Israel has conditionally agreed to extend a ceasefire that ended a month of fighting in Gaza beyond a Friday deadline, an Israeli official has said.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the official did not say for how much longer Israel had agreed to extend the truce, only that: “Israel has expressed its readiness to extend the truce under its current terms,” referring to the deal brokered by Egypt that took effect on Tuesday.
Hamas had no immediate comment.
The truce has been holding for a second day as Egyptian mediators pursued talks with Israeli and Palestinian representatives on an enduring end to a war that has devastated Gaza.
Egyptian intelligence officials met in Cairo with a high-level Israeli delegation last night, a day after conferring with Palestinians who included envoys from Hamas and the Islamic Jihad group, Egyptian officials said.
“The indirect talks between the Palestinians and Israelis are moving forward,” one Egyptian official said, making clear that the opposing sides were not meeting face to face. “It is still too early to talk about outcomes but we are optimistic.”
Egyptian and Palestinian sources said further discussions were expected to be held in Cairo today, with expectations of an initial response by Israel to Palestinian demands, which it has so far shown no sign of accepting.
Israel withdrew ground forces from the Gaza Strip yesterday morning and started a 72-hour Egyptian-brokered ceasefire with Hamas as a first step towards a long-term deal.
In Gaza, where some half-million people have been displaced by a month of bloodshed, some residents left UN shelters to trek back to neighbourhoods where whole blocks have been destroyed by Israeli shelling and the smell of decomposing bodies fills the air.
Streets in towns in southern Israel, which had been under daily rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, were filled again with playing children.
Palestinians want an end to the Israeli-Egyptian blockade on impoverished Gaza and the release of prisoners, including those Israel arrested in a June crackdown in the occupied West Bank after three Jewish seminary students were kidnapped and killed. Israel has resisted those demands.
"For Israel the most important issue is the issue of demilitarisation. We must prevent Hamas from rearming, we must demilitarise the Gaza Strip," Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Reuters television.
US Secretary of State John Kerry, in an interview on the BBC's HARDtalk programme, also spoke of a need for Hamas to decommission its rocket arsenal.
“What we want to do is support the Palestinians and their desire to improve their lives and to be able to open crossings and get food in and reconstruct and have greater freedom,” Mr Kerry said.
“But that has to come with a greater responsibility towards Israel, which means giving up rockets, moving into a different plane,” he said.
Mr Kerry said, however, all this would “finally come together” as part of wider Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts that he has spearheaded but which have been frozen since April over Israel’s opposition to a unity deal between Hamas and Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestine Liberation Organization
Gaza officials say the current conflict has killed 1,867 Palestinians, most of them civilians. Israel says 64 of its soldiers and three civilians have been killed since fighting began on July 8th, after a surge in Palestinian rocket launches.
Reuters