Israel calls up reservists as concern over Gaza ceasefire mounts

Israel’s military has called up reservists in preparation for a possible resumption of its offensive in Gaza if Hamas fails to meet a Saturday deadline to release more Israeli hostages and a nearly month-old ceasefire breaks down, Reuters has reported.

Concern that the ceasefire will collapse is growing as fury mounts in Arab countries over President Donald Trump’s plan for the United States to take over Gaza, displace its Palestinian inhabitants and build an international beach resort.

Under the ceasefire deal in force since 19 January, Hamas agreed to free three more hostages on Saturday. However, the Palestinian resistance movement said this week it was suspending the handover because of what it said were Israeli violations of the ceasefire terms. Trump responded by saying that all hostages must be freed by noon on Saturday or he would “let hell break out”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu then warned on Tuesday that his country would resume “intense fighting” if Hamas did not meet the deadline, but he did not say how many hostages should be freed.

Netanyahu added that he had ordered the military to gather forces in and around Gaza, and the military announced it was deploying additional forces to Israel’s south, including mobilising reservists.

READ: Israel opposes disclosure of full deal signed with Hamas

The head of Hamas in Gaza, Khalil Al-Hayya, arrived in Cairo on Wednesday for a surprise visit to discuss the fragile ceasefire. A Hamas official told Reuters that mediators Egypt and Qatar had stepped up efforts to end the current impasse.

The standoff threatens to reignite a conflict in which Israel has devastated the Gaza Strip, internally displaced most of its people, caused shortages of food and running water and pushed the Middle East to the brink of a wider regional war.

Palestinians in Gaza expressed alarm that the ceasefire might collapse and urged Hamas and Israeli leaders to agree on an extension.

“We had barely started believing that a truce would happen and that a solution was on the way, God willing,” said Lotfy Abu Taha, a resident of Rafah in southern Gaza. “The people are suffering. The people are the victims.”

Israeli officials said government ministers had endorsed Trump’s threat to cancel the ceasefire unless all hostages are released on Saturday. Hamas, meanwhile, said it remained committed to the agreement, but that Israel must fulfil what it agreed to do when it signed the deal. Despite the Trump and Netanyahu threats, the movement has not agreed to release the hostages on Saturday.

READ: Israel’s actions drove Hamas to suspend captive release, say Israeli experts

Arab League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Gheit said in Dubai that Trump’s vision for Gaza could lead the Middle East into a new cycle of crises with a “damaging effect on peace and stability.”

Trump has said Palestinians in Gaza could settle in countries such as Jordan and Egypt. Both reject the proposal.

Egypt will host an emergency Arab summit on 27 February to discuss “serious” developments for Palestinians.

In a sign of Arab anger over Trump’s vision of Gaza, two Egyptian security sources said Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi would not go to Washington for talks if the agenda included Trump’s plan to displace Palestinians. The date for such a visit has not been announced, and the Egyptian presidency and foreign ministry did not comment.

The Gaza war — described by the International Court of Justice as “plausible genocide” — followed the Hamas-led cross-border incursion on 7 October, 2023, in which at least 1,200 people were killed, many of them by the Israel Defence Forces carrying out the controversial “Hannibal Directive”. An estimated 250 Israelis and Thais were taken into Gaza as hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

In response, Israel began its military offensive against Hamas which has killed at least 48,000 Palestinians in small, densely populated Gaza, according to Gaza health officials. Around 112,000 have been wounded, and 11,000 are missing, presumed dead, under the rubble of their homes and other civilian infrastructure destroyed by the apartheid state.

Hamas has freed 16 Israeli hostages from an initial group of 33 children, women and older men to be exchanged for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and detainees in the first stage of the ceasefire deal. It also returned five Thai hostages.

Negotiations on a second phase, which mediators hoped would include agreement on releasing the remaining hostages and a full Israeli troop withdrawal from Gaza, should be under way in Doha but an Israeli team returned home on Monday.

Palestinians fear a repeat of the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe), when nearly 800,000 people were driven out by Zionist terrorists when Israel was created in occupied Palestine. Trump has said that Palestinians would lose their legitimate right to return to their homes under his plan for Gaza.

Meanwhile, he wants Saudi Arabia, which wields heavy influence in other Arab and Muslim countries, to normalise ties with Israel. Riyadh has previously said that it will not establish ties with Israel without the creation of a Palestinian state.

Under his first administration in 2017-21, Trump brokered normalisation accords between Israel and some Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates. Asked if the UAE could find common ground with Washington on Gaza, Abu Dhabi’s ambassador to the US, Yousef Al-Otaiba, said the US approach was difficult. “But at the end of the day we’re all in a solution-seeking business, we just don’t know where it’s going to land yet,” he said.

UAE President Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan told US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday that peace efforts in the region should be on the basis of a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, state news agency WAM reported.

Trump’s Gaza plan upended decades of US Middle East policy which called for a Palestinian state co-existing in peace alongside Israel as the solution to one of the world’s most complex and volatile problems.

The Arab League’s Aboul Gheit said that the idea of the Arab Peace Initiative drawn up by Saudi Arabia in 2002 — in which Arab nations offered Israel normalised relations in return for a statehood deal with the Palestinians and full Israeli withdrawal from territory captured during the June 1967 war — would be reintroduced.

READ: Gaza: 118 Palestinians killed, 822 wounded since ceasefire began