Push for Israel-Hamas truce intensifies

GAZA STRIP, Mar 05 (AFP/BBC): International mediators were with Hamas negotiators in Cairo Tuesday for talks on a truce to pause nearly five months of fighting in Gaza before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which begins early next week.

Envoys from the Palestinian militant group and the United States were expected to meet with Qatari and Egyptian mediators for a third day of negotiations on a six-week truce, the exchange of dozens of remaining hostages for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and increased aid to Gaza.

Israeli negotiators have so far stayed away from the talks, despite growing diplomatic pressure for a truce to take effect before Ramadan.

Israeli media reported that the country's negotiating team boycotted the talks after Hamas did not provide a list of living hostages.

Senior Hamas leader Bassem Naim told AFP that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was to blame for obstructing the talks and said it was for the United States to stop the war before Ramadan, saying the "ball is in their court".

Israel has said it believes 130 of the 250 captives taken by Hamas in the October attack that triggered the war remain in Gaza, but that 31 have been killed.

As conditions in the besieged Palestinian territory deteriorate and the spectre of famine looms, Israel has faced increasingly sharp rebukes from its top ally the United States.

Vice President Kamala Harris expressed "deep concern about the humanitarian conditions in Gaza" during talks in Washington on Monday with Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz.

Children starving to death

in northern Gaza : WHO

Children are dying of starvation in northern Gaza, the World Health Organization (WHO) chief says. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the agency's visits over the weekend to the Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals were the first since early October.

In a post on social media, he spoke of "grim findings". A lack of food resulted in the deaths of 10 children and "severe levels of malnutrition", while hospital buildings have been destroyed, he wrote.

The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza reported on Sunday that at least 15 children had died from malnutrition and dehydration at the Kamal Adwan hospital. A sixteenth child died on Sunday at a hospital in the southern city of Rafah, the Palestinian official news agency Wafa reported on Monday.

Dr Tedros reported "severe levels of malnutrition, children dying of starvation, serious shortages of fuel, food and medical supplies, hospital buildings destroyed" in northern Gaza, where an estimated 300,000 people are living with little food or clean water.

"The lack of food resulted in the deaths of 10 children," he posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. The visits were the WHO's first in months "despite our efforts to gain more regular access to the north of Gaza", he wrote.

"The situation at Al-Awda Hospital is particularly appalling, as one of the buildings is destroyed," he added. The UN warned last week that famine in Gaza was "almost inevitable".

A senior UN aid official warned that at least 576,000 people across the Gaza Strip - one quarter of the population - faced catastrophic levels of food insecurity and one in six children under the age of two in the north were suffering from acute malnutrition.

And the regional director of the UN's children's agency, Unicef, said "the chil.