First aid boat unloads in Gaza as Hamas proposes new truce

GAZA CITY - A first aid ship plying a new maritime corridor from Cyprus began unloading its cargo of desperately needed food in Gaza on Friday as Hamas proposed a new six-week truce in the war.

AFP footage showed the Open Arms, which set sail from Cyprus on Tuesday, towing a barge that the Spanish charity of the same name says is loaded with 200 tonnes of food for Gazans threatened with famine after more than five months of war.

World Central Kitchen, the US charity working with Open Arms, said it was readying another boat with supplies of beans, canned meat, flour, rice and dates in the Cypriot port of Larnaca but stressed the need for more road access to bring aid into Gaza.

"Our ambition is having a highway of aid going into Gaza," the group's Juan Camilo Jimenez said in a video posted on social media platform X.

The Israeli military said it had deployed troops to "secure the area" around the jetty while the cargo of aid was unloaded. The "vessel underwent a comprehensive security inspection," it said.

A spokesman for the Hamas-ruled territory's health ministry said early on Saturday that 123 people had been killed across Gaza in the past 24 hours, including 36 people in a strike on a house sheltering displaced people in central Nuseirat.

In negotiations aimed at securing a new truce and hostage deal, Hamas has put forward a new proposal for a six-week ceasefire and the exchange of several dozen Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners, an official from the militant group told AFP. 

Hamas would want this to lead to "a complete (Israeli) withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and a permanent ceasefire", the official said.

The proposal would involve the release of some 42 hostages, who would be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners at a ratio of between 20 and 50 prisoners per hostage, the official said, down from a previous proposal of roughly 100 to one.

Palestinian militants seized about 250 Israeli and foreign hostages during the Hamas attack of October 7, dozens of whom were released during a week-long truce in November. Israel believes about 130 captives remain in Gaza, including 32 presumed dead.

Israel said it was sending a delegation to Qatar for a new round of negotiations.