#gaza-ceasefire

#gaza-ceasefire

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST: There is a lot left to do on President Trump's 20-point plan to end the war in Gaza. LEILA FADEL, HOST: Yeah. He still needs to appoint what he's calling a Board of Peace and get an international force up and running. And there are still pretty regular and fatal attacks in Gaza. But Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is visiting Trump in Florida today and trying to get him focused on some other things, like Iran and its proxies.

High on the agenda will be the ceasefire in Gaza, which in October halted the devastating two-year-long war. Though the terms agreed for an initial phase have been largely completed, with Israel's forces pulling back to new positions and Hamas releasing all living and all but one of the dead hostages, immense challenges face the implementation of the second phase of the president's 20-point plan.

Qatar warns daily Israeli breaches threaten entire agreement put forward by US President Donald Trump.

The United Nations Security Council last month mandated international troops to operate in Gaza through the end of 2027, but the exact role of these forces remains unclear. The U.S. convened representatives of dozens of countries in the Qatari capital this week to discuss plans for the International Stabilization Force, or ISF. It was only a planning meeting, with no countries yet formally committing troops, according to a U.S. official who spoke anonymously in order to discuss the closed-door meeting.

Israel has violated the United States-brokered Gaza ceasefire at least 497 times in 44 days, killing hundreds of Palestinians since the ceasefire came into effect on October 10, according to the Gaza Government Media Office. Some 342 civilians have been killed in the attacks, with children, women and the elderly accounting for the majority of the victims. list of 3 itemsend of list We condemn in the strongest terms the continued serious and systematic violations of the ceasefire agreement by the Israeli occupation authorities, the office said in a statement on Saturday.

Gaza risks sliding towards a deadly limbo where a ceasefire is nominally in place but killing continues, a top Qatari diplomat has warned, calling for rapid progress in setting up the international security force and administration to pave the way for full Israeli withdrawal. We don't want to reach a situation of no war, no peace, said Majed al-Ansari, adviser to Qatar's prime minister and spokesperson for the foreign ministry. On Tuesday, Israeli airstrikes killed more than 100 Palestinians, at least 66 of them women and children, in the deadliest day since Donald Trump declared the war was over.

It feels as though, for now, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a favorite of his US counterpart, Donald Trump. Meeting the US president in the Oval Office can be a risky undertaking one never knows what sort of greeting one might get but it hasn't been a problem for Erdogan, yet. For weeks, Trump has been talking about the 71-year-old Turkish leader in glowing terms.

"We are not a protectorate of the United States. Israel is the one that will decide on its security," Netanyahu said in a statement issued by his office as he headed into the meeting.

Vice President JD Vance is in Israel, where he is set to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Gaza ceasefire has been in place for almost two weeks. Vance says the deal is continuing to progress despite the fighting between Israel and Hamas over the weekend. The vice president, along with several other U.S. officials in Israel, is working to get the two sides to take the next steps under the deal.

Israel has received, via the Red Cross, the bodies of two hostages, which were returned to Israeli security forces in Gaza, Netanyahu's office said in a post on the X social media platform early on Sunday. The prime minister's office said the families of Israeli captives were updated on the return of the remains, and the two bodies had been transferred to Israel's National Centre of Forensic Medicine for identification.

A ceasefire in Gaza has created a hopefully enduring-albeit uneasy-pause in the two-year Israel-Hamas war, with the recent exchange and release of hostages hailed as a diplomatic breakthrough even as questions continue to come about whether this truce will hold. That uncertainty matters across the Middle East because even a small slip up could quickly devolve the region back into chaos with militaries and generals at the table instead of diplomats.

Earlier this week, Hamas and Israel agreed to a ceasefire that included the release of the twenty living hostages who remained in Gaza and some two thousand Palestinians who are held in Israeli jails. The success of the exchange has raised hopes that the devastating war may really be coming to an end. President Donald Trump, who took credit for the deal after pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept it, now wants both sides to implement his twenty-point peace plan,

"After 738 days in captivity, on October 13, all 20 surviving hostages were freed from the hands of the terrorist organization Hamas, with four German citizens among them," Merz said. "They're home. They're with their families. And that fills us, and me personally, with great joy and relief."