The arrival this Tuesday in Cairo of top officials of the secret services of Israel and the United States has generated certain expectations about the possibility of a new ceasefire in the war ravaging Gaza.
The working basis is what the President of the United States, Joe Biden, announced on Monday when advancing that at least six weeks of cessation of the attacks could be achieved, something that would open the door to new exchanges of hostages for Palestinian prisoners.
The pressure from Israel's main ally has been stronger than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's categorical refusal last week to accept the demands of the Islamists.
In Israel, the success that elite uniformed personnel have managed to remove from Rafah, in the south of the Strip, is celebrating two kidnapped people in an operation described as historic.
But, at the same time, the authorities are aware that this will not be the way for the 134 who are still there to return home.
In recent days, it is “certain” that there has been “advances” in the positions of both sides, Israel and Hamas, amid “constructive meetings” that lead to a certain “optimism,” according to a foreign source who remains in the anonymity cited by the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz
.
For days, the capital of Egypt has been the scene where negotiating teams from this country and Qatar along with a Hamas delegation are trying to pave the way for a pause in hostilities.
Now the head of Mossad (Israel's foreign spy service), David Barnea, and the head of the CIA (the United States Central Intelligence Agency), William Burns, have joined.
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“Do not return until everyone returns home, the living and the dead,” the relatives of the hostages implore the Israeli negotiators sent to Egypt, according to a statement they have made public.
They also refer to those who have already lost their lives, 31 according to the authorities of 134. “The eyes of 134 hostages are on you.
This is a once-in-a-lifetime mission and you have the ability to rescue 134 captives and prevent their fate from becoming the same as that of Ron Arad,” they add, referring to an Israeli soldier who has been missing for almost four decades.
That month and a half to which Biden referred after a meeting with the King of Jordan, Abdullah II, would mean a period six times longer than the first ceasefire achieved in the war, which was a single week at the end of the month of November.
Neither the negotiators nor the parties in conflict have revealed details around which the negotiation would be revolving, such as the number of Palestinian prisoners that would be released for each hostage or what the profile of those prisoners who would be released from Israeli prisons would be.
The United States, in any case, believes that those six weeks, if achieved, would serve as a cushion to achieve more ambitious objectives that could lead to a possible end to the conflict, which has already left almost 28,500 dead in Gaza since October 7.
In the last few hours, the impetus with which Israel announced that it was going to enter Rafah with blood and fire with its troops is also deflating, according to some local media.
The presence of more than a million displaced people who have nowhere to go and the lack of an agreement with Egypt, whose border borders that town in southern Gaza, complicate these plans.
In addition, the United Nations has also come to the fore today to ensure that it does not plan to participate in any operation of forced movement of the population, as Israel intends to be able to carry out its operation against the battalions that, they claim, Hamas has in the area.
“We have not received any official communication from Israeli officials,” said Jens Laerke, spokesman for the UN office for humanitarian affairs (OCHA), in statements to the Reuters agency.
“In any case, the UN does not participate in forced and non-voluntary evacuations.
“There is no plan at this time to facilitate the evacuation of civilians,” he added.
The United States has insisted that the ground invasion of Rafah cannot be carried out without a feasible evacuation plan for the hundreds of thousands of civilians.
No one, so far, has offered details on the Israeli side of how they can go from words to deeds in this regard.
More than half of Gaza's 2.3 million people are crowded in and around Rafah.
The vast majority do not have shelter, food, water or the most basic things to survive.
Although Israel has not launched its ground incursion into the southernmost tip of Gaza, its troops continue to pound Rafah daily.
A drone attack this Tuesday seriously injured an editor and a cameraman for the Qatari network Al Jazeera, which reported that it is the fifth time that Israel has carried out actions of this type against its reporters during the current conflict.
In December they already killed a cameraman.
The centrist minister Benny Gantz outlines what is the Government's plan, which foresees at the same time negotiations, continuing with the military steamroller and releasing the hostages.
“We will have conversations with our friends around the world” and “we will take the measures that give us freedom of action: evacuate the population, secure the borders and carry out the necessary preparatory work for a ground invasion, and we will act,” Gantz said. according to the Israeli newspaper
Maariv
.
The categorical refusal expressed last week by the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, to the demands of the Palestinian Islamists did not mean that, faced with the need to bring home the hostages, he was not open to negotiations continuing.
The approval of the trip by the delegation led by Barnea is seen as a step towards a possible ceasefire.
Since the war began on October 7, the guns have only been silenced for one week.
It was during the last of November.
Then, in different exchanges, 105 hostages were able to leave Gaza and 240 Palestinian prisoners, women and minors, were released from Israeli prisons.
There are still 134 kidnapped people in the Strip, of whom, according to Israel, 31 are already dead.
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