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The White House expressed hope Friday that there was progress in talks about the release of the remaining hostages Hamas holds in Gaza, as President Joe Biden's Middle East envoy was returning to Washington from the region.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Biden spoke with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi on Friday. The U.S. president also spoke with Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani in efforts to free the hostages, Kirby said.
Meanwhile, the head of the CIA, William Burns, will be meeting with his counterparts from Israel and Egypt, as well as Qatar's emir, on the release of the remaining hostages, and in an attempt to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, U.S. media reported.
Biden's Middle East envoy, Brett McGurk, was engaged in "active" discussions on ensuring the release of hostages, according to the White House.
Qatar has played a central role in the negotiations since November, when the first group of hostages was released from Gaza.
The interlocutors are trying to negotiate a new cease-fire to allow the release of more hostages and the release of jailed Palestinians held by Israel. About 100 hostages held by Hamas and 240 Palestinians jailed by Israel were freed in the late November weeklong cease-fire.
But no new cease-fire agreement has been reached.
In a majority ruling of at least 15 out of 17 judges Friday, the International Court of Justice, or ICJ, ordered Israel to prevent acts of genocide against the Palestinians and do more to help civilians, but it stopped short of ordering a cease-fire as requested by the plaintiff, South Africa.
South Africa brought a case against Israel to the court this month, accusing it of carrying out a state-led genocide in its offensive against Hamas.
South Africa's legal premise for the case is that genocide is such a grave crime that all countries are duty-bound to prevent it.
While the ruling dashed Palestinian hopes of a binding order for cease-fire in Gaza, it also reflected a legal setback for Israel, which had hoped that the court would throw out a case brought under the genocide convention established after the Holocaust.
The court said the war was causing grievous humanitarian harm. It also said it was "gravely concerned" about the fate of hostages held in Gaza and called on Hamas and other armed groups to immediately release them without conditions. The hostages were captured in the October 7 attacks on Israel that triggered the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry said the decision was a welcome reminder that "no state is above the law." Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters the ruling would contribute to "isolating the occupation and exposing [Israel's] crimes in Gaza."
For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the ICJ's decision not to order a cease-fire but rejected the claim of genocide as "outrageous" and said that Israel would continue to defend itself.
Israel is required to submit a report to the court on the steps it has taken to comply with the orders within one month of the ruling. The court will examine in detail the merits of the case, a process that could take years.
While the ICJ's decisions are final and without appeal, the court has no way of enforcing them.
Israel says it makes the utmost efforts to avoid civilian casualties.
Gaza's Health Ministry said Friday that the territory's death toll had climbed to more than 26,000 people, with more than 64,400 wounded, in more than three months of war.
The ministry said early Friday that in the past 24 hours, 183 Palestinians had been killed in Israeli strikes and 377 had been injured.
The Israeli military said it was investigating an attack on Thursday that killed at least 20 people and wounded another 150 at a traffic circle in Gaza City. The attack occurred as Palestinians waited for humanitarian aid, Hamas health officials said.
Also in central Gaza, Palestinian health officials said a nighttime Israeli airstrike on a house in Al-Nusseirat refugee camp had killed six people.
The fighting has severely disrupted the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and the international charity ActionAid said Thursday that hunger there had reached catastrophic levels, prompting people to grind animal feed to use as flour.
"Famine is looming across the territory," ActionAid said in a statement, "while pockets of famine are strongly suspected in the north, where it is extremely challenging for aid to reach."
The fighting is part of Israel's efforts to end Hamas' control of the Gaza Strip since the October 7 terror attack, when Hamas militants invaded southern Israel, killed about 1,200 people and took about 240 people hostage.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.