Hamas has accepted an offer for a temporary ceasefire with Israel, a Hamas official confirmed to The Hill.
The news comes amid rising fears that Israel is set to launch an invasion of Rafah, a southern city in Gaza where about a million Gazans are sheltering.
Hamas’s head of political and international relations, Dr. Basem Naim, confirmed to The Hill that Hamas had communicated with Egyptian and Qatari mediators that it had accepted a ceasefire proposal.
The U.S., along with Egypt and Qatar, has engaged intensively for weeks on a truce proposal between Israel and Hamas.
Israel did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Biden administration has said the stall in talks rested solely on Hamas, indicating that Israel had agreed to the details of the truce.
Ceasefire mediators have not publicly detailed the full contents of the truce proposal.
But the broad contours of the deal is a six-to-eight week pause in fighting, in which Hamas would release Israeli hostages it has held since it kidnapped them from Israel on Oct 7. The release of the hostages would occur in phases, with the most vulnerable of the 133 believed to be in Gaza released first.
In exchange, Israel is expected to release an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, withdraw its troops from certain regions of the Gaza Strip and allow for Gazans to travel from the south of the territory to the north.
The pause in fighting is also expected to allow for a surge of humanitarian aid into the Strip, where more than one million Palestinians have been displaced by fighting, tens of thousands have been wounded amid the war, and starvation and disease are rampant.
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