Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved his deployment. mossad foreign intelligence agency Ceasefire talks in Qatar as sign of progress in negotiations war in Gaza.
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office announced the decision on Saturday night local time. It was not immediately clear when David Balnea would travel to Qatar’s capital Doha for the latest round of indirect negotiations between Israel and the militant group Hamas. His presence means the involvement of senior Israeli officials who must sign any agreements.
During the 15-month war, there was only one brief cease-fire, and that was in the early weeks of the fighting. Talks brokered by the United States, Egypt and Qatar have repeatedly stalled since then.
Prime Minister Netanyahu It advocates destroying Hamas’ fighting ability in Gaza. Hamas insists on the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from the largely destroyed territory. On Thursday, the Gaza Ministry of Health said: 46,000 Palestinians died in this war.
The head of Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet, and military and political advisers will also be sent to Qatar. Netanyahu’s office said the decision was made after talks with the defense minister, security chiefs and negotiators “on behalf of the outgoing and incoming US administrations.”
The office also released a photo of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with President-elect Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, who visited Qatar this week.
Ayyad Baba/AFP/Getty
The families of about 100 hostages captured in the October 7, 2023 extremist attack that sparked the war and still being held in Gaza have called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to provide support for the return of their loved ones. They are pressing for an agreement.
The recovery of the bodies of two hostages in the past week has renewed fears that time is running out. Hamas said it did not know who was alive or dead after months of heavy fighting.
“We guarantee the return of all hostages, down to the last one, the living for rehabilitation, and the dead for a proper burial in their homeland,” a group representing the families of some of the hostages said in a statement. Please return with an agreement to do so.”
Israel and Hamas There is also pressure from outgoing President Biden and President Trump to reach an agreement before Inauguration Day on January 20th.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this week that a deal was “very close” and that he wanted to complete it before handing over diplomacy to the incoming Trump administration. But U.S. officials have expressed similar optimism several times over the past year.
Ariel Shalit/Associated Press
Issues in the talks include which hostages will be released under the first part of the phased cease-fire agreement, which Palestinian prisoners Israel will release, and the extent of Israeli military withdrawal from the populated areas of the Gaza Strip. There is.
Hamas and other groups have killed about 1,200 people and taken about 250 hostages in the Gaza Strip in the attacks that sparked the war. More than 100 hostages were released following a ceasefire in November 2023, and other hostages have been rescued and bodies recovered over the past year.
At least eight Palestinians, including two children and two women, were killed in a school-turned-evacuation center in northern Gaza on Saturday by an Israeli airstrike, according to the Civil Defense, a government-run first response force run by Hamas. A person died. Thirty people, including 19 children, were injured in an attack on the Halawa school, which shelters thousands of displaced people in the Jabaliya region, it said.
The Israeli military said, without providing evidence, that it had attacked a Hamas headquarters in a former school in Jabaliya.
Civil defense spokesman Mahmoud Bassal said four people were killed on the streets of Gaza City in separate attacks. The Gaza Ministry of Health said at least 32 bodies had arrived at hospitals in the past 24 hours.
“We ask the world, can you hear us? Do we exist?” said Hamza Saleh, one of the majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million displaced people. He spoke Friday in the southern city of Khan Yunis, where children are scrambling for food aid as hunger grows.
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