Relatives of hostages detained in Gaza called on Benjamin Netanyahu to reach an agreement with Hamas. Israel has already confirmed that it will send the leader of the secret services to Doha this weekend.
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The Families Forum, the main association of relatives of hostages detained in Gaza, called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday to reach an agreement with Hamas for the release of the hostages.
“We call on the Israeli Prime Minister to give the negotiating team full authority to reach this agreement. Time is running out for the hostages,” argued the Forum, in a statement, after the announcement of new talks with a view to a truce, over the weekend in Doha.
The organization also urged “International leaders will put maximum pressure on Hamas to accept this agreement and end the humanitarian catastrophe.“, the same day that an open letter signed by some two thousand Israelis was published asking the international community to exert “global pressure” on Israel to force an immediate ceasefire.
Supported by singer Achinoam Nini (Noa) and international law and human rights professor Neve Gordon, the letter from residents in Israel and abroad calls on the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, the League of Arab States and all States will immediately intervene and apply “all possible sanctions” to achieve an immediate ceasefire.
“Many of us are veteran activists against the occupation, for peace and for mutual existence on this land. We are motivated by our love for the land and its inhabitants, and we are concerned about its future,” reads the letter, sent in 11 languages and collected by The Guardian newspaper.
The signatories expressed themselves”horrified by the war crimes committed by Hamas and other organizations on October 7“.
“And we are horrified by the countless war crimes that Israel is committing,” the signatories added, lamenting that the “majority of Israelis” support the continuation of the war and the “massacres.”
They also criticized that Israel is “on a suicidal path” and that it sows “destruction and devastation that increases day by day” and what they called the abandonment of hostages and the silencing of Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Hamas is willing to “stop fighting” as long as Israel meets the demands of the original ceasefire agreement
Israel has already confirmed that it will send the leader of the Mossad secret services, David Barnea, to Doha this weekend to resume negotiations for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and the release of hostages.
In addition to Barnea, the talks will include the new head of the Egyptian secret services, Hassan Mahmoud Rashad, the possible head of the US secret services at the CIA, William Burns, and the Prime Minister of Qatar, Mohammed ben Abdelrahmane Al-Thani. , interlocutor of the Palestinian Islamist group, since Hamas is not directly involved.
In a joint press conference with the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, Al Thani announced this Thursday in Doha that contacts with Hamas had resumed after the death, a week ago, of its top leader, Yahya Sinwar.
The official had also mentioned that “a team of American negotiators will come to Doha along with a team of Israeli negotiators and will discuss how to move these negotiations forward.”
Blinken had said, for his part, that he expected negotiators to meet in the coming days to try to reach a truce in Gaza, once again calling on Israel and Hamas to reach an agreement.
Since a brief truce 11 months ago, during which dozens of hostages held in the Gaza Strip were freed, successive rounds of negotiations on Gaza have yielded no results.
On October 7 of last year, Israel declared a war in the Gaza Strip to “eradicate” Hamas, hours after it carried out an attack of unprecedented proportions on Israeli territory, killing some 1,200 people and wounding about 250 more.
The war, which this Thursday marked 384 days and continues to threaten to spread throughout the Middle East region, has so far left 42,847 dead in the Gaza Strip (almost 2% of the population) and more than 100,000 injured, in addition More than 10,000 people are missing, most of them civilians, presumably buried in the rubble, according to updated figures from local authorities, which the UN considers reliable.
Source: Observadora
