US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to travel to Egypt Tuesday to discuss the latest efforts to secure a Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal, the State Department said.
It did not announce any corresponding plans to travel to Israel, which is often on his itinerary when he is in the Middle East.
His trip to the region comes just one day after US envoy Amos Hochstein was in Israel to discuss diplomatic efforts to calm the IDF-Hezbollah violence along Israel’s northern border.
“The Secretary will meet with Egyptian officials to discuss ongoing efforts to reach a ceasefire in Gaza that secures the release of all hostages, alleviates the suffering of the Palestinian people, and helps establish broader regional security,” the State Department said.
The trip is expected to last until the 19th. While in Egypt he will co-chair the opening of the U.S.-Egypt Strategic Dialogue with Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty.
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters in Washington on Monday that the US continued “to engage with our partners in the region, most specifically with Egypt and Qatar.”
He spoke just two weeks after a high-level meeting took place in Doha, led by CIA Director William Burns, but failed to achieve any tangible results.
Hamas’s execution of six Israeli hostages had also created a sense of despair.
Low-level negotiations, however, have contended on the first stage of a three-part deal that would last for six weeks, and see the return of up to 32 hostages out of the remaining 101 captives.
Qatar and Egypt have been the main mediators for a deal, with the support of the US.
Miller said he didn’t “have a timetable,” and added that “we are working expeditiously to try to develop that proposal, try to find something that would bring both the parties to say ‘yes,’ and to formally submit it.”
US negotiators, including Burns, have said that 90% of Phase One is agreed upon and that the difficulty was in securing the remaining 10%.
Miller confirmed that the two main sticking points remain the details of how many Palestinian security prisoners and terrorists held in Israeli jails would be freed in exchange for each captive.
During the talks in Doha, there had been an agreement that some 800 Palestinian prisoners would be freed.
US Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew told the Haaretz National Security Conference on Monday, “We are pressing as hard as we can, from the president down through the entire team to reach an agreement on a [Gaza] ceasefire and a hostage release.”
Among the complications, he said, is that Hamas is not a government and has no direct relations with Israel or the United States, Lew said.
The negotiations are taking place through mediators, he said.
“We don’t know what Hamas is willing to accept, and we’re pressing for Israel, the United States, Qatar, and Egypt to bring together, as close as we can, one position in the end, to force a decision by Hamas,” he said.
Lew said that Israel has shown flexibility in the talks for a hostage and ceasefire deal.
“The last indications we’ve had from the Government of Israel are that there’s flexibility on the key issues, and we need to drive it to closure,” he said.
If Phase One of the deal can be implanted, he said, it would be easier to achieve a diplomatic resolution to the cross-border IDF-Hezbollah conflict, Lew said.