It is now harder to achieve a Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal in light of the explosions of Hezbollah beepers across Lebanon, Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty told reporters in Cairo on Wednesday, during a joint press conference with visiting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
“We are in continuous communication with Hamas” which has highlighted its commitment to the original framework agreement of May 27 and the July 2nd version, Badr said.
But “what happened yesterday in Lebanon is hindering and is limiting the achieving of a ceasefire agreement and the release of the hostages,” he said. Israel has not claimed responsibility for the attacks, but is widely believed to have been behind them.
Badr warned that “we are on the bank of a comprehensive war” and “any mistake can lead us to a comprehensive war in the region, and this is very dangerous.”
Egypt and Qatar, with the help of the US, have been the main mediators for a deal that in its first phase would see the release of some 32 of the remaining 101 hostages and a six-week lull to the war.
The US has believed that a wider war in the North would make it impossible to finalize the deal, which it hopes would also lead to a diplomatic resolution to the IDF-Hezbollah war along Israel’s northern border which has run concurrent to the October 7 war.
Blinken told reporters that this is one of the reasons it was urgent to conclude a deal as soon as possible.
“One of the hallmarks” of the process is that communication with all the parties has been complicated and time-consuming, he said.
“We’ve seen that in the intervening time, you might have an event, an incident, something that makes the process more difficult, that threatens to slow it. Anything of that nature, by definition, is probably not good in terms of achieving the result that we want,” he said.
“The bottom line is this,” he said, a Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal “is less a question of substance and more a question of political will,” he said, as he spoke of how both parties had a responsibility to conclude a deal.
“For both parties, it’s important to demonstrate that political will to get this agreement concluded,” he said.
Political will is what the US is “looking for” and what is “imperative” to get the deal across the finish line, Blinken said.
“If that will is present, this agreement gets done. If it gets done it has immediate benefits for everyone involved, starting with the hostages coming home and the people in Gaza getting immediate relief,” Blinken stated. A deal also opens up possibilities for diplomatic solutions including along the Israeli-Lebanese border, he added.
Most of the deal is agreed upon
He repeated statements that US officials have made in past weeks, that out of the 18 points in the Phase One of the deal, 15 have already been agreed upon.
“We’ve made a tremendous amount of progress over the last month, month and a half,” Blinken told reporters. “There are, I think, in the in the agreement, 18 paragraphs, 15 of them are agreed on.”
“But the remaining issues need to be resolved. We put forward with the Egyptians and the Qataris ideas for resolving them,” he said.
Two of the final stumbling blocks have been Israel’s insistence on an IDF presence along the Philadelphi corridor, and issues regarding the swap of hostages for Palestinian security prisoners and terrorists in Israeli jails.
Badr clarified that Egypt would not accept a permanent IDF presence along its border with Gaza.
“We have a very frank and clear stance,” Badr said in response to a question about an Israeli presence along the critical buffer zone between Egypt and Gaza.
“Egypt will not accept any changes to the existing rules before the seventh of October, especially with regard to the rules of the operation of the Palestinian side,” he said in a statement that was translated from Arabic into English.
“The total reaction of any military presence along the opposite side of the border crossing and the aforementioned [Philadelphi] corridor,” Badr said.
Blinken was in Egypt to hold a strategic dialogue between the two countries but used the opportunity to also discuss ways to advance the Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal.
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