas militant in the city who had infiltrated Israel during the 2023 attack and that it “regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals.”

Overall, the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said at least 57,762 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed since the start of the conflict.

Hamas’s October 2023 attack led to the deaths of 1,219 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.

A total of 251 hostages were seized in the attack. Forty-nine are still held in Gaza, including 27 the Israeli military says are dead.

 

PORT SUDAN: Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces killed eight civilians in an attack on a bunker sheltering dozens in the besieged western city of El-Fasher, a doctor said Thursday.

Nearly all of Darfur, the vast western region of Sudan, remains under RSF control, with communications and media access cut off since the RSF’s war with the army began in April 2023.

The conflict has killed tens of thousands, triggered the world’s largest hunger and displacement crisis, and devastated the northeast African country.

“The RSF bombed a shelter where citizens had taken refuge using a drone, late on Tuesday night,” the doctor told AFP from El-Fasher Teaching Hospital, one of the city’s last functioning health facilities.

They spoke on condition of anonymity for their safety, as health workers have been repeatedly targeted, using a satellite Internet connection to circumvent the communications blackout.

North Darfur state’s capital, El-Fasher, is the only major city in Sudan’s vast Darfur region still outside RSF control, despite a siege that began in May last year.

Since losing control of the capital Khartoum to the army in March, the RSF has stepped up attacks on El-Fasher and its surrounding displacement camps — where famine has already been declared — in an attempt to consolidate its hold on Darfur.

The United Nations has repeatedly warned of the plight of the city’s trapped civilians, who shelter from shelling in makeshift bunkers dug in courtyards and in front of houses.

The bunker bombed on Tuesday had been “sheltering dozens of people,” an eyewitness told AFP.

The city’s resistance committee, one of hundreds of volunteer groups coordinating frontline aid across the country, said El-Fasher was rocked by RSF artillery throughout Wednesday.

El-Fasher’s estimated one million people survive with barely any access to food, water or health care, with critical infrastructure decimated by a lack of maintenance and fuel shortages.

The United Nations said this week that nearly 40 percent of children under five in El-Fasher were suffering from acute malnutrition, including 11 percent with severe acute malnutrition.

Aid sources say an official famine declaration is impossible given the lack of access to data, but mass starvation has all but gripped the city.

Since the war began, the UN estimates 780,000 people have been displaced from El-Fasher and its surrounding displacement camps, including half a million in April and May following a series of brutal RSF attacks.

Of the 10 million people currently internally displaced in Sudan — the world’s largest displacement crisis — nearly 20 percent are in North Darfur.