PENTAGON — Palestinian officials said Tuesday that Fatah and the militant group Hamas were close to an agreement on a plan for administering postwar Gaza.
The plan would see Fatah, which governs part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and Hamas, which has controlled Gaza since 2007, jointly appointing a committee of up to 15 politically independent technocrats to administer the Gaza Strip.
The officials said the plan would follow a ceasefire agreement with Israel.
But months of talks brokered by the United States, Egypt and Qatar aimed at halting the fighting in Gaza have yet to yield an agreement between Israel and Hamas. Israel has said it is intent on erasing any vestige of Hamas control in Gaza in the postwar period.
U.S. and other officials expressed hope in recent days that a ceasefire deal between Israel and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah militant group could help to push along the Gaza ceasefire efforts.
However, new fighting erupted in Lebanon on Tuesday, with Israel carrying out several drone and artillery attacks, including a deadly strike that Lebanon's Health Ministry and state media said killed a shepherd.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to keep striking "with an iron fist" against perceived Hezbollah violations of the truce. Defense Minister Israel Katz warned that if the ceasefire collapses, Israel will target not just Hezbollah but the Lebanese state — an expansion of Israel's campaign.
"If until now we have differentiated between Lebanon and Hezbollah, that will no longer be the case," Katz said during a visit to Israel's northern border.
The ceasefire deal calls for Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon and for Hezbollah to move its fighters away from the border. Lebanon's military and U.N. peacekeepers are set to patrol a buffer zone between the two sides.
Elsewhere, Israel's military said Tuesday that it targeted vehicles in the Aqabah area of the Jordan Valley in the occupied West Bank, killing three Hamas members it said were planning an imminent attack.
Israel also carried out an airstrike in Syria on Tuesday, saying it killed a senior member of Hezbollah responsible for coordinating with Syria's army on rearming and resupplying the Lebanese militant group.
Renewed rocket launches from Hezbollah militants in Lebanon and a wave of retaliatory strikes by Israel are intensifying pressure on the ceasefire agreement.
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) late Monday carried out a series of strikes across Lebanon, accusing the Iranian-backed Hezbollah of defying the deal by targeting Israel with rockets.
"Hezbollah's launches tonight constitute a violation of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Lebanon," the IDF said in a statement on its Telegram channel. "The State of Israel demands that the relevant parties in Lebanon fulfill their responsibilities and prevent Hezbollah's hostile activity from within Lebanese territory."
Israel said its targets included dozens of Hezbollah rocket launchers, terrorist fighters and other Hezbollah infrastructure.
Lebanon's Health Ministry late Monday said Israeli strikes in the towns of Haris and Talousa killed nine people and injured three others.
The ministry said earlier that Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon killed two more.
The flurry of strikes followed a Hezbollah rocket attack on an Israeli military position in the disputed Shebaa Farms area, which Hezbollah described as a "defensive warning strike."
But despite the revived hostilities and tough talk from both Israeli and Hezbollah officials, U.S. officials expressed hope Monday that a temporary peace will prevail.
"Broadly speaking, it's our assessment that despite some of these incidents that we're seeing, the ceasefire is holding," Pentagon press secretary Major General Pat Ryder said Monday during a briefing with reporters.
"We will continue to work with partners in the region to ensure that the ceasefire has the best potential for succeeding," he added.
U.S. State Department officials Monday, likewise, said they have not seen indications that the ceasefire is in danger of collapsing, despite accusations by both sides of violations.
"This is work that's ongoing," said State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller. "We take all of them very seriously, and we work through the [ceasefire] mechanism that we set up to adjudicate them."
Negotiators from the United States and France have touted the ceasefire deal as a chance to forge a more permanent cessation of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon, and end fighting that erupted following the October 7, 2023, attack by Hezbollah ally Hamas on Israel.
During its attack, Hamas killed about 1,200 people and took another 250 hostage. There are still about 100 hostages held in Gaza, with about one-third believed to be dead.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump warned Monday on his social media platform that "there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East" if the hostages are not released by the time he takes office on January 20.
"Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America," he added. "RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW!"
In its counteroffensive in Gaza, Israel has killed more than 44,400 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish in its death toll between civilians and combatants. Israel, without providing evidence, says it has killed more than 17,000 militants.
Hamas and Hezbollah have been designated as terror groups by the United States, the United Kingdom and other Western countries.
VOA’s Nike Ching contributed to this report. Some material came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
