Middle East crisis live: Egyptian delegation due in Israel seeking to kickstart Gaza ceasefire talks, say reports | Israel-Gaza war

The vast amount of rubble including unexploded ordnance left by Israel’s devastating war in the Gaza Strip could take about 14 years to remove, a United Nations official said on Friday.

Reuters reports Pehr Lodhammar, senior officer at the UN mine action service (Unmas), told a briefing in Geneva that the war had left an estimated 37 million tons of debris in the widely urbanised, densely populated territory.

He said that although it was impossible to determine the exact number of unexploded ordnance found in Gaza, it was projected that it could take 14 years under certain conditions to clear debris, including rubble from destroyed buildings.

“We know that typically there’s a failure rate of at least 10% of land service ammunition that is being fired and fails to function,” he said. “We’re talking about 14 years of work with 100 trucks.”

A premature Palestinian infant, rescued from her mother’s womb by an emergency caesarean section shortly after the woman was killed by an Israeli airstrike, has died, her uncle said Friday.

Associated Press reports Rami al-Sheikh said Sabreen Jouda died in a Gaza hospital on Thursday after her health deteriorated and medical teams were unable to save her.

The baby’s home in the southern Gaza city of Rafah was hit by an Israeli airstrike shortly before midnight Saturday. Her parents and 4-year-old sister were all killed.

Al-Sheikh told The Associated Press that Sabreen was buried next to her father on Thursday.

Peter Beaumont

Peter Beaumont has this analysis for the Guardian from Jerusalam:

Earlier this week senior Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya suggested the Islamic militant group might be willing to agree to a truce of five years or more with Israel, and that it would lay down its weapons and convert into a political party if an independent Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders.

The comments came in an interview on Wednesday amid a stalemate in months of talks for a ceasefire in Gaza. It is not clear that the idea enjoys the backing of Hamas’s military wing who have long called the shots in Gaza.

Speaking to the AP in Istanbul, Al-Hayya said Hamas wants to join the Palestine Liberation Organization, headed by the rival Fatah faction, to form a unified government for Gaza and the West Bank. He said Hamas would accept “a fully sovereign Palestinian state” and if that happens, he said, the group’s military wing would dissolve.

“All the experiences of people who fought against occupiers, when they became independent and obtained their rights and their state, what have these forces done? They have turned into political parties and their defending fighting forces have turned into the national army,” he added.

Over the years, Hamas has sometimes moderated its public position with respect to the possibility of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. But its political programme still officially “rejects any alternative to the full liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea” – referring to the area reaching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, which includes lands that now make up Israel.

Over the past two decades senior Hamas officials have at times floated the idea of a so-called “hudna”, a kind of ceasefire mandated in Islamic jurisprudence.

Literally meaning a period of calm, it does not imply a negotiated end to hostilities, but rather suggests a pause, with some officials having suggested a truce lasting a generation in the past.

Two things remain murky: how serious Hamas is about the proposition, and whether it has any real buy-in from either Hamas’s leadership in Gaza, not least its armed leadership.

There has long been a debate about whether there exists, or has existed within Hamas, a more moderate and pragmatic strand, a debate often focussed on expressions of support for a long term hudna.

Historically Hamas has deployed the suggestion at times where it wants to appear more flexible,including after Hamas assumed power in Gaza in 2007.

While the proposed truce in this case is shorter than some that have been mentioned, Hamas’s declared support for long truces in the past, including by some of its early founders, has also tended to be defined by Hamas’s worldview. History, Hamas believed, is on their side, not Israel’s, which it sees as bound to eventual failure.

Importantly for Hamas, the concept of a hudna – which is not seen as a means to an end in itself – has offered the possibility of a way of dealing with accumulating pressures on the group within Palestinian society

Al-Hayya’s remarks come in a period where Hamas is facing increasingly obvious Israeli preparations to attack the southern Gaza city of Rafah and at a time when its principle interlocutor, Qatar, has spoken of its frustration over ceasefire talks, raising speculation that Hamas’s political leadership might leave Qatar.

And while both Israel and Hamas have been publicly cleaving to maximalist positions around ceasefire talks, a flurry of discreet activity in recent days has suggested some potential for movement, perhaps putting pressure on Hamas to want to appear not to be the deal breaker.

What is clear, as it always has been when the issue of similar long term truces have been floated in the past, is that there is zero chance Israel would accept such a truce on the conditions suggested. Israel has vowed to crush Hamas.

Welcome to our latest liveblog on the Israel-Gaza war and the wider Middle East crisis. I’m Martin Belam in London and I will be with you for the next while.

An Egyptian delegation is set to travel to Israel on Friday to kickstart a new round of ceasefire talks, according to reports in Israeli media and picked up by Agence France-Presse, citing unnamed officials.

Qatar, the US and Egypt have been mediating talks to secure a truce and the release of hostages, but those have stalled for days.

Israel has also vowed to move on with a planned military operation in Rafah, despite international outcry and concern for about 1.5 million Palestinians sheltering in the city.

The Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer said Israel’s war cabinet was meeting on Thursday “to discuss how to destroy the last battalions of Hamas”.

Several Israeli media outlets, citing unnamed officials, said that ahead of the planned visit, the cabinet also discussed a new plan for a truce and hostage release.

Here is a summary of the latest developments:

• US troops have finally begun construction of a pier off the coast of Gaza that aims to speed the flow of humanitarian aid, the Pentagon has said, but the complex plan to bring more desperately needed food to Palestinian civilians is still mired in fears over security and how the aid will be delivered.

• The US and 17 other countries including the UK, France and Germany are calling for the release of hostages by Hamas, and saying that there is a deal on the table that offers “an immediate and prolonged ceasefire in Gaza” in return. In a letter, they write: “The fate of the hostages and the civilian population in Gaza, who are protected under international law, is of international concern. We emphasise that the deal on the table to release the hostages would bring an immediate and prolonged ceasefire in Gaza.”

• Briefing the media about the letter, a senior US administration official said the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had prioritised holding on to the hostages over securing a ceasefire. “Hamas is holding hostages, they are releasing videos of the hostages and refusing to let the hostages go back to their families. And if they would do that, this crisis will wind down. It’s just a very clear path.”

• Israel appears to be readying to send troops into Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, the only corner of the strip that has not seen fierce ground fighting and where more than half of the Palestinian territory’s population of 2.3 million have sought shelter. Haaretz reported: “The Israeli army has informed the government that its forces have completed their preparations for an upcoming operation in Rafah, and that the date for such an operation is to be decided by the cabinet.”

• An aid worker who was part of Belgium’s development aid efforts has been killed by an Israeli strike on Gaza, the country’s development minister, Caroline Gennez, said on Thursday. The statement said at least seven people were killed by the strike on a building that housed about 25 people, including displaced people from other parts of the Gaza Strip. “The indiscriminate bombing of civilian infrastructure and innocent civilians goes against every international and humanitarian law and the rules of war,” Gennez said. More than 200 aid workers have been killed in Gaza since the war between Israel and Hamas began.

• At least 34,305 Palestinians have been killed and 77,293 wounded in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October, the Hamas-led Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Thursday. That number includes 43 deaths in the last 24 hours. It has not been possible for journalists to independently verify the casualty figures being issued during the conflict.

• The seven World Central Kitchen aid workers killed by Israeli airstrikes represented the “best of humanity” and risked everything “to feed people they did not know and will never meet”, José Andrés, the celebrity chef who founded the organisation, told mourners on Thursday. Speaking at Washington National Cathedral to those gathered to honour the aid workers, Andrés said there was no excuse for the killings and renewed calls for an investigation into the deaths.

• Progressive activists in the US have condemned Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House of Representatives, for “wilfully spreading misinformation” and “inciting violence” in a TV interview about student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.