Hamas has alleged that the United States was using the Gaza ceasefire negotiations to buy time for Israel to carry out massacres after massacres in Palestine.
The Hamas statement came after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu had accepted a “bridging proposal for a ceasefire deal in Gaza”, Al Jazeera reported.
“When Blinken says that the Israelis agreed and then the Israelis say that there is an updated proposal, this means that the Americans are subject to Israeli pressure and not the other way around. We believe that it is a manoeuvre that gives the Israelis more time,” senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan told Reuters.
Meanwhile, AFP reported the United Nations condemned “unacceptable” levels of violence that are now commonplace against humanitarian workers after a record 280 were killed worldwide in 2023.
And it warned that the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza is potentially fueling even higher numbers of such deaths this year.
“The normalization of violence against aid workers and the lack of accountability are unacceptable, unconscionable and enormously harmful for aid operations everywhere,” Joyce Msuya, acting director of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said in a statement on World Humanitarian Day.
“With 280 aid workers killed in 33 countries last year, 2023 marked the deadliest year on record for the global humanitarian community,” a 137% increase over 2022, when 118 aid workers died, OCHA said in the statement.
It cited the Aid Worker Security Database which has tracked such figures back to 1997.
The UN said 163 of those killed in 2023 were aid workers killed in Gaza during the first three months of the war between Israel and Hamas, mainly in air strikes.
