Diplomatic correspondent
Where next? The first six -week phase of Gaza is the interruption of fire ends on Saturday.
42 days of January 19, they saw their true proportion of uncertainty, hope, sadness and anger, but everything that should happen at that time.
Israeli hostages – living and dead – they were released. Palestinian prisoners were released.
But negotiations on the second phase, including the release of all the remaining living hostages and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, barely started.
The conversations opened in Cairo on Friday, but the Delegation of Israel returned home in the evening.
Reports suggest that the negotiations will continue “remote” and that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should have held talks on late nights with delegation, high ministers and intelligence bosses.
In order for such a meeting to be held late on Saturday, he was very unusual. But since mid -morning, no details have been published.
It seems that Israel wants to extend the current phase for another six weeks, to bring more hostages back and release more Palestinian prisoners, but without withdrawing his troops.
The government is unwavering here that Hamas, a group responsible for the Massacre of October 7, 2023 and taking 251 hostages, must lay their hands and give up any form of authority in the gauze belt.
Israel also says that he is not yet ready to leave the corridor from Philadelphi along the border with Egypt Gaza – a process that was supposed to start on Saturday.
In a statement addressed to journalists on Friday, an unnamed Israeli official said: “We will not allow Hamas killers to wander our borders again with trucks and guns, and we will not allow them to indulge in smuggling.”
It is often believed that such anonymous quotes come directly from the Prime Minister’s Office.
Last summer, the efforts to secure a truce in Gaza broke into when Netanyahu insisted on maintaining Israeli troops stationed with the Philadelphia corridor.
On Friday night, Hamas said he would not agree to any extension of the first phase without the guarantees of American, cataroo and Egyptian mediators that the second phase would eventually happen.
Hamas seems to be determined to remain a force in Gaza, even if he could be willing to surrender to the daily management of other Palestinian actors, including the Palestinian administration based on the west coast.
Egypt worked on a plan for renovation for Gaza, as an alternative to Donald Trump’s proposal to take over the area and evacuate his entire civilian population.
But Western diplomats are not optimistic that the plan, which should be presented at the Arab League summit in Cairo next Tuesday, has a type of robust security and management arrangements that will be needed to meet Israeli demands.
This is a critical moment.
For all emotional unrest in the last few weeks, the Israelis expected the gradual release of hostages. He is believed to have 24 lives, still waiting to be freed, and there are 39 more that is assumed to be dead.
The Israelis desperately want them all backwards, without the types of propaganda representations that are appalled and angry with the whole country.
If the whole procedure is now stopped, public anger – on Hamas and their government – will become mounted. Further street protests are planned, including one on Saturday night at The Place in Tel Aviv that all Israelis now know as a hostage square.
“We require the return of all 59 remaining hostages up to the 50th day of the agreement,” the invitation from the headquarters of the hostages and the missing families writes.
“Now is our only window window – we will not get another.”
The Secretary General of the UN, António Guterres weighed, persuading the parties “not to spare the efforts to avoid the breakup of this agreement.”
The conviction is widespread that, sooner or later, the war will begin again.
It is a dark perspective, for hostages and for two million Palestinians in Gaza who are trying to reassemble their lives in current, fragile peace.
In a place where families are still digging bodies from the ruins, sometimes with bare hands, the thought of continuing the conflict that has already claimed that tens of thousands of lives are cold.
The areas of Gaza’s belt, which have escaped with the worst conflict so far, would probably suffer badly from returning to war, which would make even more difficult to maintain life in this devastated lane of the country.
