Israel has pulled all of its ground troops out of southern Gaza for “tactical reasons”, the country’s army has said, raising questions about the future direction of the war as Hamas and Israeli delegations travel to Egypt for a new round of ceasefire talks.
Two brigades will stay in the northern half of the Gaza Strip and the new corridor that now bifurcates the Palestinian territory at Wadi Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces said on Sunday, in order to “preserve the IDF’s freedom of action and its ability to conduct precise intelligence based-operations”.
It is believed the drawdown is primarily to relieve reservists after nearly four months of intense fighting in the decimated southern city of Khan Younis, rather than any significant shift in strategy.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Israel has pulled all of its ground troops out of southern Gaza for “tactical reasons”, the country’s army has said, raising questions about the future direction of the war as Hamas and Israeli delegations travel to Egypt for a new round of ceasefire talks.
But the timing of the announcement coincides with the beginning of a round of mediated talks in Cairo, the Egyptian capital, aimed at securing a second truce and hostage release deal, and is being received as a positive sign that the latest negotiations, after much faltering, may finally bear fruit.
The CIA director, Bill Burns, is also expected to attend the talks, which will begin on Sunday evening, alongside the Qatari foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is under growing international pressure over his forces’ conduct in Gaza and the desperate humanitarian situation, said on Sunday that Israel would not give into Hamas’s “extreme” demands or agree to any ceasefire until the remaining hostages were released.
Hamas, the militant group that seized control of Gaza in 2007, triggered the bloodiest war in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict with an unprecedented cross-border offensive on 7 October, in which they killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted another 250, according to official Israeli tallies.
Famine is “projected and imminent” in the northern half of Gaza, a UN-backed report said last month, and according to Oxfam the number of people facing “catastrophic levels” of hunger has nearly doubled since December.
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