As officials report that a deal has been agreed, a precarious pause in hostilities and the release of hostages could only be welcomed<\/p>\n
Hope has rarely felt so fragile, or so inadequate. A moment long sought and prayed for will nonetheless be met with fear and apprehension as well as joy by Palestinians<\/a> in the wasteland that is Gaza and among the traumatised families of Israeli hostages<\/a>.<\/p>\n After more than 15 months of war, which has left tens\u00a0of thousands dead and almost 2 million struggling\u00a0to survive, US officials and others reported that a ceasefire and hostage-release deal has been reached. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said there were still \u201cunresolved clauses\u201d, though his cabinet<\/a> was expected to vote on it on Thursday morning. They should back it. The broad outlines of this agreement have long been clear. The cost of the delay is unbearable. Since it was first mooted, thousands more Palestinians and an unknown number of Israeli hostages taken in the Hamas raids of\u00a07\u00a0October 2023 have been killed. Last week, research\u00a0in the Lancet medical journal suggested that the death toll recorded by Gazan health officials was 40% too low<\/a>, with an estimated 64,260 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces by last June.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As officials report that a deal has been agreed, a precarious pause in hostilities and the release of hostages could only be welcomed Hope has rarely felt so fragile, or so inadequate. A moment long sought and prayed for will nonetheless be met with fear and apprehension as well as joy by Palestinians in the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30584\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}