Gaza Cesefire Deal reaches a critical moment

Where is it? The first six -week phase of the Alto El Fuego de Gaza ends on Saturday.

The 42 days since January 19 have seen their fair part of uncertainty, hope, pain and anger, but everything that should have happened at that time has done so.

Israeli hostages, The Living and the Dead have been released. Palestinian prisoners released.

But negotiations on phase two, including the release of all the remaining living hostages and the withdrawal of the Israeli troops of Gaza, have barely begun.

The conversations opened at Cairo on Friday, but Israel’s delegation returned home at night.

The reports suggested that the negotiations would continue “at a distance” and that the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, had to hold night conversations with the delegation, the higher ministers and the chiefs of intelligence.

For such a meeting to take late on Saturday it was very unusual. But in the middle of Saturday, details have not been published.

Israel seems to be looking to extend the current phase for another six weeks, to recover more hostages and free more Palestinian prisoners, but without removing their troops.

The government here is inflexible in which Hamas, the group responsible for the massacres of October 7, 2023 and the 251 hostage taking, has to leave their weapons and renounce any form of authority in the Gaza Strip.

Israel also says that he is not yet ready to leave the Filadelphic corridor along the border of Egypt -Gaza, a process that should have begun on Saturday.

In a statement sent to journalists on Friday, an unidentified Israeli official said: “We will not allow Hamas’ murderers to wander again with our borders with trucks and weapons, and we will not allow them to reorganize smuggling.”

It is often believed that such anonymous quotes come directly from the prime minister’s office.

Last summer, efforts to ensure a high fire in Gaza hesitated when Netanyahu insisted on keeping Israeli troops parked along the Philadelphous corridor.

On Friday night, Hamas said he would not agree with any extension of phase one without guarantees of US, Qatar and Egyptian mediators that phase two will eventually take place.

Hamas seems determined to remain a force in Gaza, even if he could be willing to deliver the daily government to other Palestinian actors, including the Palestinian authority based in Cisjernas.

Egypt has been working on a reconstruction plan for Gaza, as an alternative to Donald Trump’s proposal to take the area and evacuate its entire civilian population.

But Western diplomats are not optimistic that the plan, which will be presented at a summit of the Arab League in Cairo next Tuesday, has the type of solid safety and governance arrangements that will be needed to meet Israeli demands.

This is a critical moment.

Despite all the emotional agitation of the last weeks, the Israelis have come to wait for the gradual liberation of hostages. It is believed that there are 24 alive, which are still released, with another 39 allegedly dead.

The Israelis desperately desperately want them back, without the type of propaganda screens that have disliked and enraged the entire country.

If the whole process now stops, the public anger, in Hamas and its own government, will be mounted. More street protests are planned, including one on Saturday night in the place of Tel Aviv than all Israeli now know as hostages.

“We demand the return of the remaining 59 hostages for day 50 of the agreement,” says the invitation of the hostages and the headquarters of the missing families forum.

“Now it is our only window of opportunity, we will not get another.”

The UN Secretary General, António Guterres, has intervened, urging the parties to “not save any effort to avoid a breakdown of this agreement.”

There is a generalized belief that, sooner or later, war will begin again.

It is a gloomy perspective, for hostages and for two million Palestinians in Gaza who try to build their lives in current and fragile peace.

In a place where families are still digging bodies of the debris, sometimes with their naked hands, the idea of ​​a resumption of a conflict that has already claimed tens of thousands of lives is chilling.

The areas in the middle of the Gaza Strip that until now have escaped the worst of the conflict would probably suffer from any return to war, which makes it even more difficult to keep life in this devastated strip of earth.