Blinken proposes UN role, Palestinian state path in Gaza

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken attends an event at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, on January 14, 2025. (AFP)
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken attends an event at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, on January 14, 2025. (AFP)
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Updated 14 January 2025
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Blinken proposes UN role, Palestinian state path in Gaza

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken attends an event at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, on January 14, 2025. (AFP)
  • “We’ve long made the point to the Israeli government that Hamas cannot be defeated by a military campaign alone,” Blinken said
  • Blinken said that Gaza should be under the control of the Palestinian Authority

WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday proposed international security forces and temporary UN leadership to stabilize post-war Gaza but said Israel in turn must agree on a pathway to a Palestinian state.
With talks in Qatar nearing a ceasefire in the devastating 15-month war, Blinken laid out his long-awaited roadmap for post-war Gaza after a defeat of Hamas — with days left before he leaves office.
Blinken acknowledged the misgivings of Israel — where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leads a far-right government and expects even stronger US support under President-elect Donald Trump — but pleaded for a new approach.
“We’ve long made the point to the Israeli government that Hamas cannot be defeated by a military campaign alone,” Blinken said at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.
“Without a clear alternative, a post-conflict plan and a credible political horizon for the Palestinians, Hamas — or something just as abhorrent and dangerous — will grow back,” he said.
In line with his calls since the start of the war, Blinken said that Gaza should be under the control of the Palestinian Authority — which now holds shaky, partial control of the West Bank and has been repeatedly undermined by Israel.
Acknowledging the limitations of the Palestinian Authority, Blinken said an unstated number of countries have offered to send troops and police to post-war Gaza.
He said that the “interim security mission” would include both foreign forces and “vetted Palestinian personnel.”
“We believe that the Palestinian Authority should invite international partners to help establish and run an interim administration with responsibility for key civil sectors in Gaza, like banking, water, energy, health,” Blinken said.
The Palestinian Authority would coordinate with Israel and the rest of the international community, which would be asked to provide funding.
A senior UN official would oversee the effort, which would be enshrined by a UN Security Council resolution, Blinken said.
“The interim administration would include Palestinians from Gaza and representatives from the PA selected following meaningful consultation with communities in Gaza,” Blinken said.
The interim authority “would hand over a complete responsibility to a fully reformed PA administration as soon as it’s feasible,” he said.
The post-war deal would take shape in negotiations after an initial ceasefire, which both Blinken and President Joe Biden said was on the “brink” of acceptance.
Trump has backed efforts to end the war but is also expected to ally himself firmly with Israel, to which Biden authorized billions in weapons but occasionally criticized over civilian deaths.
Netanyahu has long fought the idea of a Palestinian state, and his allies have described the renewed push for statehood as a reward for the October 7, 2023 attack, the deadliest in Israel’s history.
Blinken rejected the argument, saying: “Far from rewarding Hamas, accepting a political horizon would be the ultimate rebuke to its nihilistic agenda of death and destruction.”
Blinken, who was repeatedly interrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters, also criticized Israel over actions during the conflict.
“Israel’s government has systematically undermined the capacity and legitimacy of the only viable alternative to Hamas, the Palestinian Authority.”


Why is Gaza truce under threat?

Why is Gaza truce under threat?
Updated 13 February 2025
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Why is Gaza truce under threat?

Why is Gaza truce under threat?
  • Under the truce, the warring parties have already completed five exchanges of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, but have in recent days have entered into a blame game over the implementation of the deal
  • US President Donald Trump’s forceful backing of ally Israel has put the ceasefire under strain, and particularly his proposal to take over the Gaza Strip and remove its Palestinian inhabitants

JERUSALEM: A little over three weeks since it came into effect, a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas that halted the Gaza war has become increasingly fragile.
Under the truce, the warring parties have already completed five exchanges of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, but have in recent days have entered into a blame game over the implementation of the deal.
US President Donald Trump’s forceful backing of ally Israel has put the ceasefire under strain, and particularly his proposal to take over the Gaza Strip and remove its Palestinian inhabitants.
The truce is currently in its first phase. The next ones have not yet been finalized.
Here are the positions of the key actors who could decide the future of the truce:
For days now, Hamas has accused Israel of not respecting the agreement, saying that the amount and type of aid entering Gaza was insufficent.
Israeli authorities have denied the claims.
In several statements, the Palestinian militants have said they had not received machinery requested to clear the rubble in Gaza, and complained about obstacles to evacuating wounded people to Egypt under the terms of the agreement.
On Wednesday, Hamas said that as a result of the Israeli violations it would postpone indefinitely the next hostage release, which was due to take place on February 15.
Hugh Lovatt, a researcher at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told AFP that the announcement from Hamas may be an attempt to force a decision on the next phases of the truce.
“Hamas’s aim is to break the deadlock in the negotiations on the second phase of the agreement,” he said, adding that the Palestinian movement has been trying to obtain guarantees that the ceasefire will hold and the war will come of a permanent end.
It’s a “Hail Mary pass,” said Lovatt, “because they fear that Israel will take advantage of Trump’s support to impose new conditions and delay the implementation of the agreement.”
The ongoing first phase of the ceasefire is for 42 days. During this period, negotiations for the second phase were meant to start but that has not happened yet.
On Wednesday, a Hamas delegation arrived in Cairo to discuss the disputes over the agreement with Egyptian negotiators.
But a Hamas spokesman warned that the group would not bow down to the “language of threats” from the United States and Israel.
Trump on Monday said “all hell” would break out in Gaza if Hamas did not free all Israeli hostages held in the territory by Saturday noon.
Under the terms of the truce, not all hostages were meant to be freed during the first phase.
The president’s threat came soon after he announced a plan for the United States to take control of the Gaza Strip and move its almost 2.4 million residents to Jordan or Egypt.
The proposal has provoked widespread international condemnation, and experts have said it would violate international law.
Yonatan Freeman, an international relations expert at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said that Trump’s statements had “underscored the US backing of Israel.”
“Trump and Netanyahu have both emphasized the importance of releasing hostages,” Freeman said.
He said that despite making threats, he did not believe that either Trump of Israel’s leaders wanted the war to resume.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said Hamas cannot be allowed to use the ceasefire to “rebuild itself and recover strength.”
Echoing statements from the US president, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that Israel would resume “intense fighting” in Gaza if Hamas did not return hostages by Saturday.
Netanyahu did not specify whether he expected all the hostages to be freed, or a smaller batch due for release under the terms of the deal.
“It’s in his best interest to do it gradually,” said Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group.
According to her, Netanyahu was deliberately being ambiguous and was “buying time” to extend the first stage of the truce and delay talks about the post-war future of the Gaza Strip.
But Netanyahu also faces domestic “public pressure” to secure the release of the remaining hostages, including through indirect negotiations with Hamas, said Zonszein.
“It could be a determining factor that when the three hostages came out last Saturday, they looked really, really bad,” she said of the three Israelis freed on Saturday.
They appeared emaciated, spurring concern among Israelis for the fate of those still in captivity.
Despite their disputes, Zonszein said that the sides have not “given up on anything yet.”
“They’re just playing power games.”


Wife of Colombian-Israeli hostage receives proof of life

Wife of Colombian-Israeli hostage receives proof of life
Updated 13 February 2025
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Wife of Colombian-Israeli hostage receives proof of life

Wife of Colombian-Israeli hostage receives proof of life

BOGOTA: The wife of Elkana Bohbot, a Colombian-Israeli man being held hostage by Hamas, said Wednesday she had received proof he was alive and denounced the “terrible” conditions in which he was being held.
In an interview with Colombia’s Blu Radio, Rebecca Gonzalez said that she received news of her husband from Ohad Ben Ami, one of the three hostages released by Hamas last weekend.
The three, whose emaciated appearance caused widespread shock, were released under the fifth exchange of prisoners since Israel and Hamas agreed a truce in their 15-month war on January 19.
“He (Ben Ami) brought me proof of life from my husband. I received a message, I even received a song in which he asks me to be strong,” Gonzalez, who is Colombian, said.
“He is alive, and we need to get him out of there immediately,” she pleaded.
Relating Ben Ami’s account of his captivity, which left him in a “severe nutritional state” according to doctors, Gonzalez said: “They are in tunnels, they are not allowed to see the light, they are not allowed to go out for air.”
She said her husband was living on a piece of bread a day, “very little water” and was “mistreated physically and psychologically.”
Bohbot, who hails from the town of Mevasseret Tzion near Jerusalem and has a young son, was one of the producers of the Supernova music festival, which Hamas gunmen stormed during their October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
His childhood friends and fellow rave organizers Michael and Osher Vaknin were killed in the attack.
A Hamas video from October 7 posted online showed Bohbot, now aged 36, bound and injured in the face, being held by the Palestinian armed group.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro gave him Colombian nationality a month after the attacks.
The Hamas attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,211 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
The group also took 251 hostages, of whom 73 remain in Gaza, including 35 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign has reduced most of Gaza to rubble and killed at least 48,222 people, the majority of them civilians, according to figures from the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.
The United Nations considers the ministry’s figures reliable.


UNICEF decries soaring violence against children in West Bank

UNICEF decries soaring violence against children in West Bank
Updated 13 February 2025
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UNICEF decries soaring violence against children in West Bank

UNICEF decries soaring violence against children in West Bank
  • UNICEF condemns all acts of violence against children and calls for the immediate cessation of armed activity across the occupied West Bank

UNITED NATIONS, United States: Violence against children has surged in recent months in the occupied West Bank, where Israel is conducting a sweeping military operation, UNICEF warned Wednesday as it called for an end to hostilities.
UNICEF’s regional director Edouard Beigbeder said 13 Palestinian children were killed in the West bank since the start of the year alone, including seven killed following the launch of a large-scale operation by Israel in the north of the territory on January 19.
The casualties include a two-and-a-half-year-old child, whose pregnant mother was also injured in the shooting, according to the United Nations children’s agency.
“UNICEF condemns all acts of violence against children and calls for the immediate cessation of armed activity across the occupied West Bank,” Beigbeder said in a statement.
“All civilians, including every child without exception, must be protected.”
He added that the rising use “of explosive weapons, airstrikes and demolitions in Jenin, Tulkarem, and Tubas Governorates — including in refugee camps and other densely populated areas — has left essential infrastructure severely damaged, disrupting water and electricity supplies.”
In total, 195 Palestinian children and three Israeli children have been killed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, since Hamas launched its brutal attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, triggering Israel’s relentless campaign in Gaza.
That constitutes a 200 percent increase in the number of Palestinian children killed in the territory over the past 16 months, compared to the same period prior.
According to UN humanitarian agency OCHA, 224 children (218 boys and six girls) were killed between January 2023 and January 2025 in the West Bank by Israeli forces or Israeli settlers, which represents nearly half of the 468 children killed in total in the territory since 2005, when OCHA began documenting these victims.
More than 2,500 Palestinian children were also injured in the West Bank between January 2023 and December 2024, according to the agency.


Russian Red Sea base deal still on the table, Sudanese FM says

Russian Red Sea base deal still on the table, Sudanese FM says
Updated 13 February 2025
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Russian Red Sea base deal still on the table, Sudanese FM says

Russian Red Sea base deal still on the table, Sudanese FM says
  • The war in Sudan has drawn in multiple competing regional and global influences, in part due to its ample Red Sea coastline, as well as gold resources

CAIRO: An agreement signed years ago for the creation of a Russian naval base in Sudan remains on the table following talks in Moscow, Sudanese Foreign Minister Ali Yusef Sharif said in an interview with Russia Today on Wednesday.
Such a deal has been discussed for years since an agreement was signed under former President Omar Al-Bashir. The army generals who overthrew him in 2019 said later the plan was under review, and a base has never materialized.
“In our meeting we did not negotiate the deal ... there was a deal signed and there is no disagreement,” he said, saying that as before all that remains is the issue of ratification.
“There are no obstacles, we are in complete agreement,” Sharif had said earlier when asked about the deal, following talks with Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov.
He did not provide any additional details on the plan.
Russia has cultivated ties with both sides in Sudan’s almost two-year-long civil war, and Russian officials have visited the army’s wartime capital of Port Sudan in recent months.
Last year, a top Sudanese general said Russia had asked for a fueling station on the Red Sea in exchange for weapons and ammunition.
Sharif said such a station presented no threat to any other country or to Sudan’s sovereignty, drawing on the example of nearby Djibouti, which hosts several foreign bases.
Such a station would be beneficial to Russia, particularly after the fall of Syria’s Assad regime put in question key bases there.
The war in Sudan has drawn in multiple competing regional and global influences, in part due to its ample Red Sea coastline, as well as gold resources.


Israel threatens displacement from Gaza if hostages not released Saturday

Families and supporters attend a demonstration calling for the immediate return of hostages held in Gaza.
Families and supporters attend a demonstration calling for the immediate return of hostages held in Gaza.
Updated 12 February 2025
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Israel threatens displacement from Gaza if hostages not released Saturday

Families and supporters attend a demonstration calling for the immediate return of hostages held in Gaza.
  • If fighting resumes, Katz said, “new Gaza war will be different in intensity from the one before” ceasefire, and will not end without defeat of Hamas, hostage release

GAZA CITY: Israel on Wednesday threatened to launch a new war on Hamas that would lead to the implementation of US President Donald Trump’s plan to displace all Palestinians from the territory if the militants do not release hostages this weekend.
The remarks by Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz came shortly after Palestinian group Hamas said it would not bow down to US and Israeli “threats” over the release of hostages under a fragile truce deal.
Mediators Qatar and Egypt were pushing to salvage the ceasefire agreement that came into effect last month, a Palestinian source and a diplomat familiar with the talks told AFP, while Hamas said its top negotiator was in Cairo.
The truce has largely halted more than 15 months of fighting and seen Israeli captives released in small groups in exchange for Palestinians in Israeli custody.
But the deal, currently in its 42-day first phase, has come under increasing strain.
The warring sides, which have yet to agree on the next phases of the truce, have traded accusations of violations, spurring concern that the violence could resume.
Katz said Israel would resume its war if Hamas fails to free captives on Saturday, when a sixth hostage-prisoner exchange was scheduled under the terms of the agreement.
Hamas has said it would postpone the release citing Israeli violations, and hours later, Trump warned that “hell” would break loose if the Palestinian militant failed to release “all” hostages by then.
If fighting resumes, Katz said, “the new Gaza war will be different in intensity from the one before the ceasefire, and it will not end without the defeat of Hamas and the release of all the hostages.”
“It will also allow the realization of US President Trump’s vision for Gaza,” he added.
Katz on Thursday ordered the army to prepare for “voluntary” departures from Gaza.
The Israeli military said it has already begun reinforcing its troops around Gaza.
Trump had proposed taking over the war-ravaged Gaza Strip and moving its more than two million residents to Jordan or Egypt — a plan experts say would violate international law but which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called “revolutionary.”
Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said on Wednesday that Israel was “evading the implementation of several provisions of the ceasefire agreement,” warning that hostages would not be released without Israeli compliance with the deal.
“Our position is clear, and we will not accept the language of American and Israeli threats,” said Qassem, after Netanyahu threatened to “resume intense fighting” if hostages were not released by Saturday.
Last week’s hostage release sparked anger in Israel and beyond after Hamas paraded three emaciated hostages before a crowd and forced them to speak.
On the Palestinian side, Hamas accused Israel of failing to meet its commitments under the agreement, including on aid, and cited the deaths of three Gazans over the weekend.
Hamas has insisted it remained “committed to the ceasefire,” and said that a delegation headed by chief negotiator Khalil Al-Hayya was in Cairo for meetings and to monitor “the implementation of the ceasefire agreement.”
A diplomat and a Palestinian source familiar with the talks both told AFP on condition of anonymity that mediators were engaged with the parties to resolve the dispute.
UN chief Antonio Guterres has urged Hamas to proceed with the planned release and “avoid at all costs resumption of hostilities in Gaza.”
In Tel Aviv, Israeli student Mali Abramovitch, 28, said that it was “terrible to think” that the next group of hostages would not be released “because Israel allegedly violated the conditions, which is nonsense.”
“We can’t let them (Hamas) play with us like this... It’s simply not acceptable.”
In southern Gaza’s Khan Yunis, 48-year-old Saleh Awad told AFP he felt “anxiety and fear,” saying that “Israel is seeking any pretext to reignite the war... and displace” the territory’s inhabitants.
Trump reaffirmed his Saturday deadline for the hostage release when hosting Jordan’s King Abdullah II on Tuesday.
In a phone call Wednesday, Abdullah and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah El-Sisi said they were united in supporting the “full implementation” of the ceasefire, “the continued release of hostages and prisoners, and facilitating the entry of humanitarian aid,” according to a statement from the Egyptian presidency.
The two leaders called for Gaza’s “immediate” reconstruction “without displacing the Palestinian people from their land.”
Egypt, a US ally which borders Gaza, earlier said it planned to “present a comprehensive vision” for the reconstruction of the Palestinian territory.
A UN report has said that more than $53 billion will be required to rebuild Gaza and end the “humanitarian catastrophe” there.
The war was triggered by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,211 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
Militants also took 251 hostages, of whom 73 remain in Gaza, including 35 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed at least 48,222 people in Gaza, the majority of them civilians, according to figures which the UN considers reliable from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.