Israeli forces and Hamas fighters appeared to be abiding by a truce for a fifth morning on Tuesday, after a four-day ceasefire was extended at the last minute for at least two days to let more hostages go free.
A single column of black smoke could be seen rising above the obliterated wasteland of the northern Gaza war zone from across the fence in Israel, but there was no sign of jets in the sky or the rumble of explosions.
Both sides reported some Israeli tank fire in the Sheikh Radwan district of Gaza City in the morning, but there were no immediate reports of casualties. A spokesperson for the Israeli Defence Forces said: “After suspects approached IDF troops, an IDF tank fired a warning shot.”
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During the truce, Hamas fighters released 50 Israeli women and children as young as toddlers from among the 240 hostages they captured in southern Israel during a deadly rampage on Oct. 7. In return, Israel released 150 security detainees from its jails, all women and teenagers.
Hamas also separately released 19 foreign hostages, mainly Thai farmworkers, under separate deals parallel to the truce agreement.
Israel has said the truce could extend indefinitely as long as Hamas continues to release at least 10 hostages per day. But with fewer women and children left in captivity, keeping the guns quiet beyond Wednesday could require negotiating to free at least some Israeli men for the first time.
Israel added an additional 50 Palestinian women to its list of 300 detainees cleared for release under the truce, seen as a sign it was prepared to negotiate for more hostages to go free under further extensions.
Truce not permanent: Israel
Israeli security cabinet minister Gideon Saar told Army Radio that the two-day extension had been agreed to under the terms of the original offer, and Israel remained willing to extend the truce further if more hostages were released. Israelis would know when the truce was over because the fighting would begin again.
“Immediately upon the completion of the hostage-recovery framework, the warfighting will be renewed,” he said. “We have every intention of implementing the goals of the war as it applies to toppling Hamas in Gaza.”
The truce so far has brought the first respite to the Gaza Strip in seven weeks, during which Israel bombed swaths of the territory, especially the north, including Gaza City, into a desolate moonscape.
More aid was able to reach the territory, which had been under a total Israeli siege.
Israel has sworn to annihilate Hamas, the militant group that rules Gaza, after its gunmen burst across the fence and went on a spree, killing around 1,200 people, including several Canadians.
Since then, Gaza health authorities deemed reliable by the United Nations say about 15,000 people have been confirmed killed in Israel’s bombardment, around 40 per cent of them children, with many more dead feared to be lost under rubble.
More than two-thirds of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have lost their homes, trapped inside the enclave with supplies running out, with thousands of families sleeping rough in makeshift shelters with only the belongings they can carry.
U.S. wants to see more aid for Gaza
The White House is asking Israel to take greater care to protect civilians and limit damage to infrastructure if it launches an offensive in southern Gaza to avoid further displacements that would overwhelm humanitarian efforts, senior U.S. officials said.
The message has been delivered from President Joe Biden on down, the officials told reporters on a conference call.
“We have reinforced this in very clear language with the government of Israel — very important that the conduct of the Israeli campaign when it moves to the south must be done in a way that is to a maximum extent not designed to produce significant further displacement of persons,” one official said.
“You cannot have the sort of scale of displacement that took place in the north, replicated in the south. It will be beyond disruptive, it will be beyond the capacity of any humanitarian support network,” the official said, adding, “It can’t happen.”
The official said the campaign needed to be “deconflicted” from power, water, humanitarian sites and hospitals in south and central Gaza, meaning avoid attacks on those types of infrastructure sites.
He said the Israelis had been receptive to the notion “that a different type of campaign has to be conducted in the south.”
But it wasn’t immediately clear what consequences, if any, Israel would face if it failed to heed the White House pleas.
Though likely to fail, several progressive House Democrats earlier this month introduced a bill in the chamber to block $320 million US of weapons sales to Israel.
“The United States already provides the Israeli government with $3.8 billion of military aid a year, and holds enormous leverage over their actions. It is the responsibility of Congress to exercise oversight over weapons sales,” the legislators said in a statement.
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Featured VideoSince 2020, state-level politicians in the U.S. have passed dozens of bills that LGBTQ advocates say are anti-trans. When it comes to defending these laws in court, states have been turning to an unlikely ally: Toronto psychologist James Cantor. He’s testified in more than 20 cases in the U.S. involving transgender issues. Today on Front Burner, CBC investigative journalist Jonathan Montpetit on Cantor’s influence, and how his scientific expertise is being weaponized by conservative Christian groups and Republican politicians to roll back trans rights in the U.S. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.
Meanwhile, a second U.S. official said Washington would like to see the humanitarian pause extended as long as possible.
The official said the first of three relief aid flights conducted by the U.S. military would land in northern Sinai on Tuesday carrying badly needed supplies for Gaza, with two more planned in coming days.
The flights would bring medical items, food aid and winter items that would be delivered by the United Nations.
The officials said aid deliveries to Gaza were currently running at about 240 truckloads a day but this was nowhere near enough to meet needs.