{"id":964663,"date":"2024-07-07T16:19:51","date_gmt":"2024-07-07T16:19:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/dm-simulator-v2\/?p=964663"},"modified":"2024-07-07T16:19:51","modified_gmt":"2024-07-07T16:19:51","slug":"hamas-says-waiting-for-israeli-response-on-ceasefire-proposal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elections.sabc.co.za\/elections2024\/hamas-says-waiting-for-israeli-response-on-ceasefire-proposal\/","title":{"rendered":"Hamas says waiting for Israeli response on ceasefire proposal"},"content":{"rendered":"
Hamas is waiting for a response from Israel on its ceasefire proposal, two officials from the Palestinian group said on Sunday, five days after it accepted a key part of a US plan aimed at ending the nine-month-old war\u00a0in Gaza.<\/div>\n
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“We have left our response with the mediators and are waiting to hear the occupation’s response,” one of the two Hamas officials told Reuters, asking not to be identified.<\/div>\n
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to hold consultations on Sunday on the next steps in negotiating the three-phase plan<\/a> that was presented in May by US President Joe Biden and is being mediated by Qatar and Egypt.<\/div>\n
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It aims to end the war and free around 120 Israeli hostages being held by Hamas.<\/div>\n
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Another Palestinian official, with knowledge of the ceasefire deliberations, said Israel was in talks with the Qataris.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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“They have discussed with them Hamas’ response and they promised to give them Israel’s response within days,” the official, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters on Sunday.<\/div>\n
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Netanyahu has said that negotiations would\u00a0continue this week\u00a0but has not given any detailed timeline.<\/div>\n
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Hamas has dropped a key demand that Israel first commit to a permanent ceasefire before it would sign an agreement. Instead, it said it would allow negotiations to achieve that throughout the six-week first phase, a Hamas source told Reuters on Saturday on condition of anonymity because the talks are private.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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A Palestinian official close to the peace efforts has said the proposal could lead to a framework agreement if embraced by Israel and would end the war.<\/div>\n
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US Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns will travel to Qatar this week for negotiations, a source familiar with the matter said.<\/div>\n
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More than 38 000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s military onslaught, according to Gaza health officials, and the coastal enclave has largely been reduced to rubble.<\/div>\n
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On Sunday, an Israeli airstrike killed Ehab Al-Ghussein, the Hamas-appointed deputy minister of labour, and three other people at a church-run school in western Gaza City sheltering Christian and Muslim families, Hamas media and the Civil Emergency Service said.<\/div>\n
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The Israeli military said that after it took steps to minimise the risk of civilians being harmed there, it struck militants who were hiding in the school, as well as a facility in the vicinity where weapons were being made.<\/div>\n
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Ghussein’s wife and children had been killed in an Israeli strike in May.<\/div>\n
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The U.N. agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, called the situation increasingly tragic, saying in a post on X, “families continue to face forced displacement, massive destruction and constant fear.<\/div>\n
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Essential supplies are lacking, the heat is unbearable, diseases are spreading”.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Protests in Israel<\/strong><\/div>\n
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In Israel, protesters\u00a0took to the streets across the country to pressure the government to agree to the Gaza ceasefire deal, that would bring back 120 hostages still being held in Gaza.<\/div>\n
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They blocked rush hour traffic at major intersections across the country, picketed politicians houses and briefly set fire to tires on the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway before police cleared the way.<\/div>\n
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Meanwhile, fighting continued to rage across Gaza, and north Israel came under rocket attack from Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon.<\/div>\n
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Air raid sirens sent residents of 24 Israeli towns running for shelter. One person was seriously wounded, police said. Hezbollah said it had fired rockets at an army base.<\/div>\n
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In Gaza, Palestinian health officials said at least 15 people were killed in separate Israeli military strikes.<\/div>\n
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An Israeli air strike on a house in the town of Zawayda, in central Gaza, killed at least six people and wounded several others, while six others were killed in an air strike on a house in western Gaza, the health officials said.<\/div>\n
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Gaza’s health ministry does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants but officials say most of the dead throughout the war have been civilians. Israel has lost 323 soldiers in Gaza and says at least a third of the Palestinian dead are fighters.<\/div>\n
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In central and northern areas of Rafah, on the southern Gaza border with Egypt, Israeli tanks deepened their raids.<\/div>\n
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Health officials there said they had recovered three bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli fire in the eastern part of the city.<\/div>\n
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The Israeli military said on Sunday its forces had killed 30 Palestinian gunmen in Rafah during close combat and air strikes in the past day.<\/div>\n
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In Shejaia, an eastern suburb of Gaza City, the military said its forces killed several Palestinian gunmen, and located weapons and explosives. It published a drone video showing gunmen, some appearing to be wounded or dead, in a house.<\/div>\n
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Reuters could not immediately verify the video.<\/div>\n
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The armed wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, an allied militant group, said fighters attacked Israeli forces in several locations across the Gaza Strip with anti-tank rockets and mortar bombs.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hamas is waiting for a response from Israel on its ceasefire proposal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":964664,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1277],"tags":[817,355,261,436],"class_list":["post-964663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-2","tag-ceasefire","tag-hamas","tag-israel","tag-us"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elections.sabc.co.za\/elections2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elections.sabc.co.za\/elections2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elections.sabc.co.za\/elections2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elections.sabc.co.za\/elections2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elections.sabc.co.za\/elections2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=964663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/elections.sabc.co.za\/elections2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964663\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elections.sabc.co.za\/elections2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/964664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elections.sabc.co.za\/elections2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=964663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elections.sabc.co.za\/elections2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=964663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elections.sabc.co.za\/elections2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=964663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}