ALAMEIN, Egypt: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken pushed for progress towards a Gaza ceasefire and a deal to release captives as he visited Egypt on Tuesday, but major areas of dispute are still to be resolved in talks planned for later this week.
Blinken's visit to the region included meetings in Israel on Monday and he is now travelling to Qatar, one of the mediators in the Gaza talks along with the United States and Egypt.
Blinken said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had accepted a US "bridging proposal" aimed at narrowing the gaps between the two sides after talks last week paused without a breakthrough, and urged Hamas to accept it too.
The Palestinian group has not explicitly rejected the proposal, but said it overturns what was previously agreed, without specifying how, and accused Israel of spinning out negotiations in bad faith.
In Egypt, Blinken met President Abdel Fattah el Sisi, whose country has been helping mediate the on-off Gaza talks for months along with the US and Qatar. Sisi said after the meeting that it was time to put an end to the war and warned of the conflict expanding in the region.
At stake is the fate of tiny, crowded Gaza, where Israel's military campaign has killed more than 40,000 people since October according to Palestinian health authorities, and of the remaining captives being held there.
On Tuesday, Israel's military said it had recovered the bodies of six captives from southern Gaza. According to Israeli authorities, 109 now remain in the Palestinian territory, of whom around a third are believed to be dead.
DARK SHAME
The world has not done enough to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza, Irish Prime Minister Simon Harris has said.
Harris called for an urgent review of the EU-Israel Association Agreement as he said human rights clauses in the trade pact were being breached.
Harris warned that the world would look back on the conflict as a "time of dark shame."
The Irish prime minister said he asked himself "every single day" what more the Irish government could do.
Speaking in Dublin on Tuesday, he said: "I find the scenes that are happening in the Middle East to be grotesque and almost unimaginable in terms of the scale of catastrophe. I've called it a war on children, I believe it to be that. The actions of Israel are utterly disproportionate. I'm also very conscious when it comes to things like trade, that is done at an EU level." - Agencies
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