Dubai: Palestinian officials said on Tuesday a Gaza ceasefire deal with Israel has been reached under Egyptian mediation and a formal announcement of an agreement was imminent.
There was no immediate confirmation from Israel, where a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declined to comment.
Cairo’s initiative, Palestinians officials said, called for an indefinite halt to seven weeks of hostilities, the immediate opening of Gaza’s blockaded crossings with Israel and Egypt and a widening of the enclave’s fishing zone in the Mediterranean.
Under a second stage that would begin a month later, Israel and the Palestinians would discuss the construction of a Gaza sea port and an Israeli release of Hamas prisoners in the occupied West Bank, the officials said.
Hamas’s exiled deputy leader, Mussa Abu Marzuk, wrote on his Facebook page that the deal was a ‘victory’ for the resistance. Palestinian health officials say 2,129 people, most of them civilians, including more than 490 children, have been killed in Gaza since July 8, when Israel launched its assault on Gaza.
Thousands of homes in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed or damaged in the conflict. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights said 540,000 people had been displaced in the territory where Palestinians, citing Israeli attacks that have hit schools and mosques, say no place is safe.
Meanwhile, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was to present an initiative Tuesday to the Palestinian leadership that, people close to him said, would bypass UN-brokered negotiations with Israel that have failed for many years to produce a separate Palestinian state.
Instead he will call for an international conference or UN resolution demanding a deadline to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.
As leverage, Abbas would join the International Criminal Court and other institutions where he has long threatened to pursue Israeli violations, the sources said. The initiative has reportedly won the backing of Arab states, Western states and Russia.
