A United States envoy said an agreement to end the Israel-Hezbollah war is “within our grasp” after talks in Lebanon.
However, there was no such optimism in the Gaza Strip, where the looting of nearly 100 aid trucks by armed men worsened an already severe food crisis.
Amos Hochstein, the Biden administration’s pointman on Israel and Lebanon, arrived as Hezbollah’s allies in the Lebanese government said it had responded positively to the proposal, which would entail both the militants and Israeli ground forces withdrawing from a UN buffer zone in southern Lebanon.
The buffer zone would be policed by thousands of additional UN peacekeepers and Lebanese troops.
Israel has called for a stronger enforcement mechanism, potentially including the ability to operate against any Hezbollah threats, something Lebanon is likely to oppose.
Mr Hochstein said he had held “very constructive talks” with Lebanon’s parliament speaker Nabih Berri, an ally of Hezbollah who is mediating on the group’s behalf, on Tuesday.
“Specifically today, we have continued to significantly narrow the gaps,” the envoy told reporters after the two-hour meeting.
“It’s ultimately the decisions of the parties to reach a conclusion to this conflict… It is now within our grasp.”
Mr Berri said the “situation is good in principle”, though some unresolved technical details remain.
The Lebanese side was now waiting to hear the results of Hochstein’s talks with Israeli officials, he told the Asharq al-Awsat newspaper.
The theft in Gaza over the weekend of nearly 100 trucks loaded with food and other humanitarian aid sent prices soaring and caused shortages in central Gaza, where most of the population of 2.3 million people have fled and where hundreds of thousands are crammed into squalid tent camps.
Experts say famine may already have set in in the north, where Israel has been waging a weekslong offensive that has killed hundreds of people and driven tens of thousands from their homes.
Hamas ignited the war in Gaza when its fighters stormed into Israel on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250.
Around 100 hostages are still inside Gaza, at least a third of them believed to be dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed almost 44,000 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, according to local health authorities, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants in their toll.
The war has left much of the territory in ruins and forced around 90% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million to flee, often multiple times.
Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel the day after the Hamas attack in what it said was solidarity with the Palestinians and Hamas, a fellow Iran-backed militant group.
Israel launched retaliatory airstrikes, and all-out war erupted in September.
Israeli bombardment has killed more than 3,500 people in Lebanon and wounded almost 15,000, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.
It also displaced nearly 1.2 million, or a quarter of Lebanon’s population.
On the Israeli side, 87 soldiers and 50 civilians have been killed by rockets, drones and missiles, and tens of thousands of Israelis have been evacuated from homes near the border.
