The threat of a renewed escalation in attacks came as Washington’s top diplomat, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, met officials in Israel to seek a longer pause in the devastating conflict.
The Palestinian group Hamas said its militants carried out a shooting in Jerusalem on Thursday, killing three people despite agreeing to extend for a day a truce in Gaza and to release at least 10 more Israeli hostages.
The threat of a renewed escalation in attacks came as Washington’s top diplomat, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, met officials in Israel to seek a longer pause in the devastating conflict.
The fate of the truce is hanging in the balance once again.
A Hamas source told Agence France-Presse that 10 more Israeli hostages would be released from Gaza in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, after the warring parties agreed to extend the pause in combat operations until Friday morning.
“All of them are alive,” said the source who is not authorised to speak to the media and asked to remain anonymous. “Israel last night refused a list Hamas proposed that included three Israeli bodies.”
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Only hours after the truce extension, the Islamist militants claimed responsibility for a shooting in Jerusalem that killed three people and called for an “escalation of the resistance”.
The morning attack saw two gunmen from annexed east Jerusalem kill three people and wound eight others at a bus stop in the western part of the city, before two off-duty soldiers “neutralised” them, police said.
Separately, two Israeli soldiers were slightly injured in a ramming attack on a checkpoint in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, the army said, adding the assailant had also been “shot and neutralised”.
If the truce does come to an end on Friday, it will be despite international pressure for more time to allow medical supplies, food and fuel into the besieged Gaza Strip after fierce combat and bombardments sparked by Hamas’s bloody October 7 attacks on Israel.
“We have seen over the last week the very positive development of hostages coming home, being reunited with their families,” Blinken said at a meeting with Israeli President Isaac Herzog in Tel Aviv.
