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Hamas Says It Accepts UN-Backed Gaza Truce Plan, US Cites ‘Hopeful Sign’ 

Palestinian boys transport water containers past buildings destroyed during previous Israeli bombardment, in Gaza City on June 10, 2024, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas. (AFP)
Palestinian boys transport water containers past buildings destroyed during previous Israeli bombardment, in Gaza City on June 10, 2024, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas. (AFP)
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Hamas Says It Accepts UN-Backed Gaza Truce Plan, US Cites ‘Hopeful Sign’ 

Palestinian boys transport water containers past buildings destroyed during previous Israeli bombardment, in Gaza City on June 10, 2024, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas. (AFP)
Palestinian boys transport water containers past buildings destroyed during previous Israeli bombardment, in Gaza City on June 10, 2024, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas. (AFP)

Hamas accepts a UN resolution backing a plan to end the war with Israel in Gaza and is ready to negotiate details, a senior official of the Palestinian armed group said on Tuesday in what the US Secretary of State called "a hopeful sign". 

Conversations on plans for Gaza after the Israel-Hamas war ends will continue on Tuesday afternoon and in the next couple of days, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in Tel Aviv after talks with Israeli leaders. "It's imperative that we have these plans." 

Blinken met Israeli officials on Tuesday in a push to end the eight-month-old Israeli air and ground war against Hamas that has devastated Gaza, a day after President Joe Biden's proposal for a truce was approved by the UN Security Council. 

Ahead of Blinken's trip, Israel and Hamas both repeated hardline positions that have undermined previous mediation to end the fighting, while Israel has pressed on with assaults in central and southern Gaza, among the bloodiest of the war. 

On Tuesday, however, senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri, who is based outside Gaza, said it accepted the ceasefire resolution and was ready to negotiate over the details. It was up to Washington to ensure that Israel abides by it, he added. 

He said Hamas accepted the formula stipulating the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza and a swap of hostages held in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners jailed in Israel. 

"The US administration is facing a real test to carry out its commitments in compelling the occupation to immediately end the war in an implementation of the UN Security Council resolution," Abu Zuhri told Reuters. 

Blinken said the Hamas statement was "a hopeful sign" but definitive word was still needed from the Hamas leadership inside Israeli-besieged Gaza. "That's what counts, and that's what we don't have yet." 

The war began when Hamas-led Palestinian gunmen stormed into southern Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7, killing more than 1,200 people and seizing more than 250 as hostages, according to Israeli tallies. 

Israel's retaliatory air and ground blitz in Gaza has killed more than 37,000 Palestinians, the Gaza health ministry has said, and reduced most of the narrow, coastal enclave to wasteland, with malnutrition widespread. 

Biden's proposal envisages a ceasefire and release of hostages in exchange for Palestinians jailed in Israel in stages, ultimately leading to a permanent end to the war. 

Israel has said it will agree only to temporary pauses in the war until Hamas is defeated, while Hamas has countered it will not accept a deal that does not guarantee the war will end. 

Blinken, speaking to reporters before departing for neighboring Jordan, also said his talks were also addressing day-after plans for Gaza, including security, governance, and rebuilding the densely populated enclave. 

"We've been doing that in consultation with many partners throughout the region. Those conversations will continue...it's imperative that we have these plans," he said. 

In the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, Palestinians reacted cautiously to the Security Council vote, fearing it could prove yet another ceasefire initiative that would prove fruitless. 

"We will believe it only when we see it," said Shaban Abdel-Raouf, 47, a displaced family of five sheltering in the central city of Deir Al-Balah, a frequent target of Israeli firepower. 

"When they tell us to pack our belongings and prepare to go back to Gaza City, we will know it is true," he told Reuters via a chat app. 

FEARS OF MAJOR ISRAEL-HEZBOLLAH WAR 

In his visit, his eighth to the Middle East since the Israel-Hamas war erupted last October, Blinken also hoped to counter rising violence between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah after both signaled readiness for a major spillover conflict. 

On Monday, Blinken had talks in Cairo with President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt, an important mediator in the Gaza war, in Cairo before proceeding to Israel, where he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. 

Blinken had consultations on Tuesday with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, centrist ex-military chief Benny Gantz - who quit Israel's war cabinet on Sunday over what he said was Netanyahu's failure to outline a plan for the war's end - as well as opposition leader Yair Lapid. 

The US State Department said Blinken discussed Biden's truce proposal with Gantz and reiterated that it would advance Israel's security interests, bring hostages home and raise the chances of restoring calm along Israel's border with Lebanon. 

The US is Israel's closest ally and biggest arms supplier, though it has become sharply critical of the high civilian death toll, vast destruction and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza caused by the Israeli military campaign. 

The war raged on in Gaza on Tuesday as Israeli forces stepped up strikes on its southern city of Rafah a day after four soldiers were killed in an ambush claimed by Hamas. 

Israeli Army Radio said the soldiers died in an explosion in a building in Rafah's Shaboura district. Hamas said it had ambushed troops by detonating explosives planted in the building. 

HOPES FOR CEASEFIRE REPEATEDLY DASHED 

Biden has repeatedly declared that ceasefires were close over the past several months, but there has been only one, week-long truce, in November, when over 100 hostages were freed in exchange for about 240 Palestinians held in Israeli jails. 

Israeli forces rescued four hostages held by Hamas in a commando raid into a crowded urban refugee camp in central Gaza on Saturday during which 274 Palestinians were killed by Israeli bombardments, according to Gaza's health authorities. 

There are over 100 hostages left in the coastal enclave, according to Israeli tallies, including at least 40 whom Israeli authorities have declared dead in absentia.  

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Arab World

As Flooding Becomes a Yearly Disaster in South Sudan, Thousands Survive on the Edge of a Canal

Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
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As Flooding Becomes a Yearly Disaster in South Sudan, Thousands Survive on the Edge of a Canal

Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)

Long-horned cattle wade through flooded lands and climb a slope along a canal that has become a refuge for displaced families in South Sudan. Smoke from burning dung rises near homes of mud and grass where thousands of people now live after floods swept away their village.
“Too much suffering,” said Bichiok Hoth Chuiny, a woman in her 70s. She supported herself with a stick as she walked in the newly established community of Pajiek in Jonglei state north of the capital, Juba, The Associated Press said.
For the first time in decades, the flooding had forced her to flee. Her efforts to protect her home by building dykes failed. Her former village of Gorwai is now a swamp.
“I had to be dragged in a canoe up to here,” Chuiny said. An AP journalist was the first to visit the community.
Such flooding is becoming a yearly disaster in South Sudan, which the World Bank has described as “the world’s most vulnerable country to climate change and also the one most lacking in coping capacity."
More than 379,000 people have been displaced by flooding this year, according to the UN humanitarian agency.
Seasonal flooding has long been part of the lifestyle of pastoral communities around the Sudd, the largest wetlands in Africa, in the Nile River floodplain. But since the 1960s the swamp has kept growing, submerging villages, ruining farmland and killing livestock.
“The Dinka, Nuer and Murle communities of Jonglei are losing the ability to keep cattle and do farming in that region the way they used to,” said Daniel Akech Thiong, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group.
South Sudan is poorly equipped to adjust. Independent since 2011, the country plunged into civil war in 2013. Despite a peace deal in 2018, the government has failed to address numerous crises. Some 2.4 million people remain internally displaced by conflict and flooding.
The latest overflowing of the Nile has been blamed on factors including the opening of dams upstream in Uganda after Lake Victoria rose to its highest levels in five years.
The century-old Jonglei Canal, which was never completed, has become a refuge for many.
“We don’t know up to where this flooding would have pushed us if the canal was not there,” said Peter Kuach Gatchang, the paramount chief of Pajiek. He was already raising a small garden of pumpkins and eggplants in his new home.
The 340-kilometer (211-mile) Jonglei Canal was first imagined in the early 1900s by Anglo-Egyptian colonial authorities to increase the Nile’s outflow towards Egypt in the north. But its development was interrupted by the long fight of southern Sudanese against the Sudanese regime in Khartoum that eventually led to the creation of a separate country.
Gatchang said the new community in Pajiek is neglected: "We have no school and no clinic here, and if you stay for a few days, you will see us carrying our patients on stretchers up to Ayod town.”
Ayod, the county headquarters, is reached by a six-hour walk through the waist-high water.
Pajiek also has no mobile network and no government presence. The area is under the control of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition, founded by President Salva Kiir’s rival turned Vice President Riek Machar.
Villagers rely on aid. On a recent day, hundreds of women lined up in a nearby field to receive some from the World Food Program.
Nyabuot Reat Kuor walked home with a 50-kilogram (110-pound) bag of sorghum balanced on her head.
“This flooding has destroyed our farm, killed our livestock and displaced us for good," the mother of eight said. “Our old village of Gorwai has become a river.”
When food assistance runs out, she said, they will survive on wild leaves and water lilies from the swamp. Already in recent years, food aid rations have been cut in half as international funding for such crises drops.
More than 69,000 people who have migrated to the Jonglei Canal in Ayod county are registered for food assistance, according to WFP.
“There are no passable roads at this time of the year, and the canal is too low to support boats carrying a lot of food,” said John Kimemia, a WFP airdrop coordinator.
In the neighboring Paguong village that is surrounded by flooded lands, the health center has few supplies. Medics haven’t been paid since June due to an economic crisis that has seen civil servants nationwide go unpaid for more than a year.
South Sudan’s economic woes have deepened with the disruption of oil exports after a major pipeline was damaged in Sudan during that country's ongoing civil war.
“The last time we got drugs was in September. We mobilized the women to carry them on foot from Ayod town,” said Juong Dok Tut, a clinical officer.
Patients, mostly women and children, sat on the ground as they waited to see the doctor. Panic rippled through the group when a thin green snake passed among them. It wasn't poisonous, but many others in the area are. People who venture into the water to fish or collect water lilies are at risk.
Four life-threatening snake bites cases occurred in October, Tut said. “We managed these cases with the antivenom treatments we had, but now they’re over, so we don’t know what to do if it happens again.”