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After meetings in Israel, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was pressing Hamas’s leadership through intermediaries to continue talks on the deal.
traveling with Secretary Blinken in Al Alamein, Egypt
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken pressed ahead with his diplomatic tour of the Middle East to push for a cease-fire in Israel’s war with Hamas, meet with the Egyptian president before traveling to Qatar to talk with officials there.
Mr. Blinken was pressing Hamas leadership through the leaders in Egypt and Qatar,m who are acting as intermediaries, to continue talks on a deal to secure a truce and free the remaining hostages in Gaza, a senior administration official said.
Negotiations were expected to resume in Egypt this week, after two days of high-level talks in Qatar ended on Friday without an immediate breakthrough. On Monday, Mr. Blinken discussed the deal with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Jerusalem.
In Egypt, Mr. Blinken met with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt at his summer palace in El Alamein, and with the foreign minister, Badr Abdelatty. Later in the day he flew to Doha, Qatar, to hold talks with Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, the country’s emir.
Mr. Blinken “thanked the president for Egypt’s partnership as a mediator on the cease-fire talks,” according to a brief statement by State Department spokesman Vedant Patel.
Mr. el-Sisi’s office said in a statement that the Egyptian leader had been “keen to stress that the time has come to end the ongoing war” and shared Mr. Blinken’s concerns for the potential for violence to spread in the region. Mr. el-Sisi insisted that any cease-fire proposal would need to be followed by a “broader international recognition of the Palestinian state and the implementation of the two-state solution.”
