G7 Urges Hamas to Accept Gaza Truce Deal

Children stand in the rubble of a collapsed building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on April 9, 2024. (Photo by AFP)
Children stand in the rubble of a collapsed building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on April 9, 2024. (Photo by AFP)
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G7 Urges Hamas to Accept Gaza Truce Deal

Children stand in the rubble of a collapsed building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on April 9, 2024. (Photo by AFP)
Children stand in the rubble of a collapsed building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on April 9, 2024. (Photo by AFP)

G7 leaders on Thursday called on Palestinian militant group Hamas to accept a roadmap towards a ceasefire in Gaza announced by US President Joe Biden in May.

The UN Security Council had supported the plan and "now it is important that everyone implements it," German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said at the Group of Seven summit in Italy.

"We therefore call on Hamas in particular to give the necessary consent so that this can now work," he said, AFP reported.

Biden launched a new US effort late last month to secure a truce and hostage release.

However the deal remains uncertain as Hamas officials have insisted that any ceasefire agreement must guarantee a permanent end to the war -- a demand Israel has firmly rejected.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who is hosting the summit, said she confirmed "the unanimous support for the US mediation proposal for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza".

The G7, which also includes Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the US, also called for "the release of all hostages, and for a significant increase in humanitarian assistance to the civilian population of Gaza", she said.

 



Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

 Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

 Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)

Family members of Syrians who disappeared in the 14-year civil war on Sunday gathered in the city of Daraa and called on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them.

The United Nations in 2021 estimated that over 130,000 Syrians were taken away and disappeared, many of them detained by Bashar al-Assad's network of intelligence agencies, as well as by opposition fighters and the extremist ISIS group. Advocacy group The Syrian Campaign says some 112,000 are still missing to this day.

When opposition led by group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham overthrew President Bashar Assad in April, they stormed prisons and released detainees from the ousted government's dungeons.

Families of the missing quickly rushed to the prisons seeking their loved ones. While there were some reunions, rescue services also discovered mass graves around the country and used whatever remains they could retrieve to identify the dead.

Wafa Mustafa held a placard of her father, Ali, who was detained by the Assad government's security forces in 2013. She fled a week later to Germany, fearing she would also be detained, and hasn't heard from him since.

Like many other Syrians who fled the conflict or went into exile for their activism, she often held protests and rallied in European cities. Now, she has returned twice since Assad's ouster, trying to figure out her father's whereabouts.

“I’m trying, feeling both hope and despair, to find any answer on the fate of my father,” she told The Associated Press. “I searched inside the prisons, the morgues, the hospitals, and through the bodies of the martyrs, but I still couldn’t find anything.”

A United Nations-backed commission on Friday urged the government led by interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa to preserve evidence and anything they can document from prisons in the ongoing search for the disappeared and to pursue perpetrators.

Some foreign nationals are missing in Syria as well, notably American journalist Austin Tice, whose mother visited Syria in January and met with al-Sharaa. Tice has not been heard from other than a video released weeks after his disappearance in 2012 that showed him blindfolded and held by armed men.

Syria’s conflict started as one of the popular uprisings of the so-called 2011 Arab Spring, before Assad crushed the largely peaceful protests and a civil war erupted. Half a million people have been killed and more than 5 million left the country as refugees.