Rafah massacre: Biden pushing for six-week Gaza fighting halt after deadly Rafah strikes – live

Joe Biden said on Monday the US is pushing for a six-week pause in the fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza as a stepping stone toward a longer ceasefire.

Mr Biden and Jordan’s King Abdullah spoke after the two longtime allies held talks in the White House residence. Their discussions covered a daunting list of challenges, including a looming Israeli ground offensive in southern Gaza and the threat of a humanitarian calamity among Palestinian civilians.

Israel on Monday launched airstrikes in the Rafah refugee camp, killing at least 67 Palestinians, despite a warning from Mr Biden to hold fire.

Mr Biden, who has shown increasing exasperation with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for not heeding his advice, said the US was working with allies in the region on a deal to pause the fighting.

The deal would start with a pause in fighting of at least six weeks, “which we could then take the time to build something more enduring,” he said.

The Kremlin hopes that Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas will visit Russia at a time convenient for both sides, Russia’s RIA state news agency reported on Tuesday.

“Abbas has an open invitation. We hope that the visit will take place at a time convenient for both sides,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying.

RIA said that Mr Abbas had planned to come to Russia in November of last year, but the visit was postponed at the request of the Palestinian side.

In al-Najjar hospital in Gaza’s border city of Rafah, the shredded remains of body parts arrived in bags with numbers scribbled on the top.

Written by the first responders who had just pulled the limbs out of the rubble, the numbers signified the estimated number of people that they thought might be inside each bag.

The mangled pieces of human flesh are so damaged “it was impossible to properly identify them”, said Amjed*, a resident of the city who visited the hospital on Monday.

He shuttled from hospital to hospital, from bomb site to bomb site, trying to sort the missing from the dead in the wake of Israel’s ferocious overnight assault on the city.

“The first bodies to arrive at the hospitals were all children and women. There were so many bodies lining the ground,” he told The Independent.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Monday that Israel’s widening attacks on Gaza would “top our agenda” when he meets with the leaders of the UAE and Egypt over the next two days.

In a televised address following his weekly cabinet meeting in Ankara, Mr Erdogan chastised the “hypocritical policy” of the West as the “reason for Israel’s recklessness”.

Referring to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “wannabe Hitler”, he said Israel was “crossing a new red line every day in its policy of brutality and massacre.”

Western countries were “turning a blind eye to Netanyahu’s massacres,” he added.

Mr Erdogan is due to meet UAE president Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan on Tuesday before traveling to Egypt on Wednesday to meet president Abdel Fattah el-Sissi.

“What more can we do for our Gazan brothers in the meetings we will hold in the Emirates and Egypt? God willing, we will look at it,” he said.

The UN Security Council held an emergency closed meeting on the escalating civilian death toll in Gaza and Israel’s plans to move its offensive to Rafah where some 1.5 million Palestinians have fled hoping to find safety.

China’s UN Ambassador Zhang Jun said that there was “a loud cry” among council members about the need for urgent action – to deal with the “unfolding humanitarian catastrophe”.

Algeria, the Arab representative on the 15-member Security Council who called the meeting, has circulated a draft resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in the war.

Mr Zhang said the “very strong and overwhelming position of council members” is for the Security Council to act but one member – a clear reference to Israel’s closest ally the US – “worries about the complication of Security Council action with the bilateral efforts” it is undertaking.

Israeli airstrikes in Rafah should not affect negotiations toward a deal between Israel and Palestinian militants Hamas on the release of hostages, a U.S. official said on Monday, ahead of expected further talks between spy chiefs in Egypt.

Senior officials from the United States, Egypt, Israel and Qatar are expected to resume negotiations on Tuesday in Cairo to work on a three-phase deal framework that will see the release of hostages and achieve an extended pause, sources familiar with the matter said.

The framework was hammered out in Paris last month by CIA Director Bill Burns, his Israeli counterpart David Barnea of the Mossad, Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al Thani, who also serves as foreign minister, and Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel.