The United States, Egypt, Qatar and Turkiye have urged the parties to the Gaza ceasefire to honour their commitments and show restraint, the chief US envoy says after talks in the US city of Miami.
Senior officials from the four mediator countries met Steve Witkoff, US President Donald Trump’s special envoy, on Friday to review the first phase of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which took effect on October 10, according to a joint statement released on Saturday.
The meeting was held against the backdrop of ongoing Israeli attacks on the enclave. The Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza said that six people were killed on Friday when an Israeli strike hit a school housing displaced people, raising the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli fire since the deal took effect to about 400.
“We reaffirm our full commitment to the entirety of the President’s [Trump’s] 20-point peace plan and call on all parties to uphold their obligations, exercise restraint, and cooperate with monitoring arrangements,” Witkoff said in a statement posted on X.
Saturday’s statement cited progress yielded in the first stage of the peace agreement, including expanded humanitarian assistance, the return of captives’ bodies, partial force withdrawals and a reduction in hostilities.
It called for “the near-term establishment and operationalisation” of a transitional administration, which is due to happen in the second phase of the agreement, and said that consultations would continue in the coming weeks over its implementation.
Under the truce deal’s terms, Israel is supposed to withdraw from its positions in Gaza, an interim authority is to govern the Palestinian territory instead of Hamas, and an international stabilisation force is to be deployed.
On Friday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressed hope that countries would contribute troops for the stabilisation force, but also urged the disarmament of Hamas, warning the process would unravel unless that happened.
A meeting was also held between Hamas’s chief negotiator, Khalil al-Hayya, and Turkish intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin in Istanbul on Saturday.
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