Diplomatic leaders are expected to gather Thursday for another round of intense negotiations to secure a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, working under the threat of a wider war that would further devastate the Middle East.
One key group won’t be at the table: As of Wednesday, Hamas said it would not be taking part in the talks because it does not believe Israel has been negotiating in good faith.
“Going to new negotiations allows the occupation [Israel] to impose new conditions and employ the maze of negotiation to conduct more massacres,” senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has been the main obstacle to sealing a deal.
Two former ambassadors, a former special envoy and additional experts said the stakes could not be higher heading into Thursday’s talks, agreeing a ceasefire is the best way to extinguish tensions threatening to boil over in the Middle East. They say the United States, with its diplomatic and military influence over Israel, has a considerable role to play.
“I don’t think it’s up to Hamas or even its allies at this moment in time,” said Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group. “I think the one actor whose actions would be most consequential is the United States.”
Tensions running high after killings
Ceasefire talks are set to resume in Doha, Qatar, on Thursday, with mediators from the host nation, Egypt and the United States. Hamas’s absence does not mean progress won’t be made, as it maintains open communication channels with Egypt, and Hamas has its chief negotiator based in Doha.
“Hamas is committed to the proposal presented to it on July 2, which is based on the UN Security Council resolution and the [U.S. President Joe] Biden speech, and the movement is prepared to immediately begin discussion over a mechanism to implement it,” Abu Zuhri told Reuters.
David Satterfield, former U.S special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issues, says current negotiations are more complicated than any conflict he’s seen in his 45 years on the file.
Tensions have been running higher in the Middle East after the killings of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran and of top Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukur in Beirut in July. Israel claimed responsibility for the latter strike, but has neither confirmed nor denied its role in the blast that killed Haniyeh.
Iran has promised retaliation for Haniyeh’s killing on its soil, while Hezbollah has vowed to seek revenge for Shukur’s death. American and European leaders have called on Iran not to retaliate, warning such an attack could spark a larger regional war.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Monday that there is a real risk of escalation and urged Canadians to leave Lebanon while it’s possible because Ottawa may not be able to extricate everyone if the situation worsens.
Three senior Iranian officials told Reuters this week only a ceasefire deal in Gaza would hold Iran back from direct retaliation against Israel for Haniyeh’s killing.
‘Window for diplomatic action’
A senior adviser to U.S. President Joe Biden said Wednesday it’s critical to take advantage of the “window for diplomatic action” on Thursday to end the war before escalations could spiral “out of control.”
“The more time goes by of escalated tensions, the more time goes by of daily conflict, the more the odds and the chances go up for accidents, for mistakes, for inadvertent targets to be hit that could easily cause escalation that goes out of control,” Amos Hochstein, tasked with shuttle diplomacy between Lebanon and Israel, told journalists on Wednesday.
Vaez said the U.S. is a critical player in negotiations because of his influence on Israel.
He said the nation has been vocal about its support for a ceasefire, but has so far been reluctant to use a major piece of leverage: its weapons supply to Israel. He said U.S. President Biden could use ammunitions as a negotiating chip, but has not done so since war broke out in October.
“The U.S. has tremendous leverage over Israel that it had so far been reluctant to deploy, and failure to do so again almost guarantees that there will be a descendant of chaos in a way that it would be much more difficult to contain and control,” Vaez told CBC News in an interview.
David Satterfield, former U.S. special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issues and a former U.S. ambassador to Lebanon and Turkey, said the U.S. has “made it very clear that this war needs to stop” and that the ball is firmly in Hamas’s court.
“The decision of whether or not there is a ceasefire — and there are still issues to be resolved here — lies with Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas,” said Satterfield.
“If there’s an escalation, if there’s an attack on Israel, that certainly can have a negative effect on ceasefire negotiations, no question about it…. But the linchpin, the hinge, is Sinwar’s decision to negotiate in good faith.”
In an unusual move, U.S. officials announced they were deploying a guided missile submarine to the Middle East and accelerating the arrival of a carrier strike group led by USS Abraham Lincoln. The move comes as the region braces for possible attacks by Iran and its allies after the killing of senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah.
As tensions rise, the U.S. Navy has deployed warships and a submarine to the Middle East signal its willingness and ability to defend Israel in the event of wider war.
Jon Allen, a senior fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and a former Canadian ambassador to Israel and Spain, said the U.S. is using the right two-pronged approach: working on a ceasefire and flexing its military muscle.
“I think they’re doing what they should be doing,” Allen said in an interview Tuesday. “I have no hesitation in saying they’re doing everything possible [to get a deal] in the face of two difficult sides, the Israelis and Hamas. And so that’s positive.
“Then they’re sending pretty clear messages that they are there and they’re there to defend Israel on the one hand and to defend their own bases in the region and to try and make sure that there isn’t a major regional conflict.”
Vaez said a larger war would be unsurprising if a ceasefire deal can’t be reached.
“It was predictable and predicted that if that war was prolonged, it would eventually expand and attack the size,” he said. “And this is precisely what has happened.”
Published at Fri, 26 Jan 2024 09:01:20 +0000
Mohammed Mahdi Abu Al-Qumsan, 26, was in tears at the Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. The young father was barely able to stand from the shock of the news he had received.
Al-Qumsan was on his way to pick up birth certificates for his newborn twins when he received the call: Aysal, Ayser and their mother, Jumana, were killed in an Israeli strike.
The twins were just four days old.
“The phone rings, [they said], ‘The apartment you’re in has been hit,'” Al-Qumsan told CBC freelance videographer Mohamed El Saife. “They told me, ‘Your wife and children are at Al-Aqsa Hospital.'”
He held up his children’s birth certificates, trying to absorb the life-altering turn the day had taken.
“Here is their date of birth, Aug. 10,” he said. “They’re dead.”
Children in Gaza have been heavily impacted by the ongoing Israel-Hamas war — one per cent of the child population, or around 14,000, have been killed over the past 10 months, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
And of the nearly 40,000 total people killed in the strip, 115 were newborns, the ministry states.
The details of the Al-Qumsan family’s account as published “are not currently known” to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), the army told CBC in a statement.
It also said it is fighting Hamas in Gaza, and that it “targets only military objectives and employs various measures to minimize harm to civilians.”
‘We can’t even tell who’s who’
The same day, a strike in Khan Younis left five-month-old Reem Abu Haya an orphan.
“Her mom, her siblings — her entire family is gone,” her paternal grandmother Rashida Abu Haya told CBC’s El Saife. “Twenty people are gone.”
Rashida worried about how the child would manage after such a devastating loss.
“They were just having dinner until suddenly, a rocket struck them,” she said.
“They’re all mutilated into pieces. We can’t even tell who’s who.”
The current Israel-Hamas war began on Oct. 7, when a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel killed around 1,400 and took about 250 hostage, by Israeli counts. Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza since then has killed nearly 40,000, by Palestinian tallies.
In June, for the first time, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres added Israel’s military and security forces, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad to the list of parties committing “grave violations” against children.
The annual list covers the deaths of children in conflict, denial of access to aid and targeting of schools and hospitals, and a report is presented to the UN Security Council.
“I’m appalled by the dramatic increase and unprecedented scale and intensity of grave violations against children in the Gaza Strip, Israel and the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, despite my repeated calls for parties to implement measures to end grave violations,” wrote Guterres.
Children pay the ‘heaviest price’
Children, defined as those under 18, make up nearly half of Gaza’s population, and they pay the “heaviest price” in the war, Dalia Al-Awqati, Save the Children Canada’s head of humanitarian affairs, told CBC in an interview.
“Children are more likely to be killed by the explosive weaponry that is used in the bombardment,” she said. “Their bodies are a lot more vulnerable to the violence that they experience.”
The effects of the war are not simply physical but psychological, too, she said.
“It has taken an immense mental toll on children.”
And even prior to the war, children’s mental health in the territory was already at “a breaking point,” she said.
Israel has blockaded Gaza since 2007 — when Hamas took over the region — citing the need to protect itself. But many children have not known life in the strip without such a blockade, which has largely cut Gazans off from the rest of the world.
Multiple escalations in violence before the war have impacted them, as well: In 2022, Save the Children found that four out of five kids in Gaza reported living with depression, grief and fear.
One last time together
Al-Qumsan’s screams filled the air, as he begged to see his wife one last time — her body along with those of their babies lay in white body bags in the hospital courtyard. Men held him up and whispered to him, trying to calm him, though most of these attempts proved futile.
Eventually, Al-Qumsan took his place among community members.
Through sobs, he began his prayer for the deceased. He wept for the deaths of his wife and children, killed after just four days together, in a war that continues to tear families apart.
Published at Wed, 14 Aug 2024 22:16:15 +0000
