Truce talks in Cairo have made ‘significant progress’
Welcome to our ongoing live reporting of Israelâs war against Hamas in Gaza and the wider Middle East crisis. Hereâs the latest news in brief to bring you up to speed.
Talks in Cairo aimed at brokering a truce have made âsignificant progressâ, with more negotiations expected in the coming days, Egyptian state-linked outlet Al-Qahera reported on Monday. Al-Qahera cited a high-ranking Egyptian source to report that the progress was made on âseveral contentious points of agreementâ.
The Qatari and Hamas delegations had left the Egyptian capital and were expected to return âwithin two days to finalise the terms of the agreementâ, it reported.
US and Israeli delegations were due to leave the Egyptian capital âin the next few hoursâ and consultations were expected to continue over the next 48 hours, it added.
Meanwhile, Israel has pulled all of its ground troops out of southern Gaza for âtactical reasonsâ, the countryâs army has said, raising questions about the six-month-old warâs future direction amid the Cairo talks.
The Israel military said a âsignificant forceâ would continue to operate in the rest of Gaza.
The troop drawdown is believed to be primarily to relieve reservists after months of fighting in Khan Younis, rather than any significant shift in strategy.
The Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said on Sunday evening that the withdrawal was part of preparations to launch a ground attack on Gazaâs southernmost city of Rafah.
In other developments:
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CIA director Bill Burns and Qatari prime minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani will join the negotiators from Egypt, Israel and Hamas in Cairo, according to some media reports. An Israeli delegation will also take part in the talks, an Israeli official said. However, the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, also said on Sunday that Israel would not agree to a ceasefire until the hostages being held in Gaza were released.
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Three people were killed, including a field commander in Lebanonâs Hezbollah elite forces Al Radwan, in an Israeli strike on Al Sultanya village in southern Lebanon, two security sources told Reuters early on Monday.
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None of Israelâs embassies was safe any more, a senior adviser to Iranâs supreme leader said. Tehran viewed confrontation with Israel as a âlegitimate and legal rightâ, Yahya Rahim Safavi was quoted by the semi-official Tasnim news agency saying on Sunday. He was speaking after a suspected Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus on 1 April for which Tehran has vowed retaliation.
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At least 33,175 Palestinian people have been killed and 75,886 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, Gazaâs health ministry said. Thirty-eight were killed and 71 injured over the past 24 hours, the Hamas-run ministry said on Sunday. UN agencies and charities said the situation was âbeyond catastrophicâ amid a looming famine.
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Iraq has agreed to send 10m litres of fuel to the Gaza Strip in support of the Palestinian people, the prime minister said. Iraq also agreed to receive wounded Palestinians from Gaza and provide them treatment in government and private hospitals, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani added in a statement on Sunday.
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The White House has pushed back on comments by World Central Kitchen founder José Andrés that Israel is engaged in âwar against humanity itselfâ following the Israeli attack that killed seven aid workers, but ruled out putting US monitors on the ground in Gaza. âThereâs going to have to be some changes to the way Israeli defence forces are prosecuting these operations in Gaza to make sure this doesnât happen again,â the White House national security communications adviser, John Kirby, told the US ABC on Sunday.
Key events
No progress made at Cairo ceasefire talks, says Hamas official
A Hamas official told Reuters on Monday that no progress was made at a new round of Gaza ceasefire talks in Cairo also attended by delegations from Israel, Qatar and the United States.
âThere is no progress yet,â he added.
Earlier on Monday, Egyptâs state-affiliated Al-Qahera News TV channel quoted a senior Egyptian source as saying progress had been made in the talks, after a deal was reached among participating delegations on issues under discussion.
Israel and Hamas sent teams to Egypt on Sunday after the arrival on Saturday of CIA Director William Burns, whose presence underlined U.S. pressure for a deal that would free hostages held in Gaza and ease the humanitarian crisis there.
Israel and Hamas, at war in the Gaza Strip since October, have failed so far to resolve disagreements over their main demands.
Israel is yet to provide a satisfactory explanation for the death of seven aid workers last week, prime minister Anthony Albanese said on Monday as Australia appointed a senior former military official to study Israelâs inquiry into the incident.
Israel said on Friday its soldiers mistakenly believed they were attacking Hamas gunmen when air strikes killed the mostly international group of World Central Kitchen staff, including Australian âZomiâ Frankcom. Two officers have been dismissed and others reprimanded, Reuters reported.
Albanese said the explanation for the deaths was not adequate. Given that almost 200 aid workers had been killed in the conflict, Israel also needed to provide more information about what it would do to prevent similar events in the future, he added.
âWe donât find the explanations to be satisfactory to this point,â he said in an interview on state broadcaster ABC. âWe need proper accountability, we need full transparency about the circumstances and I think that is what the Australian public would expect.â
Albanese declined to say what actions Australia would consider adequate, or whether he would consider diplomatic sanctions should Israel fail to provide more information.
Nicaragua is set to ask the International Court of Justice on Monday to order Berlin to halt military arms exports to Israel and reverse its decision to stop funding UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA.
The two-day hearings on emergency measures are part of a wider case brought by Nicaragua which accuses Germany of violating the Genocide Convention and the laws of war with its support for Israel.
German officials have said the ICJ case is not justified, and Berlin will present its side in court Tuesday.
Germany has been one of Israelâs staunchest allies since the 7 October attacks by Hamas militants which killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli tallies.
It is also one of the major arms exporters to Israel, sending 326.5 million euros ($353.70 million) in military equipment and weapons in 2023, to according to Economy Ministry data.
Lawyers in Germany filed a case last week against the government to stop the arms exports.
An all-female group of charity volunteers from Birmingham have sent gender-specific products to the women in Gaza to âgive a little bit of dignityâ to those living in the war-torn region.
The team of eight women, working with the charity ISRA-UK, arrived in Cairo, Egypt, on 1 April, where they spent a week in a warehouse packing and loading around 3,000 hygiene kits onto a lorry which will be driven across the Rafah border into Gaza.
Each kit is comprised of five packets of sanitary towels, two tubes of toothpaste, a toothbrush, body lotion, hand sanitiser, a few packets of wet wipes and shampoo.
Saraya Hussain, 47, from Birmingham, who led the deployment, told the PA news agency that the team worked âtirelesslyâ to ensure each box was packed correctly and included handwritten messages of âlove, peace and hope for the recipientsâ.
âSeeing the lorry loaded and ready to go was emotional for many of the team as it was covered with our banner with the simple statement of âWomen for Gazaâ, she said.
âOne of the team described it as bittersweet, in that she felt proud that she was able to do something but it equally felt like it was so little.
âThe products will be beneficial to everyone, including women, to help them keep clean and give them a little bit of dignity as best as we can while theyâre going through such a terrible time.â
Jason Burke
Late one night in March, Ahmed Abu Jalala rose quietly, trying hard not to wake his family, sleeping around him on the floor of a UN-run school in northern Gaza.
The 54-year-old father knew his six children needed food, but after months of war there was none. Little aid reached Jabaliya, where they had been staying since fleeing their small home in the early weeks of the conflict, and his children had been reduced to eating wild plants. So Abu Jalala went out into the darkness to search for flour being brought by a humanitarian convoy.
âWe would never have let him go if weâd known ⦠Weâve not seen or heard of him since,â said Etemad Abu Jalala, the missing manâs uncle.
After six months of war, tens of thousands have disappeared in Gaza, their whereabouts unknown to their relatives or friends. The International Committee of the Red Cross has recorded more than 7,000 calls to its missing persons hotline since the start of the conflict in Gaza but the total is almost certainly many times that figure.
Iranâs foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian left Oman to visit Syriaâs capital Damascus a week after Iranâs consulate there was targeted in a suspected Israeli attack, state media reported on Monday.
Iran has vowed to avenge the death of seven of its Revolutionary Guards commanders who were killed in the attack, with a senior adviser to the Supreme Leader saying on Sunday that Israeli embassies were no longer safe, Reuters reported.
Amirabdollahian started a regional tour on Sunday in Muscat, where he met Omani officials and a representative of Yemenâs Houthis Mohamed Abdelsalam, who said the Iranian-backed militant group would continue to target Israel-bound ships until a ceasefire is reached in Gaza.
âThe attack on Iranâs embassy building in Damascus is a new step in Israelâs warmongering and its attempt to expand war regionally,â Amirabdollahian said while in Oman.
Israel typically does not discuss attacks by its forces on Syria. Asked about the strike last week, an Israeli military spokesperson said: âWe do not comment on reports in the foreign mediaâ.
Truce talks in Cairo have made ‘significant progress’
Welcome to our ongoing live reporting of Israelâs war against Hamas in Gaza and the wider Middle East crisis. Hereâs the latest news in brief to bring you up to speed.
Talks in Cairo aimed at brokering a truce have made âsignificant progressâ, with more negotiations expected in the coming days, Egyptian state-linked outlet Al-Qahera reported on Monday. Al-Qahera cited a high-ranking Egyptian source to report that the progress was made on âseveral contentious points of agreementâ.
The Qatari and Hamas delegations had left the Egyptian capital and were expected to return âwithin two days to finalise the terms of the agreementâ, it reported.
US and Israeli delegations were due to leave the Egyptian capital âin the next few hoursâ and consultations were expected to continue over the next 48 hours, it added.
Meanwhile, Israel has pulled all of its ground troops out of southern Gaza for âtactical reasonsâ, the countryâs army has said, raising questions about the six-month-old warâs future direction amid the Cairo talks.
The Israel military said a âsignificant forceâ would continue to operate in the rest of Gaza.
The troop drawdown is believed to be primarily to relieve reservists after months of fighting in Khan Younis, rather than any significant shift in strategy.
The Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said on Sunday evening that the withdrawal was part of preparations to launch a ground attack on Gazaâs southernmost city of Rafah.
In other developments:
-
CIA director Bill Burns and Qatari prime minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani will join the negotiators from Egypt, Israel and Hamas in Cairo, according to some media reports. An Israeli delegation will also take part in the talks, an Israeli official said. However, the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, also said on Sunday that Israel would not agree to a ceasefire until the hostages being held in Gaza were released.
-
Three people were killed, including a field commander in Lebanonâs Hezbollah elite forces Al Radwan, in an Israeli strike on Al Sultanya village in southern Lebanon, two security sources told Reuters early on Monday.
-
None of Israelâs embassies was safe any more, a senior adviser to Iranâs supreme leader said. Tehran viewed confrontation with Israel as a âlegitimate and legal rightâ, Yahya Rahim Safavi was quoted by the semi-official Tasnim news agency saying on Sunday. He was speaking after a suspected Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus on 1 April for which Tehran has vowed retaliation.
-
At least 33,175 Palestinian people have been killed and 75,886 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, Gazaâs health ministry said. Thirty-eight were killed and 71 injured over the past 24 hours, the Hamas-run ministry said on Sunday. UN agencies and charities said the situation was âbeyond catastrophicâ amid a looming famine.
-
Iraq has agreed to send 10m litres of fuel to the Gaza Strip in support of the Palestinian people, the prime minister said. Iraq also agreed to receive wounded Palestinians from Gaza and provide them treatment in government and private hospitals, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani added in a statement on Sunday.
-
The White House has pushed back on comments by World Central Kitchen founder José Andrés that Israel is engaged in âwar against humanity itselfâ following the Israeli attack that killed seven aid workers, but ruled out putting US monitors on the ground in Gaza. âThereâs going to have to be some changes to the way Israeli defence forces are prosecuting these operations in Gaza to make sure this doesnât happen again,â the White House national security communications adviser, John Kirby, told the US ABC on Sunday.
