Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to the Middle East to press a proposal to release Israeli hostages in return for a pause in the Gaza offensive, AFP quotes the US State Department as saying.

Blinken will visit Qatar and Egypt — the mediators of the proposal — as well as Israel, the West Bank and Saudi Arabia starting Sunday, it said.

This comes after Qatar’s foreign ministry spokesman Majed al-Ansari said there were hopes of “good news” about a fresh pause to the fighting “in the next couple of weeks”.

He said a truce proposal agreed with Israeli negotiators was presented to Hamas and had received a “positive” initial response from the Palestinian group and was “approved by the Israeli side”. The plan was thrashed out with Israeli negotiators by Egyptian, Qatari and US mediators in Paris earlier this week.

A source close to Hamas told AFP however: “There is no agreement on the framework of the agreement yet — the factions have important observations — and the Qatari statement is rushed and not true.”