Vivian Yee and Julian E. Barnes, Victoria Kim and Richard Pérez-Peña, Euan Ward, Hwaida Saad and Adam Sella, Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Lynsey Chutel and Marlise Simons, Raja Abdulrahim, Catie Edmondson and Karoun Demirjian, Michael Crowley, Abu Bakr Bashir
Here’s what we know:
Two officials, one Egyptian and one American, said the negotiations would keep going for three more days.
In a photo provided by the Egyptian presidency, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, center, with the C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, in Cairo on Tuesday.
Negotiations in Cairo over a possible agreement to pause the fighting in Gaza have been extended for another three days, according to an Egyptian official briefed on the talks, after a first day of high-level negotiations on Tuesday ended without an agreement.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations, said the tenor of the talks was positive.
The talks over the next three days will involve lower-level officials, who will continue discussing a new framework for a deal, one that would ensure a certain number of hostages would be released and that the fighting would be halted for a certain number of weeks, a U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic talks.
Hamas and Israel have each rejected formulas proposed recently. Last month, a broad framework for an agreement was sketched out in Paris by representatives of the United States, Israel, Qatar and Egypt. That proposal included a six-week cease-fire and the exchange of hostages in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israel.
Hamas came back with a counterproposal that demanded the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip and envisioned trading Hamas’s remaining 136 hostages for thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails, including people serving long sentences. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, dismissed the counterproposal, saying he would never “surrender to the ludicrous demands of Hamas.”
So far, the multilateral talks in Cairo have not been able to bridge the gap, and the urgency of the diplomacy has grown as Israel has announced plans to press its ground offensive into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where roughly half the territory’s population has sought refuge, many sheltering in tents with little food, water and medicine.
President Biden had dispatched the C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, to join the talks. Mr. Burns met on Tuesday with the head of Israel’s intelligence agency, the prime minister of Qatar and high-level Egyptian officials, including President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, according to Egyptian media. Qatar has acted as a mediator for Hamas.
A third person briefed on Tuesday’s talks, also speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy, said that while some progress had been made, the sides remained far apart on a key point — the number of prisoners to be released for each hostage freed.
Israel had been reluctant to participate in the talks in the first place, reflecting Mr. Netanyahu’s ambivalence about continued negotiations with Hamas and its representatives, the first U.S. official said.
Family members of hostages held in Gaza calling for a hostage deal in Tel Aviv on Monday.
International concern mounted on Tuesday over Israel’s plan to press its ground offensive into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where nearly half of the territory’s population has sought refuge, as mediators raced to broker an agreement to pause the fighting.
President Biden sent the C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, to join the talks in Cairo, and said that he had spoken with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and the leaders of Egypt and Qatar to “push this forward” over the past month.
The negotiations came as the United Nations, the United States and other countries have expressed increasing alarm about the prospect of an Israeli incursion into Rafah, where about 1.4 million people are sheltering, many in tents, without adequate food, water and medicine.
Mr. Netanyahu has ordered the military to draw up plans to evacuate civilians from the city, but many Palestinians say that no place in the territory is safe. Mr. Biden has said that the United States opposes an Israeli invasion of the city without a “credible plan” to protect civilians from harm.
“Military operations in Rafah could lead to a slaughter in Gaza,” Martin Griffiths, the top U.N. aid official, said on Tuesday. “They could also leave an already fragile humanitarian operation at death’s door.”
As the warnings grew, negotiators in Cairo tried to hammer out an agreement between Israel and Hamas that would free the remaining hostages in Gaza and halt the fighting for at least six weeks. Mr. Burns was meeting with the head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, the prime minister of Qatar and Egyptian officials, according to Al Qahera, an Egyptian state-owned television channel.
On Tuesday, an Egyptian official briefed on the talks said that the negotiations would continue for another three days.
John F. Kirby, a National Security Council spokesman, said on Tuesday that the talks were “moving in the right direction” but declined to provide details. Israel and Hamas, however, remain far apart in their publicly stated positions and have shown no signs of budging. Israel, for one, has said it will not stop fighting in Gaza until Hamas is crushed and the hostages are freed.
“Nothing is done until it is all done,” Mr. Kirby told reporters at the White House.
Asked about whether the United States believes that the American hostages in Gaza are still alive, he said, “We don’t have any information to the contrary.”
The expected Israeli advance into Rafah has led to mounting pressure on Egypt, which controls a major border crossing into the city.
Rather than opening its border to give Palestinians a refuge from the expected onslaught, Egypt has reinforced its frontier with Gaza, saying it will not let refugees cross the border into Sinai.
Palestinians fleeing Rafah for the northern Gaza Strip on Tuesday.
There have been fears that any Israeli military action that sends Gazans spilling into Egyptian territory could jeopardize the decades-old peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, an anchor of stability in the Middle East. But on Monday, Egypt offered assurances that the treaty would stand.
Mr. Netanyahu has described Rafah as Hamas’s last stronghold. On Monday, after Israeli forces freed two hostages held in the city in a nighttime commando operation, he said that “only continued military pressure, until total victory, will bring about the release of all of our hostages.”
But the rescue operation coincided with a wave of Israeli strikes that killed dozens in Rafah, Gazan health authorities said, pointing to the risks to civilians of a full-scale invasion of the city. Pressure is mounting, too, from within Israel, where groups like the Hostages and Missing Persons Families Forum have appealed to the government to reach an agreement for their freedom.
“The eyes of 134 hostages are upon you,” the group said on Tuesday in a statement directed to the Mossad chief and the head of Shin Bet, who are in Cairo for talks. “Do not give up and do not return without a deal.”
Officials of the United Nations and the International Criminal Court have warned of catastrophic consequences if Israeli forces were to invade the city.
Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesman for the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, said that an incursion into Rafah would jeopardize the delivery of essential aid through the city’s border crossing with Egypt.
The United Nations, he indicated, would play no part in Israel’s evacuation plans.
“We will not be party to forced displacement of people,” Mr. Dujarric said. “As it is, there is no place that is currently safe in Gaza.”
Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, said that he was “deeply concerned” about a full-scale ground offensive in Rafah, and hinted at the possibility of prosecution for war crimes.
“All wars have rules and the laws applicable to armed conflict cannot be interpreted so as to render them hollow or devoid of meaning,” he said on social media.
Security forces in Kiryat Shmona, an Israeli town near the Lebanese border, on Tuesday.
Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia, fired missiles into northern Israel on Tuesday that injured at least two people, emergency officials said, amid a fresh diplomatic push to end months of clashes along the border.
Hezbollah said that it had launched two separate attacks into Israel — one aimed at Israeli soldiers and the other at a police building in the northern town of Kiryat Shmona.
A 15-year-old boy and a 47-year-old woman were seriously wounded in Kiryat Shmona, according to Magen David Adom, Israel’s nonprofit emergency medical service. They had gotten out of the car they were traveling in when an anti-tank missile hit nearby, only to be injured when another landed, said Ofir Yehezkeli, Kiryat Shmona’s deputy mayor.
Israel and Hezbollah — an ally of Hamas in Gaza — have engaged in near-daily cross-border strikes since the deadly Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks in Israel. The clashes have displaced more than 150,000 people from their homes on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border.
The United States and others have engaged in diplomatic efforts to reduce the tensions. A Western diplomat said on Tuesday that France had presented a proposal to Israel, Lebanon’s government and Hezbollah. The French proposal was first reported by Reuters.
The proposal details a 10-day process of de-escalation and calls for Hezbollah to withdraw its fighters to a distance of 10 kilometers (six miles) from Lebanon’s border with Israel, according to the diplomat, who is involved in the talks and who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive deliberations. The diplomat said that France’s foreign minister, Stéphane Séjourné, presented the proposal in writing to Lebanon’s government last week while on a visit to the country.
Lebanon’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that the government had received the proposal. The French Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In recent weeks, Israel has warned that unless a diplomatic solution is reached, it would have to use military force to stop Hezbollah’s attacks in order to allow for tens of thousands of Israelis to return to their homes.
On Tuesday, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, dismissed the messages conveyed by Western “delegations” coming to Lebanon, saying they were focused only on protecting Israel.
In a televised speech, he said his armed group would keep fighting as long as the war in Gaza continues.
“You escalate, we escalate,” he said in an apparent warning to Israel.
France imposed sanctions on dozens of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, accusing them of committing acts of violence against Palestinians. It was one of the largest rounds of penalties levied against Israelis in the West Bank to date and follows Britain and U.S. restrictions imposed on four settlers this month.
France’s foreign ministry said it had banned 28 settlers from entering France or any of its territories, calling on Israel’s government to pursue legal action against them.
The French government said that the West Bank settlements were illegal under international law and incompatible with the creation of a Palestinian state, a position held by many nations but that Israel disputes. Israel’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to the French government’s statement, which did not name the individuals being placed under sanctions.
Since Oct. 7, when Hamas-led attacks on Israel ignited the war in Gaza, Jewish settlers have raised the tempo of unauthorized moves to expand their footprint on the West Bank, according to a report last month by Peace Now, an Israeli advocacy group.
Settlers have been fencing off open areas in the part of the West Bank that is under complete Israeli control in order to impede Palestinian herders, the report said, adding that several of the settlers outposts and roads are on privately owned Palestinian land in violation of Israeli law.
The settlers’ encroachments have heightened tensions in the West Bank, where violence and Israeli military raids were on the rise even before the war broke out. Palestinian militias have carried out shooting attacks against Israelis. Extremist Israeli settlers have rampaged through Palestinian villages, setting fire to property. The Israeli military has mounted frequent raids that have often turned deadly, arresting thousands.
Britain on Monday imposed sanctions involving financial and travel restrictions on four Israeli settlers in the West Bank in what it said was a “bid to tackle continued settler violence which threatens West Bank stability.”
On Feb. 1, the United States had imposed financial sanctions on four men it said were connected with “escalating violence against civilians in the West Bank.”
The Jerusalem Post reported that Israeli financial institutions had frozen the bank accounts of the four men placed or were in the process of doing so, and that there could be broader implications of the sanctions if they made international institutions leery that dealings with Israel could inadvertently involve them in sanctions evasion.
Canada has also said it would impose sanctions on Israeli settlers who incite violence in the West Bank.
The governing coalition that took power under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in December 2022 is the most right-wing and religiously conservative government in the country’s history. It supports settlement expansion and includes extremist settlers who want to annex some or all of the West Bank. Israel has in the past retroactively authorized settlements it had previously seen as illegal.
Most countries view all settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to be a violation of international law. Israel captured the West Bank, as well as East Jerusalem and Gaza, from Jordan in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. Palestinians see that land as part of a future independent state, made steadily less viable by settler expansion.
The settler population grew by 3 percent last year to stand at around 517,000, and it has grown by over 15 percent in the past five years, according to a report based on Israeli government figures issued by a pro-settler group, West Bank Population Stats.com. By comparison, there are roughly three million Palestinians living in the West Bank, which comprises Samaria and Judea.
A child in Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, on Monday, amid the destruction of an Israeli airstrike.
With Israel continuing to warn that it plans a ground invasion of Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, South Africa has asked the International Court of Justice in The Hague to issue new constraints on Israel’s military offensive to prevent genocide.
In a filing on Monday, the South African government said that it was “gravely concerned” by Israel’s planned ground advance into Rafah, where more than a million Gazans have sought shelter, which it said “has already led to and will result in further large-scale killing, harm and destruction.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who has described Rafah as Hamas’s last stronghold, said on Sunday that a ground invasion would move forward there as soon as Israel completed plans for the more than a million people sheltering in the city to be allowed to move to safety.
In December, South Africa filed a case with the International Court of Justice, the U.N.’s highest court, accusing Israel of genocide and asking the court to step in with emergency orders.
In response, the court ordered Israel last month to ensure that its actions would not lead to genocide and to increase humanitarian aid to Gaza. But the court did not order a halt to fighting in the Gaza Strip. The process of considering whether Israel is committing genocide could take the court several years.
In its request on Monday, South Africa argued that a ground invasion of Rafah would be in breach of the court’s January orders and that the court should consider further emergency measures, though it did not lay out what it believed those should be.
The court said that it had asked Israel for comment. Under court rules, the judges will have to consider South Africa’s request as a matter of priority. That could mean scheduling a hearing or issuing a new order as early as Monday. The court is also starting a six-day hearing on another issue involving Israel on Monday.
Israel’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday, but Israel has rejected accusations of genocide.
On Monday, Israeli forces freed two hostages held in the city in a nighttime commando operation, which was accompanied by a series of airstrikes. The health ministry in Gaza said at least 67 people had been killed in the strikes. Overall, the ministry says, more than 28,000 people in Gaza have been killed.
After the rescue mission, Mr. Netanyahu said that “only continued military pressure, until total victory, will bring about the release of all of our hostages.”
Smoke rising over Khan Younis in southern Gaza on Tuesday.
As explosions sounded nearby, Israeli forces on Tuesday ordered the evacuation of one of the last functioning hospitals in the Gaza Strip, according to two doctors and the Gazan health ministry, raising fears that troops would attempt to storm a facility crowded with patients and displaced people.
Adding to the terror of those inside the hospital, Israeli forces fired on people who tried to flee the medical compound on Tuesday, with some being killed or injured, the doctors said.
The scope of the evacuation order at the hospital, the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, was not immediately clear. Two doctors said the Israeli military had given assurances that patients and medical staff could stay at the hospital. But one of the doctors said the military announced on Tuesday, using a loudspeaker attached to a drone, that everyone had to leave immediately and that an attack was imminent.
“The situation is very dangerous,” said Khaled Al-Serr, a general surgeon at the hospital. He said that the Israeli military had indicated just a day earlier that the hospital, which has been surrounded by Israeli ground forces for weeks, was safe.
The surrounding city of Khan Younis has been a focus of Israel’s invasion of southern Gaza, with airstrikes killing hundreds of civilians and soldiers shooting people in the streets, according to the Gazan health ministry and Palestinian news media reports. Many Gazans who fled Israel’s military offensive in northern and central Gaza had sought shelter in Khan Younis, only to be forced to flee again as Israeli forces advanced deeper into the strip.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to questions about the evacuation order and about the allegation that its forces had shot at those trying to flee.
Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesman for the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, said on Tuesday that “intense fighting in Khan Younis, particularly near Nasser and Al Amal Hospitals,” continued to jeopardize the safety of medical staff.
The Israeli military says that Hamas uses hospitals as a cover for its operations, a claim that the group and medical officials have denied. Palestinians have sought shelter at hospitals even though Israeli forces have regularly launched strikes on and around them and in some cases raided hospital compounds.
Nahed Abu Taeema, the head of surgery at Nasser Hospital, said that explosions from airstrikes had grown closer to the hospital and more intense over the past few days. “But we won’t leave the hospital without our patients,” he said.
Amid the confusion over the evacuation order, many doctors and nurses, along with their family members who were sheltering at the hospital, had begun to pack their belongings and prepare to flee, Dr. Al-Serr said, even as leaving presented its own set of dangers.
There are about 8,000 people inside Nasser, he said, including badly wounded patients who have limb injuries and would be difficult to transport.
The situation inside the hospital has grown increasingly dire. Israeli strikes nearby caused fires that spread to the hospital’s medical equipment storage facility and supply warehouse, burning both nearly completely, said Dr. Ashraf Al-Qudra, the spokesman for the Gazan health ministry. Sewage has flooded into the emergency department, hindering the treatment of patients and threatening further spread of disease, he said.
The United Nations’ World Health Organization said that one of its teams was denied access to the hospital on Sunday. The head of the agency, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, wrote on social media that he was “deeply concerned about the safety of patients and health personnel due to the intensifying hostilities in the vicinity of the hospital,” and warned that hospitals and health workers “MUST be protected at all times.”
Speaker Mike Johnson suggested he would not allow the aid package to receive a vote on the House floor.
A buzz saw of Republican opposition in the House is threatening to kill the $95 billion aid package for Israel and Ukraine that the Senate overwhelmingly passed early Tuesday, leaving proponents of the emergency aid legislation scrounging for unorthodox ways to push the bill over the finish line.
Hours before the Senate approved the bill in a lopsided 70-to-29 vote, Speaker Mike Johnson suggested he would not allow the aid package to receive a vote on the House floor. The measure would provide an additional $14.1 billion for Israel’s war against Hamas, $60.1 billion for Kyiv and almost $10 billion for humanitarian aid for civilians in conflict zones, including Palestinians in Gaza.
“House Republicans were crystal clear from the very beginning of discussions that any so-called national security supplemental legislation must recognize that national security begins at our own border,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement on Monday night, adding: “In the absence of having received any single border policy change from the Senate, the House will have to continue to work its own will on these important matters.”
Earlier this month, Mr. Johnson rejected a bipartisan border bill crafted in the Senate, saying the crackdown at the U.S.-Mexico border needed to be more severe.
Senators often hope that an overwhelming vote on a bill in their chamber will jam the House to take up its legislation. And hours after the Senate approved the aid package, President Biden sought to ratchet up pressure on Mr. Johnson, urging him from the White House to bring the bill “to the floor immediately.”
The hostile landscape in the House means that the foreign aid bill’s only path through the House may be for a bipartisan coalition like the one in the Senate — including more mainstream, national security-minded Republicans — to come together and use extraordinary measures to force action on it.
Proponents of sending aid have discussed the idea of steering around opposition from Mr. Johnson and the far right by using a maneuver known as a discharge petition. That allows lawmakers to force legislation to the floor if they can gather the signatures of a majority of the House — 218 members — calling for the action.
Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, suggested that enough Republicans in the House who are set to retire at the end of this year could help pull the bill across the finish line.
“Last time I checked, there’s about 40 of them that aren’t coming back,” Mr. Tillis said.
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said on Tuesday after the bill’s passage that he hoped to speak privately with Mr. Johnson and urge him to put the aid package to a vote.
“I will say to Speaker Johnson I am confident that there is a large majority in the House who will vote for this bill,” he said.
The State Department is reviewing reports of harm to Gazan civilians by Israel’s military as part of a new U.S. program that tracks cases in which foreign militaries use U.S.-made weapons to injure or kill civilians.
A State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, told reporters on Tuesday that the Biden administration was “reviewing incidents” in the Gaza war under what it calls Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance, which The Washington Post reported was established last August, several weeks before Hamas led sweeping attacks on Israel on Oct. 7.
The policy was instituted to create greater accountability for the use of American weapons by U.S. allies and partners. It aims to improve assessments of military incidents involving civilians and to create recommendations based on them but does not include automatic triggers for policy responses or penalties.
Mr. Miller suggested that the review was not likely to lead to short-term changes in America’s military support for Israel, which has become a polarizing political issue for the White House. The Biden administration has repeatedly bypassed Congress for weapons sales to Israel since the war began, and the Senate passed a foreign aid package on Tuesday that included more than $14 billion in aid for Israel, though the bill still faces uncertainty in the House.
“That process is not intended to function as a rapid response mechanism,” Mr. Miller said. “Rather, it is designed to systematically assess civilian harm incidents and develop appropriate policy responses to reduce the risk of such incidents occurring in the future.” He added that it also intended to promote “military operations in accordance with international humanitarian law.”
The State Department has not publicly discussed details of the policy before. But President Biden mentioned it in a Feb. 8 national security memorandum.
That memorandum instructed the secretaries of State and Defense to, among many other things, provide an assessment within 90 days of credible reports determining whether U.S.-supplied weapons had been used in ways that did not follow “established best practices for mitigating civilian harm.” It also ordered them to catalog any “incidents reviewed pursuant to the Department of State’s Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance.”
A tent camp for displaced Palestinians in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip last week.
Ameera Malkash, a 40-year-old mother of three, fled one war only to find herself in another.
In 2012, Ms. Malkash was living in Damascus and was desperate to escape the civil war in Syria. She and her husband, Elian Fayyad, made a fateful decision: They would seek safety in Gaza, which he had left when he was 17.
“The war was getting very close to where I lived with my family,” Ms. Malkash recalled about Syria at the time. “The bombardments were very intense and very close.”
Now war has come to them again. After Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks prompted Israel to launch a retaliatory military offensive, Ms. Malkash and her children fled their home in southern Gaza for a makeshift refugee camp set up in a school. Then, as Israeli forces intensified their attacks in the south, she and her children sought refuge at a shelter in central Gaza. (Mr. Fayyad, her husband, died of cancer soon after the family arrived in Gaza in 2012.)
“There is no life here, no future,” Ms. Malkash said by phone recently. She left school after seventh grade and has never worked. Even before the war, she said, she lived on charity in Gaza, which has long been blockaded by Israel and Egypt and where even longtime residents struggled to find work.
Since the war began, many people who held foreign passports have left Gaza after their countries secured permission from the Israeli government. But that did not include Syrians, leaving Ms. Malkash and her children trapped — like more than two million others in Gaza.
Ms. Malkash and her children, who were living in Al Qarara, east of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, first took shelter at the nearby Al Hinawi school, run by the United Nations, along with more than 5,000 others.
Her eldest son, Solaiman, 16, began suffering from severe stomach pains, but the nearest hospital turned him away because it was receiving “too many casualties,” she recalled. “They gave him some medicine and dispatched him.”
Solaiman recovered, but Ms. Malkash said she feared for the health of her children. U.N. officials report soaring cases of diarrhea, respiratory infections, meningitis and other illnesses in Gaza.
Ms. Malkash, whose Syrian passport has expired, said she would apply for a Palestinian passport after the war so she can leave Gaza for good. But she doesn’t know where to go. Syria was not an option, she said.
“Things in Gaza have always been harsh, but things in Syria have been extremely bad too,” Ms. Malkash said. She recently spoke to her sister-in-law there, who said she hadn’t had a decent meal in three years.
As the war rages, Ms. Malkash dreams of simple pleasures in a new home. “I want a place where I can feel alive and enjoy peace,” she said.
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