Crunch talks over a ceasefire and hostage release deal in Gaza stretched into a second day in Doha on Friday, as international mediators sought to broker an agreement that would also aim to ease growing regional hostilities and avoid full-scale war between Israel and Iran.
The US, along with Egypt and Qatar, convened the meeting in a bid to break months of deadlock in negotiations and finalise a deal that would halt the fighting between Israel and Hamas and secure the release of Israeli hostages still held by the Palestinian militant group.
Mediators initially focused on the Israeli position after spy chiefs from Israel, the US and Egypt arrived in the Qatari capital on Thursday. According to several people briefed on the talks, Hamas representatives are not present but will be engaged by the mediators after the summit ends.
“This has been customary since the negotiations began with mediators,” one person said.
The US administration of President Joe Biden has attempted to put a positive spin on the talks, with National Security Council spokesman John Kirby saying on Thursday that “we’d already narrowed some gaps”.
“The remaining obstacles can be overcome and we must bring this process to a close. We need to see the hostages released, relief for Palestinian civilians in Gaza, security for Israel and lowered tensions in the region,” Kirby added.
Yet it remains unclear how much Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is willing to soften several additional demands he has introduced in recent weeks.
According to people briefed on the talks, major sticking points include his insistence that Israel will not withdraw from the Gaza-Egypt border region, known as the Philadelphi corridor, or allow the free “unvetted” movement of displaced Palestinians back to the strip’s north.
Netanyahu insists he has not added new conditions, blaming Hamas for the deadlock. The long-serving Israeli leader has rejected any permanent end to the war, saying he would only agree to an initial six-week truce.
On Thursday he said again that Israeli forces would not leave the Philadelphi corridor as part of any deal.
Hamas, for its part, has backtracked on its long-running demand that a deal should guarantee, from the outset, a full stop to the war, said people familiar with the talks.
On Thursday Husam Badran, a top Hamas official, said the group demanded that “any negotiations must be based on a clear plan to implement what was previously agreed”.
“Any agreement must achieve a comprehensive ceasefire, a complete withdrawal from Gaza, the return of the displaced and the reconstruction, in addition to a prisoner exchange deal,” he added in a statement.
The stakes involved in the potential deal for Gaza, where local health officials said on Thursday that the war had killed 40,000 people, have grown still higher after the back-to-back assassinations last month of two senior Iran-backed militant leaders, leading to fears of regional escalation.
Fuad Shukr, a top commander from the Lebanon-based Hizbollah movement, was killed in an Israeli air strike in Beirut, while Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh was slain in Tehran hours later. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility for Haniyeh’s assassination, but Iran and Hizbollah have vowed “severe punishment” against the Jewish state.
The US and its allies believe a ceasefire and halt to the Gaza war is the most realistic pathway to ending the cycle of regional hostilities it triggered.
UK foreign secretary David Lammy and French foreign minister Stéphane Séjourné travelled to Israel to stress that “there is no time for delays or excuses from all parties on a ceasefire deal”, said a joint statement ahead of their meeting on Friday with Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz.
“The UK and France are united in our call for a diplomatic solution to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza and restore calm along the Israeli-Lebanese border,” they added.
The talks proceeded as tensions rose in the occupied West Bank, where one Palestinian was shot dead late on Thursday night after dozens of Israeli settlers rampaged through the village of Jit, attacking locals and torching homes.
Another Palestinian was critically injured, also by live fire, according to Palestinian health authorities and eyewitnesses.
Netanyahu condemned the attack, saying he viewed the “disturbances” with the “utmost severity”.
“It is the [Israel Defense Forces] and the security forces that fight terrorism, and nobody else,” he added, vowing that those responsible would be “apprehended and tried”. No one had been arrested by midday on Friday.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid said the incident was a “terrible moral low” that “has nothing to do with Judaism”.
Jack Lew, US ambassador to Israel, wrote on X on Friday that he was “appalled” by the attacks, and that they “must stop and the criminals be held to account”.
In Gaza itself, the humanitarian situation has continued to worsen. On Friday, Unicef and the World Health Organization called for seven-day humanitarian pauses in the fighting there to enable polio vaccination campaigns for children under 10 after the virus that causes the disease was discovered in sewage samples from the territory.
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