Israel mourns dead hostages as major powers urge Gaza truce

Israel on Tuesday mourned four hostages confirmed dead inside war-torn Gaza as Western and Middle East powers threw their support behind a truce deal outlined by US President Joe Biden.

Washington said it would seek a UN Security Council resolution to back the three-phase plan which was welcomed by the Group of Seven developed countries and by leading regional governments.

Under the proposal which Biden presented last Friday as Israel’s plan, fighting would stop for an initial six weeks and hostages would be swapped for Palestinian prisoners, ahead of the start of the rebuilding of Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has however stressed since that fighting would only have to cease temporarily to free the captives, and that one of Israel’s key war aims remains the destruction of Hamas.

The White House insisted Monday that the plan was Israel’s own and not drafted by Washington to put pressure on its key ally.

“It is an Israeli proposal,” said National Security Council spokesman John Kirby. “It’s one that we, and they, worked on through some intense diplomacy.”

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Hamas, the Islamist group that has long ruled the Palestinian territory of 2.4 million people, said Friday it viewed Biden’s outline “positively” but has since made no official comment.

The group has previously insisted on a permanent ceasefire and the withdrawal of all Israeli troops from Gaza in months of intermittent talks involving US, Qatari and Egyptian mediators.

For now, the Gaza war raged on unabated, with the Israeli military reporting more air and artillery strikes and ground combat against Hamas, and Palestinians bemoaning more civilian deaths.

Overnight bombardment hit targets in Gaza City and the southern Rafah area, said AFP reporters and witnesses.

Four bodies were retrieved from a bombed house in the Bureij camp in central Gaza, and three more from the rubble of a destroyed building in Gaza City, Gaza’s civil defence agency said.

The Israeli military had on Monday confirmed another four deaths among the more than 250 captives taken by Hamas during their unprecedented October 7 attack on southern Israel.

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It named them as Nadav Popplewell, 51, and three men in their 80s, Chaim Perry, Yoram Metzger and Amiram Cooper, and said their bodies were still in the hands of Hamas.

Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said it was believed the four “were killed while together in the area of Khan Yunis during our operation there against Hamas”.

The Hostages Families Forum group, which has joined a series of mass protests demanding a truce deal, said the men “should have returned alive to their country and their families”.

Protesters in Tel Aviv on Saturday waved US flags and declared that — as the Gaza war is soon to enter its ninth month — “Biden is our only hope”.

‘No alternative’

Washington unveiled a draft UN Security Council resolution on Monday that “welcomes the new deal… and calls upon Hamas to accept it fully and implement its terms without delay and without condition”.

US ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said “numerous leaders and governments, including in the region, have endorsed this plan”.

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Biden told Qatar’s emir that “Hamas is now the only obstacle to a complete ceasefire” and “confirmed Israel’s readiness to move forward” with the terms he set out last week.

The truce plan also drew the full endorsement of the other leaders of the G7 which also includes Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.

They said it would also bring “a significant and sustained increase in humanitarian assistance for distribution throughout Gaza, and an enduring end to the crisis, with Israel’s security interests and Gazan civilian safety assured”.

“We call on Hamas to accept this deal, that Israel is ready to move forward with, and we urge countries with influence over Hamas to help ensure that it does so,” the G7 statement added.

The effort was also supported by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Jordan and Egypt, said a joint statement by their foreign ministers.

UN Middle East envoy Tor Wennesland also urged both sides to back the deal, writing on X that “there is no alternative -– and any delay, every day simply costs more lives”.

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Blazing wildfires

The war was sparked by Hamas’s October 7 attack, which resulted in the deaths of 1,194 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

Militants also took 251 hostages, 120 of whom remain in Gaza, including 41 the army says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory bombardment and ground offensive have killed at least 36,550 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.

According to the Israeli military, 294 soldiers have been killed in the Gaza military campaign since the start of the ground offensive on October 27.

Some 55 percent of Gaza’s structures have been destroyed, damaged or “possibly damaged” since the war erupted, according to the United Nations satellite analysis agency.

Amid the Gaza war, tensions have also spiralled elsewhere in the region between Israel and its allies on the one hand, and Iran-backed armed groups in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen on the other.

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The Israeli army and Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement have traded near daily cross-border fire, causing deaths and forcing mass evacuations on both sides.

As temperatures have soared, rocket strikes from Lebanon have ignited fires that have swept across scrub and farm land and forced the partial evacuation of the northeastern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona.

– By: © Agence France-Presse