'There is an enormous pressure here inside Israel for Israeli leaders to get a deal in place that frees the hostages'
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00:00I can tell you that the most significant part of Rafah from an Israeli point of view militarily
00:06and I guess from Hamas's point of view too, is what's called the Philadelphia Corridor.
00:11That's the corridor at the side between Egypt and Rafah and between Gaza.
00:18And so it's 12 kilometres long.
00:20It's not big.
00:21Israel has gone in about a quarter of the way, only three kilometres, but as far as
00:26the Rafah border crossing, that's why it's closed.
00:29They say they have already identified tunnel shafts.
00:33That is the area in which Hamas, from which Hamas was smuggling goods and military equipment
00:39from Egypt into Gaza.
00:42So that's a significant military objective from the Israeli point of view.
00:47And that I think is where it's focusing its military, that is its ground troops at the
00:55moment.
00:56We have seen airstrikes overnight in Rafah.
00:58And what Israel says is that all of this, in a statement from the prime minister last
01:03night, is meant to put the pressure on Hamas while negotiations for a ceasefire continue.
01:11As you mentioned there, ceasefire talks stalling in the past 24 hours after Israel rejected
01:18a deal that Hamas had agreed to, Iris.
01:21Well, we don't know very much about the actual terms, what Hamas did.
01:25And it was a breakthrough moment, Hexie.
01:29Hamas said it was accepting, in principle, a deal that was presented to it, finessed,
01:35if you like, by negotiators in Cairo over the past 10 days.
01:39That's Egyptian mediators, Qatari mediators, and American mediators.
01:45Israeli negotiators were not there.
01:47And Israel now says this wasn't the deal they proposed originally.
01:50However, they are sending, or have already sent, in fact, a negotiating team to Cairo.
01:56And they say this military pressure will go hand in hand.
01:59But there's an enormous pressure here, inside Israel, for Israeli leaders to get a deal
02:07in place that frees the hostages.
02:09It's now seven months to the day since the October 7th attacks.
02:14And the symbolism of that is not lost on people.
02:17And the fact that Israeli hostages have spent so long under the ground in Gaza, the fact
02:22that this war is so tiring for Palestinian civilians, for Israeli civilians displaced
02:29north and south in this country, for Lebanese civilians displaced in the south of Lebanon,
02:33I think there's a feeling that the time is up for the hostages and for the civilian populations.
02:41And I guess also a feeling that I'm hearing more and more from the hostage families, that
02:45they don't necessarily trust the Prime Minister to be acting in the best interests of the
02:51hostages, of their families, and of the nation, that his own political interests come into
02:56it as well.
02:57So all of those things in this mix today and an ongoing Israeli, smaller, targeted military
03:04operation in the Philadelphia corridor near the Gaza Strip.