The news portal Axios also reported, citing two informed sources, that Biden is considering submitting a final proposal to Israel and Hamas for a hostage release and a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip later this week. White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told the families of the US hostages held in the Gaza Strip this on Sunday.
Recent polls by the Jerusalem-based research center Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) have shown that 82 percent of Israelis support some form of agreement on the release of the hostages in the Gaza Strip, reported the Wall Street Journal. However, supporters remain deeply divided over the terms of an agreement. “There are people who say we must get the hostages back; others say we must continue the war to secure the south,” the US newspaper quoted Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the US, as saying. “It’s been the same since the first day of the war, nothing has changed,” he told the newspaper.
The main point of contention in the negotiations is currently the question of how long Israeli troops can remain stationed in the Philadelphia Corridor in southern Gaza on the border with Egypt. Israel’s security cabinet recently decided to maintain control of the corridor. In a statement by the relatives of the abducted people, Netanyahu and his coalition partners had decided to “torpedo the ceasefire agreement for the corridor, thereby knowingly condemning the hostages to death.”
Defense Minister Joav Galant demanded that the security cabinet’s decision be reversed. “It is too late for the hostages who were murdered in cold blood,” Galant wrote on Platform X. “We must bring the hostages who are still in Hamas captivity home.” According to consistent media reports, Galant had a heated argument with Netanyahu during the cabinet meeting.
Meanwhile, a vaccination campaign against the polio virus has been launched in the center of the sealed-off Palestinian territory. After the first case of polio in 25 years was recently reported in the disputed coastal strip, around 640,000 children are to be immunized against the highly contagious virus, according to the WHO. Two doses of the vaccine are usually administered four weeks apart.
During the vaccination campaign that began on Sunday, which will last a good week and is to be expanded to other parts of Gaza, Israel’s army said it wanted to observe temporary and localized breaks in fighting. According to his office, Netanyahu stressed that the pauses in fighting were not a ceasefire in the classic sense.
The Gaza war was triggered by the worst massacre in Israel’s history, with more than 1,200 deaths, which terrorists from Hamas and other extremist groups carried out in the Israeli border region on October 7 last year. Since then, the number of Palestinians killed in the war in Gaza has risen to more than 40,700, according to the health authority in the coastal region, which is controlled by Hamas. The number does not distinguish between fighters and civilians and is difficult to verify.
