The leadership of Hamas has reportedly approved the implementation of the first phase of Egypt’s proposed Gaza ceasefire agreement, according to a senior official of the Palestinian organization. According to the same sources, this first phase concerns the exchange of hostages and is the first step for an agreement that can pave the way for a final ceasefire agreement.

Hamas will soon announce that it has agreed to the Egyptian mediation proposal, Arab media reports said, while the Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds said the announcement would be made in the near future.

What does the proposal for a truce provide?

The proposal calls for a “40-day ceasefire” and the “freeing of thousands of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the release of these hostages,” added Britain’s foreign minister, David Cameron, also in the Saudi capital.

The proposal calls for a 40-day ceasefire and the release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the release of Israeli hostages abducted during Hamas’s military arm’s unprecedented raid on southern Israel on October 7, the trigger for that war.

But Hamas insists on demanding a permanent ceasefire, which the Israeli government rejects, threatening to order a ground operation in Rafah (south), which it says is the “last” stronghold of its battalions, but where more than a million have taken refuge Palestinians, the vast majority of them displaced by the bombing and fighting.

“We will do what is necessary to defeat, to crush our enemy, not excluding Rafah,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated this week, announcing that the operation in the city would take place “with or without a deal” for ceasefire.

For Husham Badran, a member of the Hamas politburo, Mr Netanyahu’s statements about the attack on Rafah “are clearly aimed at nullifying any possibility of an agreement”.

On the contrary, for US Secretary of State Blinken “the only obstacle” to the ceasefire “is Hamas”.

On the night of Friday into Saturday, AFP sources in hospitals spoke of Israeli airstrikes in Rafah and neighboring Khan Younis, which has been almost completely leveled following heavy fighting with Hamas that followed the Israeli ground operation there.

One week deadline from Israel for an agreement

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, citing Egyptian sources, Israel is willing to give another week to the ceasefire talks, and if no agreement is reached it will go ahead with the operation it has been threatening for weeks to carry out in Rafah. .

“A large-scale military operation in Rafah could lead to a bloodbath,” warned Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), yesterday, who is preparing a crisis response plan as there would be a huge “increase in the number of the wounded and the dead”.

This plan “is nothing more than a band-aid,” said Rick Peppercorn, WHO representative in the Palestinian Territories. “The health system, which is already on its knees, will not be able to withstand the potential scale of destruction that the invasion would cause,” he added.

International humanitarian aid, heavily vetted by Israel, continues to trickle in, mostly through Egypt and the Rafah crossing, as the enclave’s population — 2.4 million people — is threatened with starvation.

Faced with the often insurmountable difficulties of delivering aid by road, several countries have airdropped food into the Gaza Strip, while the US military is building an artificial harbor off its coast to facilitate the transport of aid by sea, via Cyprus.

Israel’s main ally, the US, opposes the ground invasion of Rafah and has called for a “credible” plan to protect civilians if such an operation were to go ahead. US Foreign Minister Blinken said yesterday that this has not happened in Washington and warned that given this fact, the attack on Rafa would cause much heavier losses than what would be “acceptable”, according to him.