GAZA STRIP (Dispatches) – Negotiations to pause the Zionist regime’s aggression on Gaza headed into a second day in Cairo on Wednesday, as displaced Gazans braced for an expected Israeli genocide on their last refuge of Rafah.
A Hamas source told AFP that a delegation was headed to the Egyptian capital to meet Egyptian and Qatari mediators, after Israeli negotiators held talks with the mediators on Tuesday.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an outspoken critic of Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war, was also due in Cairo Wednesday for talks with President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.
CIA Director William Burns had joined Tuesday’s talks with David Barnea, head of the occupying regime’s Mossad spy agency.
Mediators are racing to secure a pause to the Zionist regime’s genocidal campaign before Israel proceeds with a full-scale ground incursion into the Gaza Strip’s far-southern city of Rafah, where more than 1.4 million Palestinians are trapped.
The potential for mass civilian casualties has triggered urgent appeals, even from close allies, for Israel to hold off sending troops into the last major population center they have yet to enter in the four-month war.
Multi-party negotiations on hammering out a truce agreement between the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas and the Israeli regime failed to yield any results as the occupying entity’s genocide in the besieged Gaza Strip enters its fifth month.
The American news website Axios cited an unnamed Israeli official as saying that the talks involving the United States, Egypt, Israel and Qatar on a ceasefire deal, which also included an agreement on the release of captives, ended “without a breakthrough” on Tuesday.
The Israeli delegation was on its way back from Cairo, the official said, adding that CIA Director William Burns, Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahma Al Thani, and el-Sisi as well as other Egyptian officials had participated in the Cairo-based negotiations aimed at “protecting Palestinian civilians and delivering more aid into Gaza.”
Citing Egyptian officials, the Wall Street Journal also said the Israeli delegation had departed the Egyptian capital “without closing any of the major gaps in the negotiations.”
A senior Egyptian official said that despite the Israeli delegation’s departure, the negotiations were “positive” and would continue for three more days.
A Hamas official was reported as saying that the resistance movement was waiting for the outcome of the Cairo meeting, but was “open to discussing any initiative that achieves an end to aggression and war.”
The parties in the talks were seeking a formula acceptable to Hamas, which “says it is only possible to sign a deal once it is based on an Israeli commitment to ending its war and pulling out its forces from Gaza.”