The head of American diplomacy, Anthony Blinken, continues his tour of the Middle East today, in the context of efforts to declare a truce in the war between Israel and Hamas, which is headed – tomorrow Wednesday – into its fifth month.

Mr. Blinken started yesterday Monday in Saudi Arabia on his fifth tour of the region since the outbreak of the war and is expected today in Egypt and Qatar, two countries that play a mediating role along with the US, before going to Israel and the occupied West Bank.

Yesterday, France’s new foreign minister, Stéphane Cezournet, held talks with an Israeli and Palestinian official in hopes of favoring a truce and for things to start moving towards a “comprehensive political solution”.

“Are we going to die?”

Parallel to the diplomatic contacts, the Israeli bombardment continues in the Gaza Strip, where the Hamas Health Ministry spoke of 99 deaths from last night to this morning. They were particularly targeted Khan Younis and Rafa, a city of 270,000 inhabitants before the war that now hosts 1.3 million souls.

“No location is safe, none at all. Where will we go; What are we going to do; If we are supposed to live, where should we go?’ wondered Mohamed Kozaat, displaced by the fighting in the north, whose six family members, including his daughter, were injured in shelling in the south.

“We were sitting here, together with the children, and suddenly we heard shelling. The whole roof fell on us (…) I started looking for my children, my brothers, my sisters, my nephews. I couldn’t see any of them, the dust was covering your eyes (…) I found my daughter, she was injured”, he said.

The Israeli military said it was involved in “close fighting” in Khan Younis, the major city in the southern part of the enclave, where it says senior members of the Palestinian Islamist movement are based.

The leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar, who is descended from Han Yunis, has fled “on the run”, moving “from hiding place to hiding place”, the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galland assured last Monday night.

The concern is intensifying as Rafah, home to sprawling makeshift refugee camps, on the closed border with Egypt, will soon become the next target of the Israeli army, which has vowed to “eliminate” the Palestinian Islamist movement in power in the Gaza Strip since 2007, which Israel, the US and the EU label a “terrorist” organisation.

The war between Israel and Hamas was sparked by an unprecedented attack by the movement’s military arm on southern sectors of Israeli territory on October 7, when 1,163 people, mostly civilians, were killed, according to an AFP tally based on official statements by authorities.

Israel’s military retaliatory operations have since killed at least 27,478 people in the Gaza Strip, the vast majority of them women and children, according to the latest casualty count released by Hamas’ health ministry.

Truce;

In late November, a week-long truce allowed hostilities to cease, more aid to flow into the Palestinian enclave, the release of more than 100 hostages out of the 250 taken in the Gaza Strip, and the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails in exchange — on both sides it was mostly women and children.

On his new tour of the region, Mr Blinken wants to push forward the proposal drawn up by Qatari envoysof Egypt and the US in Paris at the end of last month but it has still not been approved by Hamas, nor by the Israeli government.

According to an AFP source in Hamas, the proposal calls for a six-week truce, the release of 200 to 300 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the release of 35 to 40 hostages held in Gaza, as well as the daily entry into the enclave of 200 to 300 trucks with humanitarian aid.

But the leadership of Hamas, in power in the Gaza Strip since 2007, is demanding a full ceasefire. Something that the government of Israel rejects, which declares that the military operations will not end until after the Palestinian Islamist movement is “eliminated” and the hostages are released.

“Hamas is making demands that we will not accept,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday Monday.

Faced with thirst

In Israel, US foreign policy chief Blinken is also expected to press for increased deliveries of food, water and medicine to the besieged Gaza Strip, mired in a humanitarian crisis after four months of war.

This crisis is particularly acute in the Rafah area, where more than half of the population of the Gaza Strip has been forced to flee, with thousands more arriving daily to escape the shelling and fighting.

According to the UN, people arriving in Rafa they only have 1.5 to 2 liters of water a day to drinkto cook and wash, and cases of diarrhea among children are increasing rapidly.

Worse for civilians, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is seeing countries that contributed much of its funding, including the US, suspend it, amid Israeli accusations that 12 out of its approximately 30,000 workers participated in the October 7 Hamas attack.

The war in the Gaza Strip is spreading in the region, with tensions between Israel and its allies on the one hand and Iran and the “axis of resistance” on the other, which includes, in addition to Hamas, the Lebanese Hezbollah, paramilitary organizations in Iraq and the Yemeni Houthi rebels.

The US last week carried out bombings against four sites in Syria and three in Iraq, targeting members of the Revolutionary Guards, an elite body of Iran’s armed forces, and factions close to Tehran, according to Washington. The US retaliation, which has claimed the lives of at least 45 people, has been strongly condemned by Damascus, Baghdad, as well as Iran, a sworn enemy of the US.

During an emergency UN Security Council meeting on the strikes, UN Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo appealed to states to “actively cooperate” to “prevent further escalation”.