Five hostage bodies are expected to be recovered in the Gaza Strip. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is travelling to Cairo for talks. All developments in the news blog.
8.49 am: According to media reports, Israel’s army has recovered the bodies of several hostages in the Gaza Strip. There are at least five men, according to the report, citing the hometowns of the people kidnapped on October 7.
8.37 am: The Hezbollah militia in Lebanon says it has fired several rocket salvos at Israeli military positions on the Golan Heights, which have been annexed by Israel. Fighters from the Iranian-backed militia targeted two positions with “intensive” rocket fire, Hezbollah said. The attacks were a response to the “attack by the Israeli enemy” on the Lebanese Bekaa Valley. According to sources close to Hezbollah, Israel attacked the militia’s weapons depots in this eastern region on Monday.
7.33 am: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is travelling to Cairo again for talks. Meetings with government representatives are planned there in light of the ongoing negotiations on a new agreement between Israel and the radical Islamist Hamas. The talks, which were interrupted on Friday in the Qatari capital Doha, are to be resumed in the Egyptian capital during the week. Blinken had previously met with President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel.
It is Blinken’s ninth visit to the region since the Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent war in the Gaza Strip ten months ago. The USA presented the conflicting parties Israel and Hamas with a new compromise proposal a few days ago. In a joint statement by the mediators USA, Egypt and Qatar, it was subsequently stated that the proposal bridges “remaining gaps”. Blinken said in Israel that the current negotiations were “perhaps the best, perhaps the last opportunity” for a ceasefire and the return of the hostages.
0.30 am: The radical Islamic Hamas has criticized the recent statements by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the ceasefire negotiations in the Gaza conflict. Blinken’s statement about the acceptance of an updated proposal by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu raises “many ambiguities,” senior Hamas representative Osama Hamdan told the Reuters news agency.
The proposal mentioned by Blinken corresponds “neither to what was presented to us nor to what we agreed.” His organization has already informed the mediators that it does not need new ceasefire negotiations. Instead, Hamas is demanding an agreement on an “implementation mechanism” for the agreements already reached. Blinken had previously called on Hamas to accept his government’s proposal for a transitional arrangement to a ceasefire, as Netanyahu had already done.
