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US vice-president JD Vance arrived in Israel on Tuesday in a push by top American officials to hold together a ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza that has started to fray amid violence and recriminations.
Vance arrived a day after Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, also travelled to the country.
The visits came after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered wide-ranging air strikes and temporarily blocked aid into Gaza over the weekend, saying it was in response to a Hamas attack that killed two Israeli soldiers.
Israeli media reported that the escalation ended after pressure from Witkoff and Kushner, who were central to brokering the US-backed accord.
Vance was expected to meet Netanyahu. The Israeli premier also met the chief of Egypt’s intelligence services on Tuesday, according to his office.
Under the terms of Trump’s peace plan, Hamas released the last of the 20 living Israeli hostages seized during its October 7 2023 attack on Israel, which triggered the two-year war in Gaza.
Israel has in turn freed 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and withdrawn its forces from about half of Gaza. It is also required to allow the UN to transport large amounts of food and medicine to the shattered enclave.
While Hamas has so far released the bodies of 13 dead hostages, it says it needs more time to extricate the remains of another 15 still buried under rubble, prompting an angry response from far-right Israeli politicians opposed to the ceasefire.
Vance’s visit, however, comes as the parties prepare to negotiate the next phase of the deal, which is expected to be significantly more challenging.
Under the terms of Trump’s peace plan, Hamas is expected to disarm and a foreign stabilisation force will take over security as Israeli forces pull back to a smaller buffer zone, bringing an end to the hostilities.
The deal also calls for reconstruction to begin under the oversight of an international and Palestinian governance body, which has yet to take shape.
Hamas’s top negotiator and de facto leader Khalil al-Hayya said on Tuesday that the militant group was committed to the ceasefire and was operating under American, Qatari and Egyptian assurances that the two-year conflict was truly over.
“What we have heard from the mediators and the US president assures us that the war in Gaza has ended,” he said in a statement on Hamas’s official social media channels.
“We are committed to recovering the bodies of all detained Israeli prisoners [but] are facing extreme difficulty in retrieving the bodies and are continuing our efforts.”
Netanyahu has come under pressure from members of his far-right coalition to break the ceasefire and resume the war until Hamas is destroyed.
The New York Times, citing unnamed sources, reported that Vance’s trip was intended in part to prevent the Israeli prime minister from resuming the conflict. An Israeli official declined to comment on that report.
Netanyahu’s government had already broken an earlier US-backed ceasefire and resumed the conflict in March.
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