Middle East Crisis: Blinken Calls Some Hamas Changes to Cease-Fire Proposal Unacceptable (2024)

The two sides still appear to be far apart after Hamas offered a counterproposal in cease-fire talks.

Speaking at a news conference in Doha, Qatar, alongside Qatar’s prime minister and minister of foreign affairs, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Mr. Blinken said that “a deal was on the table that was virtually identical” to one that Hamas put forward on May 6. But, he said, Hamas’s response, which was received by Egypt and Qatari mediators and passed to American officials on Tuesday, made demands that went “beyond positions that it had previously taken and accepted.”

“In the days ahead, we are going to push on an urgent basis,” he said, “to try and close this deal.”

Mr. Blinken declined to disclose details about the Hamas counterproposal.

The cease-fire proposal the Biden administration is backing would halt the fighting in Gaza immediately, and, after the release of some Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, begin talks that could lead to a much longer or even permanent cease-fire and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Qatar and Egypt have acted as intermediaries between Israel and Hamas, which do not communicate directly with each other.

But Hamas’s latest counteroffer has a few new wrinkles, according to two senior members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps who have been briefed of the details of Hamas’s response and are in touch with Hamas. They said the new counteroffer includes a demand that Israel withdraw from two critical corridors — one along the Egyptian border and one cutting across the center of the enclave — within the first week of the initial truce.

Hamas is also asking that Israeli troops pull out from Gaza entirely at the end of the first phase of the agreement, and that there be a complete and “sustainable” halt to fighting before any exchange of Palestinian prisoners for hostages, the associate said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations. The armed group is also demanding that Russia, China and Turkey sign the agreement as guarantors.

Still, Hamas officials publicly rejected Mr. Blinken’s assertion that they had made significant changes to their previous stance in May and reiterated their accusation that Israel was blocking a deal.

“This new offer includes no changes to our previous response to the offer submitted last May,” Basem Naim, a Hamas spokesman, said on Wednesday. He said Hamas’s position remains that the deal must include guarantees of a permanent cease-fire and a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, among other demands.

Israel has not publicly accepted the initial proposal. It has said that it will not agree to a deal that doesn’t allow it to eradicate Hamas, or that would force what it considers a premature end to the war. It has maintained that the proposal on the table enables it to achieve all its war aims, including the destruction of Hamas’s governing and military capabilities.

Mr. Blinken said on Wednesday that Israel had accepted the proposal, which was made public in a speech by President Biden 12 days ago in a move intended to put pressure on both sides to reach a deal. The proposal was endorsed on Monday by the U.N. Security Council.

Mr. Blinken said the United States would unveil proposals “in the coming weeks” that it has been developing with partners in the region to address Gaza’s governance, security and reconstruction.

He spoke on the last stop of a three-day tour of the Middle East, which included a visit to Israel. It is his eighth trip to the region since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.

Aaron Boxerman, Adam Rasgon and Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting.

A U.N. report accuses both Israel and Palestinian groups of war crimes.

The report said that Hamas’s military wing and six other Palestinian armed groups — aided in some instances by Palestinian civilians — killed and tortured people during the Oct. 7 assault on Israel in which more than 800 civilians were among the more than 1,200 killed. An additional 252 people, including 36 children, were taken hostage, the report said.

“Many abductions were carried out with significant physical, mental and sexual violence and degrading and humiliating treatment, including in some cases parading the abductees,” the report said. “Women and women’s bodies were used as victory trophies by male perpetrators.”

The commission also reviewed allegations by journalists and the Israeli authorities that Palestinian militants had committed rape, but it said that it had “not been able to independently verify such allegations” because Israel had not cooperated with the inquiry. The report cited “a lack of access to victims, witnesses and crime sites and the obstruction of its investigations by the Israeli authorities.”

Hamas has rejected all accusations that its forces engaged in sexual violence against Israeli women, the commission noted.

The commission also cited significant evidence of the desecration of corpses, including sexualized desecration, decapitations, lacerations, burning and the severing of body parts.

But Israel, during its monthslong campaign in Gaza to oust Hamas, has also committed war crimes, the commission said, like the use of starvation as a weapon of war through a total siege of Gaza.

It said Israel’s use of heavy weapons in densely populated areas amounted to a direct attack on the civilian population and had the essential elements of a crime against humanity, disregarding the necessity of distinguishing between combatants and civilians and causing a disproportionately high number of civilian casualties, particularly among women and children.

The conflict had killed or maimed tens of thousands of Palestinian children, a scale and a rate of casualties that were “unparalleled across conflicts in recent decades,” the commission said.

Other crimes against humanity committed by Israel in Gaza, the commission said, included “extermination, murder, gender persecution targeting Palestinian men and boys, forcible transfer of the population, torture, and inhuman and cruel treatment.”

The panel said Israeli forces used sexual and gender-based violence, including forced nudity and sexual humiliation, as “an operating procedure” against Palestinians in the course of forced evacuations and detentions. “Both male and female victims were subjected to such sexual violence,” the report said, “but men and boys were targeted in particular ways.”

“The treatment of men and boys was intentionally sexualized as an act of retaliation for the attack,” it added, referring to Oct. 7.

In a statement responding to the report, Israel’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva denounced what it called “systematic anti-Israeli discrimination.” It said the commission had disregarded Hamas’s use of human shields and “outrageously and repugnantly” tried to draw a false equivalence between Hamas and the Israeli military in relation to sexual violence.

A spokesman for Israel’s foreign ministry, Oren Marmorstein, later called the report “another example of the cynical political theater called the U.N.” in a post on social media. “The report describes an alternate reality in which decades of terrorist attacks have been erased, there are no continuous missile attacks on Israeli citizens and there isn’t a democratic state defending itself against a terrorist assault,” he wrote.

The commission — which includes Chris Sidoti, an Australian expert on human rights law, and Miloon Kothari, an Indian expert on human rights and social policy — said Israel had refused to cooperate with its investigation and denied the group access to Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Israel also did not respond to six requests for information, the panel said.

The group based its findings on interviews with survivors and witnesses conducted remotely and in person in visits to Turkey and Egypt. It also drew on satellite imagery, forensic medical records and open source data, including photographs and videos shot by Israeli troops and shared on social media.

The commission said it had identified the people most responsible for war crimes or crimes against humanity, including senior members of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups and senior members of Israel’s political and military leadership, including members of its war cabinet. The commission said it would continue its investigations focusing on those with individual criminal responsibility and command or superior responsibility.

The W.H.O. says Gazans are facing ‘catastrophic hunger.’

The warning from the global health authority came as Israel was facing mounting international pressure over its conduct of the war, and soon after a United Nations commission released a report on Wednesday accusing both Israel and Hamas of war crimes. The report said that Israel, during its monthslong campaign to oust Hamas, was using starvation as a weapon of war through a blockade that restricts what supplies can enter Gaza.

Mr. Tedros said that 1,600 children in Gaza under 5 years old have been diagnosed with and treated for severe acute malnutrition, and that 8,000 had been diagnosed with acute malnutrition. He also attributed 32 deaths to malnutrition, including 28 among children under 5 years old.

The W.H.O. and its partners have “scaled up” nutrition services in Gaza, he said, but only two facilities in the enclave are set up to serve patients who were severely malnourished. Mr. Tedros added that the dire and dangerous conditions in Gaza have complicated the ability of aid groups to provide aid, and that they have been increasingly imperiling children’s lives.

“Our inability to provide health services safely, combined with the lack of clean water and sanitation, significantly increase the risks for malnourished children,” he said.

Aid groups and the U.N. have blamed the hunger crisis in Gaza on Israel’s restrictions on aid entering the enclave, while Israel has insisted that more than enough food is entering Gaza, but that Hamas has been stealing and hoarding supplies.

The Israeli agency that coordinates aid deliveries into Gaza, known as COGAT, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. The agency’s latest online update, on Tuesday, said that 193 aid trucks entered Gaza via Egypt and two entry points in Israel on Monday, noting that 16 aid truck deliveries went to northern Gaza.

In a statement on social media, Hamas accused Israel of escalating “a brutal war of starvation” and aggravating “the humanitarian catastrophe and manifestations of famine in the Gaza Strip.” Hamas called on Arab and Muslim countries to exert pressure on Israel to allow more aid to be delivered.

For much of the war, one of the crucial entry points for aid has been a border crossing at Rafah between Egypt and Gaza. As a result, Rafah, the territory’s southernmost city, was one of the few places where desperate Gazans could find food and other supplies.

But after Israel seized the Rafah crossing in early May when it began its offensive there, Egypt responded by closing its side of the crossing. Egyptian, Israeli and Palestinian officials have since wrangled over how to reopen the crossing to aid.

Though international aid agencies cannot officially declare whether Gaza meets the technical threshold for famine until more data is collected, the head of the U.N. World Food Program said in May that famine had arrived in parts of Gaza.

Even if the gates open to aid tomorrow, malnutrition experts say many more people will die from starvation, or from diseases like diarrhea, because their bodies are so weak and medical care is so scant.

And by the time famine is finally declared, “it’s already very, very late, and there’s already going to be widespread death,” Kiersten Johnson, who directs the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a U.S. government program that tracks hunger in global crises, said in May.

The Houthis attack a merchant ship off Yemen’s coast.

After the attack, the ship was “taking on water, and not under command of the crew,” the agency, The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, said in a statement on its website. The statement said the ship’s master had reported it was also “hit for a second time by an unknown airborne projectile.”

A Houthi military spokesman, Yahya Saree, said in a televised speech that the group had used unmanned surface boats, a number of drones and ballistic missiles to target the ship, which he identified as the Tutor, a Greek-owned bulk carrier. He claimed the ship was seriously damaged and could sink.

On Wednesday, the Houthis said they launched two joint military operations with the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, on the Israeli cities Ashdod and Haifa, a claim Israel denied.

Since November, the Houthis have launched dozens of attacks on ships in the vital sea route in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, stifling global maritime trade.

In retaliation, the U.S. and British navies have been intensifying airstrikes against Houthi targets, the latest coming on June 7 after the rebel group detained 11 United Nations employees in Yemen.

The U.S. Central Command said its forces had destroyed four aerial drones and two anti-ship missiles in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen last Friday, as well as a Houthi patrol boat in the Red Sea.

In February, American military officials said the United States struck five Houthi military targets, including an undersea drone they described as an “unmanned underwater vessel” that they believed the Houthis could have received from Iran.

Hezbollah launches a rocket barrage after an Israeli strike kills a commander.

There were no immediate reports of casualties from the Hezbollah rocket barrages, according to the Israeli military.

Israel and Hamas have been trading fire since Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip prompted Hezbollah to mount cross-border attacks in support of Hamas, but the intensity of Hezbollah’s attacks has increased this month. Israeli officials have threatened at the highest levels to pursue further military action and Hezbollah has vowed to keep up its fight, raising fresh concerns that the months of low-level conflict could grow into a larger war on Israel’s northern border.

Speaking at Mr. Abdallah’s funeral in Beirut’s southern suburbs, Hashem Safieddine, the leader of Hezbollah’s executive council, pledged that the group would double down on its attacks against Israel in the wake of the killing.

“If the enemy’s message is to retreat from our position in supporting the oppressed in Gaza, then he must know that our answer is final,” Mr. Safieddine said. “We will increase the intensity, quantity and quality of our operations.”

The Israeli military said that about 215 rockets had been launched from Lebanon on Wednesday in an apparent response to the Israeli strike, setting off air raid sirens across northern Israel.

Hezbollah claimed attacks on a string of military bases, including on Mount Meron, an area housing a military radar station that is roughly five miles south of the border. Hezbollah also claimed to have struck an arms factory belonging to Plasan, a manufacturer of armored vehicles used by the Israeli military.

The military said in a statement that a number of the rockets had been intercepted, but that several had hit the ground and started fires, which firefighters were working to extinguish. It said it had responded on Wednesday by striking a number of launch sites across the border. Lebanon’s state-run news agency reported heavy Israeli airstrikes and bombardment across the country’s south.

The blazes came a week after another Hezbollah rocket attack set off wildfires that prompted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to issue a threat of “very intense action” along the Lebanese border.

On a visit to Qatar as part of a wider Middle East trip, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said he believed neither side would welcome a larger war. Mr. Blinken called it “safe to say that actually no one is working to start a war, or to have escalation,” and that “there’s a strong preference for a diplomatic solution.”

He added that the best way to calm tensions along Lebanon’s border with Israel would be a cease-fire in Gaza, which he said would “take a tremendous amount of pressure out of the system” and remove Hezbollah’s claimed justification for attacking Israel.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant, spoke at length about tensions on Israel’s northern border on Tuesday, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters in a briefing on Wednesday. “We don’t want to see a wider regional conflict and that’s why we do want to see a de-escalation of tensions in the region,” she said.

The Israeli military said in a statement that it had struck a Hezbollah command and control center, killing Mr. Abdallah and three other Hezbollah fighters. It called Mr. Abdallah one of Hezbollah’s top commanders in southern Lebanon.

Israel has been targeting Hezbollah commanders with the aim of pushing the group north of the Litani River in Lebanon, hoping to prevent cross-border attacks and to eventually allow tens of thousands of Israeli civilians displaced by the fighting to return to their homes. Some experts have expressed skepticism about whether the targeted killings can accomplish this aim.

Lebanon’s government has said that as many as 100,000 people on its side of the border have been displaced.

Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Hwaida Saad and Michael Crowley contributed reporting.

— Euan Ward reporting from Beirut, Lebanon

A freed hostage was subject to psychological warfare during his captivity, his family says.

The account of Mr. Kozlov’s eight months in captivity, related by his parents in an interview, emerged after he and three other hostages were rescued by Israeli commandos on Saturday in central Gaza, in an operation that left scores of Palestinians dead. The details offered more indications that militants in Gaza were mistreating hostages, after people who were released last November during a temporary cease-fire recounted undergoing physical, emotional and even sexual abuse.

The risky rescue lifted the public’s mood in Israel and prompted spontaneous celebrations, but it also underscored the plight of more than 100 other living and dead hostages still stuck in Gaza.

“He said it was very difficult,” said his mother, Evgeniia Kozlova, who, along with his father, Mikhail Kozlov, spoke to The New York Times this week in Tel Aviv. “It’s very hard to put into words.”

Hamas has said that it treats hostages well compared with Israel’s treatment of Palestinian prisoners, a claim that Israeli officials vehemently dispute. In an apparent effort at psychological warfare, his captors told Mr. Kozlov, 27, a Russian-Israeli, that the Israeli government had concluded that the hostages were a burden, Ms. Kozlova said.

“They were telling Andrey to be very quiet because they, the hostages, are a problem for Israel,” she said. “They said Israel can solve this problem any way it wants, including killing the hostages so they don’t have to think about them anymore.”

The militants’ claims had an effect on Mr. Kozlov — so much so that when Israeli forces arrived in a civilian neighborhood in central Gaza to rescue him, she said, he was initially not sure if they had come to save or kill him.

Since the start of the war, Israeli forces have rescued only seven of the some 250 people who were abducted to Gaza during the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel. (More than 100 hostages were released in November as a part of a short-lived cease-fire; at least a third of the 120 captives or so who remain in Gaza are dead, according to the Israeli authorities) Last week’s rescue operation also resulted in the deaths of more than 200 Palestinians, many of whom were civilians, according to the Gazan health authorities.

Israel has criticized Hamas for holding hostages in civilian areas. Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official, said on Sunday that the group had tried to distance civilians from the conflict. But Hamas has taken advantage of the urban areas in Gaza to provide its fighters and weapons infrastructure an extra layer of protection, running tunnels under neighborhoods, setting up rocket launching pads near civilian homes and holding hostages in city centers.

Unlike other hostages, Mr. Kozlov was never brought into Gaza’s vast subterranean tunnel network and was told by his guards that his circ*mstances were much better than those of other hostages, his mother said. He received food throughout his captivity, but it was often simple items like pita bread, cheese and tomatoes, she said.

During his captivity, Mr. Kozlov only went outside at night when he was being moved to a new location, his mother added. He was transferred several times throughout the war, she said.

Mr. Kozlov, Andrey’s father, said that when he and his wife discussed months ago whether they preferred their son be rescued in a military operation or freed through a diplomatic agreement, they both favored an agreement. But as no deal materialized, he said, they wanted him brought home in any way possible.

Asked about the Palestinian civilians who were killed amid their son’s rescue, Mr. Kozlov said he was saddened by their deaths.

“If there was such a possibility to avoid these victims, it would be much better,” he said.

— Adam Rasgon reported from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem

Four freed hostages were abused and malnourished, a doctor who received them says.

“After eight months,” he said, “we had a notion that they’d be much more broken, maybe look differently than they were.” They had lost less weight than had been assumed, and generally looked not so bad, he said.

But then, he said, the results from medical tests start coming in, along with initial psychological evaluations, and “you start to grasp what they’ve been through.”

All came back suffering from severe malnutrition, Dr. Pessach said. They had lost a lot of weight and then gained some back. Their muscles were “extremely wasted.” The mix of poor nutrition, confinement, lack of sunlight, abuse and psychological stress they had endured would have long-term implications for their health, he said.

He added that all the hostages he had encountered had suffered abuse in captivity, with varying degrees of frequency and intensity. “They were all abused, punished and tortured physically and psychologically in many ways,” he said.

Sheba Medical Center has been the first stop for dozens of captives who were seized in the Hamas-led assault on Israel on Oct. 7 and later freed. That includes those released in an exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners last November, as well as two men who were extracted from Gaza by Israeli commandos in February.

The latest arrivals were the four hostages rescued in an audacious and deadly raid on Saturday, during which scores of Palestinians were killed. Like several other hospitals in Israel, Sheba has set up a special, secluded wing where former hostages undergo initial tests and can meet their families in privacy.

But these four — Noa Argamani, 26; Andrey Kozlov, 27; Almog Meir Jan, 22; and Shlomi Ziv, 41 — had spent a full eight months in captivity, incommunicado, amid great trepidation in Israel over how the scores of captives believed to still be alive in Gaza might be coping.

As the surprise rescue operation was still underway, Dr. Pessach received a call to come urgently to the hospital. Half an hour later, he said, he was greeting Ms. Argamani, the first to arrive, as she got off the helicopter.

In their first hours of freedom from captivity, he said, there was one thing liberated hostages seem to crave: to see the sky.

“So we have learned we need to take them out on the first evening they are here, and to do whatever is necessary to allow them to leave without anybody knowing, to breathe the air,” he said.

The most important thing, Dr. Pessach added, was to let the freed hostages make decisions after months of having others decide everything for them.

Mr. Meir Jan, for example, wanted to meet a huge group of friends on his first night back. “That’s not normal protocol,” Dr. Pessach said, adding, “We actually advised against it.”

But the hospital supported him and helped make the gathering happen, for a limited amount of time. Dr. Pessach refused to say where it had taken place. “Some things are done like a special op,” he said.

New Gaza cease-fire proposal puts a spotlight on the Hamas leader

Hamas could be “looking after one guy,” Mr. Blinken said, referring to Mr. Sinwar.

Mr. Sinwar was an architect of the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, in which around 1,200 people were killed and around 240 taken hostage. American and Israeli officials who spent months assessing his motivations say that Mr. Sinwar knew the incursion would provoke an Israeli military response that would kill many civilians, but he reasoned that was a price worth paying to upend the status quo with Israel.

After Hamas agreed to a brief cease-fire late last year, during which more than 100 hostages in Gaza and many more Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons were exchanged, Mr. Sinwar has held out against any further cease-fire deals. More than 36,000 people have been killed in Gaza during the eight months of war, and around 80,000 people have been injured, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which says that the majority of the dead are women, children and older people.

Mr. Sinwar’s position is not the only question mark in the negotiations. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel also has not said in public that he accepted the proposal the Security Council has endorsed and is under pressure from his far-right coalition partners not to end the war until Hamas is destroyed. Mr. Blinken said on Tuesday that Mr. Netanyahu had “reaffirmed” his commitment to the plan in private talks in Jerusalem.

U.S. officials said last month that Mr. Sinwar was most likely living in tunnels beneath Khan Younis, a city in southern Gaza that has been devastated by Israeli airstrikes and fighting. Hamas has constructed a network of tunnels beneath Gaza to shield the group from Israeli surveillance and attack.

Israeli officials have said that killing Mr. Sinwar is a top priority, no matter how long it takes; he has not been seen in public since Oct. 7. He has also not released audio and video messages.

That public silence has made it difficult to determine his thinking and the extent to which he retains control of Hamas, some of whose political leaders are based in Qatar. But Israeli and American officials say Mr. Sinwar remains central to the group’s decision making.

The American and Israeli intelligence agencies that have assessed Mr. Sinwar’s motivations, according to people briefed on the intelligence, have concluded that he is primarily motivated by a desire to take revenge on Israel and to weaken it. The well-being of the Palestinian people or the establishment of a Palestinian state, the intelligence analysts say, appears to be secondary.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that Mr. Sinwar had resisted pressure to agree to a deal in recent months, calculating that a continuation of the war would work to his political advantage even at the cost of rising casualties among Palestinian civilians.

The article cited dozens of messages reviewed by the Journal that it said Mr. Sinwar had transmitted to cease-fire negotiators, Hamas compatriots outside Gaza and others. It was not possible to authenticate the messages independently.

“We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Mr. Sinwar said in one of the messages, identified as a recent one to Hamas officials who were seeking to broker an agreement with Qatari and Egyptian officials.

In another message cited by The Journal, Mr. Sinwar referred to a past war in which a weaker force prevailed over a more powerful adversary: an uprising in Algeria, which secured Algeria’s independence in 1962 at the cost of at least 400,000 Algerian and 35,000 French lives. That message called the losses “necessary sacrifices.”

The Journal report quoted what it said was a Sinwar letter, dated April 11, to the overall political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, after three of Mr. Haniyeh’s adult sons were killed by an Israeli airstrike, in which he said that their deaths and those of other Palestinians would “infuse life into the veins of this nation.”

Mr. Sinwar was imprisoned for murdering Palestinians whom he accused of apostasy or collaborating with Israel, according to Israeli court records from 1989. He was released in 2011, along with more than 1,000 other Palestinians, in exchange for one Israeli soldier captured by Hamas. Six years later, Mr. Sinwar was elected leader of Hamas in Gaza.