Negotiations aimed at brokering a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war appear to have stalled, days before an unofficial deadline of the beginning of Ramadan.
Two days of talks between Hamas and international mediators in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, have not yielded any significant breakthroughs, Palestinian officials said, after Israel declined to send a delegation to the latest round of negotiations.
“[Benjamin] Netanyahu doesn’t want to reach an agreement” and “the ball now is in the Americans’ court” to press the Israeli prime minister to come back to the table, Basem Naim, the head of Hamas’s political division in Gaza, told reporters in text messages.
Egypt’s Al-Qahera News, which is close to the country’s intelligence services, said the “negotiations are difficult but they are continuing”, citing an unnamed senior official.
The Hamas team, meeting with Egyptian, Qatari and US mediators, agreed on Tuesday to stay for at least one more day of talks.
Israeli authorities did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A US official had said on Saturday that Israel had “more or less accepted” the deal presented to an Israeli delegation in Qatar.
International mediators have over the last two days put pressure on Hamas to produce a list of hostages to be released as the first step in a phased ceasefire agreement with Israel, according to officials familiar with the discussions.
The US has also appeared to suggest that it was Hamas holding up progress rather than Israel, despite the fact that Israel did not send a delegation to the second day of talks in Cairo as hoped. “No excuses, we must get more aid into Gaza. Ceasefire is in the hands of Hamas right now,” Joe Biden told reporters on Tuesday.
The US president suggested that failure to agree a deal could lead to unrest spreading to other parts of Israel and Palestine.
“There’s got to be a ceasefire because if we get into circumstances where this continues to Ramadan, Israel and Jerusalem could be very, very dangerous,” Biden said.
Israel has demanded that Hamas present a list of 40 elderly, sick and female hostages who would be the first to be released as part of a truce that would initially last six weeks, beginning with the month of Ramadan, which is expected to start on Sunday.
Hamas has reiterated its position that all Israeli forces leave Gaza, large-scale humanitarian aid should be allowed in, and that Palestinians displaced from their homes in the north of the coastal territory be allowed to return.
Diplomatic sources in Washington said on Monday it was unclear what was stopping the Palestinian militant group from producing a list identifying the first batch of hostages, noting that similar uncertainties ended up collapsing the last successful truce in November after a week.
They suggested it could reflect communications issues between Hamas units inside and outside Gaza, that some hostages could be held by other groups, including the more hardline Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or that elements of Hamas were withholding the information as a way of obstructing a deal.
While Washington’s rhetoric on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has strengthened over the last few days, critics say Biden has opted not to use Washington’s leverage as Israel’s principal arms supplier and most important international ally to bring Israel to the negotiating table, or get the country to increase the flow of aid to Gaza’s desperate civilians.
The US air force on Saturday began airdrops of aid in a joint operation with Jordanian planes, delivering a total of 38,000 meals, after an announcement from Biden the previous day. On Tuesday, a second airdrop of 30,000 meals were delivered by transport planes, but the White House national security spokesperson, John Kirby, acknowledged that the only way to deliver assistance on the large scale required was by road or sea.
“We’re looking at both military and commercial options to move assistance by sea, there’s still an awful lot of work that’s being done to flesh it out,” Kirby said. Even if a means of delivering aid by ship was organised, he pointed out, it would still have to be unloaded and put on trucks for distribution inside Gaza.
Kirby said that the US continued to press for more deliveries by road, which have slowed to a trickle, as a result of looting by criminals and hungry crowds, as well as Israeli red tape and lack of coordination.
The World Food Programme reported on Tuesday that a 14-truck convoy that had approval from the Israeli authorities to go to northern Gaza had been held up for three hours and then turned back by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint at Wadi Gaza, halfway up the coastal strip. After it was turned back, the convoy was looted.
Israel’s offensive has killed more than 30,000 people, displaced 85% of the 2.3 million population from their homes, and left more than half of the Gaza Strip’s infrastructure in ruins, according to data from Gaza’s health ministry and the UN.
Child malnutrition is soaring in the besieged territory, with UN officials reporting on Monday that one in six children under the age of two in the northern half of Gaza are acutely malnourished.
The World Health Organization estimated on Tuesday that at least 8,000 patients needed to be evacuated for treatment, which would relieve pressure on the few remaining functioning hospitals.
The war, now five months old, was sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented surprise attack on communities across Israel in which, according to Israeli figures, about 1,200 people were killed and another 250 abducted.
About 100 hostages were exchanged for 240 Palestinian women and children held in Israel jails in November, but progress on a second deal has proved evasive.
While the start of Ramadan is not a hard deadline for a new ceasefire, the UN says a quarter of Gaza’s population are facing starvation, making a comprehensive ceasefire in which sufficient aid can reach all areas of the besieged territory crucial.
The longer the fighting lasts, the greater the risk of conflagration: Iran-backed groups in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen have already been drawn into the conflict. Ramadan is often accompanied by an uptick in violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even in quieter years.
Fighting continued in Gaza on Tuesday, with Hamas officials reporting dozens of Israeli airstrikes near the European hospital in Hamad, near the southern city of Khan Younis.
Bombing, shelling and ground fighting across Gaza had killed another 97 people in the past 24 hours, the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said, which does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths. Israel said its jets had struck 50 targets over the past day.