Israel to press attack on Rafah as it negotiates possible cease-fire deal

Hamas said Monday it agreed to a Qatari-Egyptian cease-fire proposal and Israel said it would send meditators to negotiate, reviving hopes of an extended pause to the fighting in Gaza even as Israel vowed to press on with its long-awaited military campaign in Rafah.

Early Monday, the Israeli military ordered tens of thousands of civilians in southern Gaza to “evacuate immediately” and said it would act with “extreme force” there, sending a surge of fear through more than a million Palestinians sheltering in the area. Hours later, as displaced families rushed to pack their belongings once more, panic gave way to celebrations, after Hamas announced it had informed Arab mediators that it would approve the cease-fire proposal.

But the path to any final agreement is likely to be a winding one, and there will no immediate relief for Rafah. Residents reported artillery shelling and bombings as night fell; the Israeli military said it was carrying out strikes against “Hamas terror targets” in the east of the city.

“The war cabinet has unanimously decided that Israel will continue the operation in Rafah of exerting military pressure on Hamas to advance the release of our hostages and the other goals of the war,” said a statement from the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office late Monday. “At the same time, even though Hamas’ proposal is far from Israel’s requirements, Israel will send a delegation of mediators to exhaust the possibility of reaching an agreement under conditions that would be acceptable to Israel.”

Additional meetings are expected over the next several days in both Egypt and Qatar, where CIA Director William J. Burns, who has headed the U.S. negotiating team, met Monday with Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani.

The deal Hamas has agreed to was signed off on by Israel last week, according to a senior Arab official closely familiar with the situation, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss delicate and ongoing diplomacy.

In the first of three phases, militants would release 33 women, children and elderly hostages, with three released every three days in exchange for dozens of Palestinian prisoners, the official said. On the 34th day, Hamas would give Israel a list of remaining hostages.

At the same time, Palestinians would be allowed to return to their homes, Israeli troops would withdraw from the most populated areas inside Gaza and there would be a surge in humanitarian aid. All military and reconnaissance aviation would cease for eight hours a day, and 10 hours on hostage-release days.

The second and third phases are less specifically spelled out in the written agreement, the senior Arab official said, and are the apparent crux of disagreement between Hamas and Israel. In the second stage, all hostages and agreed prisoners are to be released once arrangements are made for the return of a “sustainable calm” to Gaza.

But the two sides have differing interpretations of that phrase – first proposed by mediators in late February in an effort to bridge what has long been a seemingly irreconcilable gap between Hamas’s demand that Israel agree to a permanent cease-fire in Gaza and Israel’s insistence that any cease-fire be temporary, allowing it to eliminate what it says are the militant group’s last intact battalions inside Rafah.

During the third stage, according to the proposed deal, the two sides are to exchange bodies of the dead and begin a five-year reconstruction plan for Gaza. Hamas would agree not to construct any military facilities or import materials used for military purposes. The deal does not address Israel’s demands that Hamas’ military capabilities be destroyed, its leaders eliminated and that the group play no part in governing postwar Gaza.

Throughout the monthslong negotiations, the United States has concentrated on the initial phase of a cease-fire and hostage release, hoping that a period of quiet would convince the combatants not to return to the battlefield. The United States, along with Qatar and Egypt, are listed as “guarantors” of the deal, once agreed, though it does not spell out what that would entail.

The Hamas announcement appeared to take the mediators, and Israel, by surprise, after the latest round of cease-fire negotiations had appeared to break down following a Hamas attack near an Israeli border crossing that killed four soldiers Sunday. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told his American counterpart in a call hours later that “military action is required” in Rafah – home to about half of Gaza’s population.

The large-scale evacuation order was the first for civilians along the border with Egypt, and suggested Israel was moving ahead with plans to push into the densely populated city, despite objections from the Biden administration and widespread warnings that a military offensive would precipitate a humanitarian calamity.

The southern city has become a place of last refuge for thousands of families displaced from other parts of the Strip. They are packed shoulder to shoulder in grinding conditions, in tent camps, schools and other temporary accommodations, stalked by hunger, disease and, increasingly in recent weeks, the roar of Israeli warplanes overhead.

“We do not know where we will go after the evacuation orders that we received this morning,” said Fatima Darabiya, 30, who was staying with her family on the grounds of a school in southeast Rafah, the area covered by the Israeli order. People around her were fleeing, she said, but she was leaning toward staying: Whatever was coming, she said, was no worse than moving for a fourth time during the war, with her ailing mother, her newborn infant and her sick children, who had no strength left “to bear the dust and displacement.”

Rain fell on the dust Monday, and airstrikes boomed in the distance. Darabiya had no money to rent a car in order to move, or to buy a tent to pitch wherever she ended up. Let the tanks come, she said.

“We have nothing to lose after everything we’ve lost.”

Videos of boisterous celebrations emerged from Gaza almost as soon as the Hamas announcement was released, with residents clapping, honking car horns and dancing. “God is great!” people chanted, in a small march led by children on one of Gaza’s streets.

Reached again by phone, Darabiya said she felt some “relief,” but worried that Israel would not sign on to the plan.

The Israeli military said Monday’s evacuation order was issued ahead of a “limited” operation in Rafah, part of a campaign it says is essential to dealing a fatal blow to Hamas’s military capabilities.

U.S. officials have said publicly, and repeatedly, that a major offensive in Rafah would be “a disaster,” and that any operation must be preceded by a plan to protect civilians in harm’s way. In a call between President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, “The President reiterated his clear position on Rafah,” the White House said in a statement.

The evacuation order Monday instructed some 100,000 people to move nine miles away to Mawasi, near the edge of Khan Younis, where Arab charities have been working recently to expand a tent encampment, according to imagery collected by Planet Labs and reviewed by The Washington Post late last month. It is unclear how many people the encampment can accommodate, and aid workers have stressed they are not coordinating with Israeli authorities.

Diplomats and humanitarian agencies have warned that an invasion of Rafah would deepen a famine that has already taken hold in northern Gaza, put further strain on a decimated health-care system and probably result in massive civilian casualties.

“Israel’s evacuation orders to civilians in Rafah portend the worst: more war and famine,” E.U. foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said in a tweet Monday.

The Norwegian Refugee Council called the evacuation orders “unlawful” in a statement. The absence of “fundamental guarantees of safety and return, as required by international humanitarian law, qualifies Israel’s relocation directives as forcible transfer,” the group said.

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency that aids Palestinian refugees said in a tweet it will maintain a presence in Rafah as long “as possible & will continue providing lifesaving aid.”

But there is new hope that further escalation in Rafah can be avoided with Israel and Hamas returning to the negotiating table. U.S. officials, increasingly frustrated with the lack of progress in talks, have warned Qatar to prepare to evict Hamas from its political office in Doha if the group obstructs a deal.

Monday’s evacuation order followed days of heavy Israeli bombing on Rafah, residents said, in strikes that have repeatedly killed whole families, including children.

One of the recent strikes, early on April 29, killed 10 members of Ahlam Abu Taha’s extended family, she said. That day, Abu Taha, 40, heard explosions, shortly after midnight, and the roar of warplanes. Then more explosions. A call came from a niece that her brother’s home had been struck. Abu Taha ran to the house.

“Nothing remained as it was,” she said. As she arrived, her brother Ahmed was being lowered from the upper floors of the house on a stretcher tied to a rope. “I thought he was still alive,” she said. But he was already dead, along with her mother, a sister and three nieces.

Their bodies were put in white bags and sent to Al-Najjar Hospital, which had already received the dead from three other homes hit by airstrikes that morning, she said.

“Reconnaissance planes and warplanes do not leave the city’s skies,” she said. “The useless negotiations and talk, about a cease-fire or not, have exhausted us psychologically and physically. One day they tell us there is hope and another day they completely deny it and Israel still threatens to launch an operation.”

“We are tired,” she said. “This war must stop immediately.”

Israeli military officials say that Hamas’s top leaders, including Yehiya Sinwar, the architect of the Oct. 7 attack, and many of Israel’s 132 remaining hostages, are holed up in tunnels beneath Rafah.

In Tel Aviv on Monday night, demonstrators blocked a main highway and called for the government to make a deal. “We won’t let you miss this chance,” Einav Zangauker, the mother of Israeli hostage Matan Zangauker, told the crowd.

Aid groups in Gaza say there is nowhere for civilians to go that is both safe from attack and equipped with basic services.

Mercy Corps, in a statement Monday, described the Mawasi area as “tents stretched endlessly under scorching sun with no relief in sight and no electricity, water, or aid. During a recent heatwave, a 5-year-old girl tragically died in her tent due to extreme heat,” the group said, adding that the area was full of insect-borne diseases.

Rafah was the central hub for humanitarian operations in Gaza, and its border crossing a “lifeline for aid to enter Gaza.” A military offensive would cause that already struggling system “to collapse,” the group said.

George reported from Dubai, Harb from London, Fahim from Jerusalem and Farouk Mahfouz and Balousha from Cairo.