Board of Peace official: We’re in a tense moment; we’re trying get all sides to stop fighting in Gaza

A Board of Peace official tells The Times of Israel that “we’re in a tense moment,” as Israel continues to carry out lethal airstrikes in Gaza, and senior Israeli officials stress that they have not agreed to suspend attacks against Hamas.

“There’s been a lot of rhetoric and a lot of things said, and now quite a few actions in the last hours,” says the BoP official. “We’re trying to get over the hurdle and just get some calm in because I think that’s a critical first step.”

Israeli airstrikes overnight and today killed at least nine people, according to local health officials, and Energy Minister Eli Cohen vowed that strikes in the territory will not stop despite Hamas signing a US-backed disarmament plan and earlier reports that Israel agreed to halt attacks.

“It’s very clear that the plan shows that cessation of military operations is a key element that we work to get to,” says the official.

The official says that Israel was briefed “extensively” as the deal came together.

“If you look at the roadmap from when we started this negotiation to when we concluded, very little has changed,” says the official. “We’ve stuck to the principles that we started with at the beginning. This is an implementation of the comprehensive peace plan that President Trump unveiled last year that was enshrined by the UN Security Council. Israel agreed to both. And they’ve been fully kept fully abreast on the sequencing of it.”