Blinken: 90pc Gaza deal agreed
Published on: Saturday, September 07, 2024
By: AFP
A woman defaces a picture of Netanyahu with paint as anti-government demonstrators call for action to secure the release of Israeli hostages. Inset Blinken.
PORT AU PRINCE: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged both Israel and Hamas to finalize a Gaza truce, standing by US assessments that 90 percent of a deal was ready.
Blinken said that the United States would be offering further ideas in coming days through mediators Egypt and Qatar in hopes of sealing an agreement.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an interview with Fox News on Thursday denied a US official’s assessment that 90 percent of a deal was ready, saying “it’s not close.”
But Blinken repeated the assessment at a news conference during a visit to Haiti, saying, “I think based on what I’ve seen, 90 percent is agreed.”
“It’s really incumbent on both parties to get to yes on these remaining issues,” Blinken said.
“As close as I believe we are to getting a ceasefire agreement, every day that goes by where it is not finalized and the parties don’t say, ‘yes, period,’ is a day in which something else happens, and there is an intervening event which simply pushes things off and runs the risk of derailing what is a pretty fragile apple cart,” he said.
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Blinken said he believed that Netanyahu, who has put a top priority on normalising diplomatic relations with Arab states, could still reach a historic deal with Saudi Arabia, the guardian of Islam’s two holiest shrines.
Blinken did not rule out an agreement before Biden leaves office in January.
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“I think if we can get a ceasefire in Gaza, there remains an opportunity through the balance of this administration to move forward on normalization,” he said.
Hamas called on the United States to “exert real pressure” on Israel.
Hamas’s Qatar-based lead negotiator Khalil al-Hayya called on the US to “exert real pressure on Netanyahu and his government” and “abandon their blind bias” towards Israel.
“We warn against falling into the trap of Netanyahu... who uses negotiations to prolong the aggression against our people,” Hamas said in a statement.
Key mediator Qatar has said that Israel’s approach was “based on an attempt to falsify facts and mislead world public opinion by repeating lies”.
Such moves “will ultimately lead to the demise of peace efforts”, Qatar’s foreign ministry warned.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said on Friday that a military approach alone was not the solution to Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
“The past weekend has dramatically demonstrated that a purely military approach is no solution to the situation in Gaza,” she told reporters after meeting with her Israeli counterpart Israel Katz in the coastal Israeli city of Tel Aviv.
Baerbock was referring to the recovery of six more dead hostages announced on Sunday.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister, said in a post on X on Friday that he had asked Netanyahu to make the defeat of Hamas “and other terrorist organisations” in the West Bank one of the aims of the war in Gaza.
“When members of the Israeli government themselves call for the same approach in the West Bank as in Gaza, that is precisely what acutely endangers Israel’s security,” Baerbock said.
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