Israeli team led by spy chief Barnea meets Qatari mediators on Gaza deal

JERUSALEM: Israel’s spy chief held talks with Qatari mediators on Friday in the latest effort for a truce and hostage release deal for Gaza, almost nine months into the Israel-Hamas war.

A source with knowledge of the negotiations said Mossad chief David Barnea and his delegation had left Doha straight after the meetings on the latest Hamas ideas for an agreement.

No public statement was issued after the talks.

The US, which has worked alongside Qatar and Egypt in trying to broker a deal, had talked up the significance of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to send a delegation to Qatar.

The US believes Israel and Hamas have a “pretty significant opening” to reach an agreement, a senior official said.

The Gaza war — which has raised fears of a broader conflagration involving Lebanon — began with Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.

The militants also seized hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza including 42 the military says are dead.

In response, Israel has carried out a military offensive that has killed at least 38,011 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory.

US President Joe Biden announced a pathway to a truce deal in May that he said had been proposed by Israel. It included an initial six-week truce, Israeli withdrawal from Gaza population centers and the freeing of hostages by Palestinian militants.

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Talks subsequently stalled but the US official said on Thursday that the new proposal from Hamas “moves the process forward and may provide the basis for closing the deal,” though “significant work” remained.

Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan told AFP that the group expected a swift Israeli response — “likely today or tomorrow morning” — to its new “ideas.”

He blamed Israel for the deadlock since Biden’s announcement.

Hamdan said the ideas had been “conveyed by the mediators to the American side, which welcomed them and passed them on to the Israeli side. Now the ball is in the Israeli court.”

Hamdan said the Doha talks “will be a test for the US administration to see if it is willing to pressure the Zionist entity to accept these proposed ideas.”

There has been no truce in the war since a one-week pause in November saw 80 Israeli hostages freed in return for 240 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

The war has uprooted 90 percent of Gaza’s population, destroyed much of the territory’s housing and other infrastructure, and left almost 500,000 people enduring “catastrophic” hunger, UN agencies say.

The main stumbling block to a truce deal has been Hamas’s demand for a permanent end to the fighting, which Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners strongly reject.

The Israeli leader has faced a well-organized protest movement demanding a deal to free the hostages, which took to the streets again on Thursday evening.

Netanyahu insists the war will not end until Israel destroys Hamas and the hostages are freed.

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The head of the World Health Organization warned that “further disruption to health services is imminent in Gaza due to a severe lack of fuel.”

Only 90,000 liters (20,000 gallons) of fuel entered Gaza on Wednesday, but the health sector alone needs 80,000 liters each day.

The WHO and its partners in Gaza were having “to make impossible choices” as a result, said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

US officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have voiced hope that a ceasefire in Gaza could lead to an easing of violence on the Israel-Lebanon border as well.

Since the war began, Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah movement has exchanged near-daily cross-border fire with the Israeli army in support of its Palestinian ally.

The exchanges have intensified over the past month after Israel killed senior Hezbollah commanders in targeted air strikes.

Hezbollah said it fired more than 200 rockets and “explosive drones” at army positions in northern Israel and the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights in its latest round of reprisals on Thursday.

A military source said the rocket fire killed a soldier in northern Israel.

Hamas said Friday that its foreign relations chief Khalil Al-Hayya had met Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah to coordinate their “resistance efforts” and the upcoming truce negotiations.

Israeli team led by spy chief Barnea meets Qatari mediators on Gaza deal

Biden faces donor pressure in his re-election bid

President Joe Biden is facing pressure from some major Democratic donors as he faces a critical few days in his campaign for re-election.

A number of donors are publicly warning they will withhold funds unless Mr Biden is replaced as the party’s candidate following his disastrous debate performance last week.

They include Abigail Disney, an heiress to the Disney family fortune, Hollywood producer Damon Lindelof, Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel, and philanthropist and entrepreneur Gideon Stein.

Mr Biden is seeking to shore up his candidacy this weekend, including with a rare primetime TV interview on Friday and a rally in Wisconsin.

Pressure on Mr Biden, 81, to step aside has grown following a debate marked by several instances where he lost his train of thought and was incomprehensible.

While he admitted that he “screwed up” that night, he has vowed to stay on as his party’s standard-bearer taking on Donald Trump in the November presidential election.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said on Thursday at a White House gathering marking 4 July Independence Day in the US.

Ms Disney told the US business news channel CNBC that she did not believe that Mr Biden could win against Trump in November.

She said her intent to pull support was rooted in “realism, not disrespect”.

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“Biden is a good man and has served his country admirably, but the stakes are far too high,” Ms Disney, who has supported a number of Democrats and Democratic causes over the years, said.

“If Biden does not step down the Democrats will lose. Of that I am absolutely certain. The consequences for the loss will be genuinely dire.”

With her warning, she joined a handful of other wealthy donors.

Mr Stein told the New York Times that his family was withholding $3.5m (£2.8m) to non-profit and political organisations active in the presidential race unless Mr Biden steps aside.

Mr Lindelof, who has donated more than $100,000 to Democrats this election cycle, wrote a public essay urging other donors to withhold their funds in what he dubbed a “DEMbargo”.

“When they text you asking for cash, text back that you’re not giving them a penny and you won’t change your mind until there’s change at the top of the ticket,” Mr Lindelof wrote in Deadline.

Mr Emanuel – the brother of Rahm Emanuel, a former Barack Obama chief of staff – told a conference in Colorado that withholding funding was the key to ensuring Mr Biden’s exit from the race, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.

“The lifeblood to a campaign is money, and maybe the only way . . . is if the money starts drying up,” he said, according to the newspaper.

“You’ll see in the next couple weeks, if the money comes in . . . I talked to a bunch of big donors, and they’re moving all their money to Congress and the Senate.”

Some other major donors have not threatened to cut funding but are putting public pressure on the president to withdraw.

Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix and one of the biggest donors to the Democratic Party, told US media that Mr Biden “needs to step aside to allow a vigorous Democratic leader to beat Trump and keep us safe and prosperous”.

Others have expressed concerns about the possibility of a damaging and chaotic race to replace Mr Biden if he does leave.

Ramesh Kapur, a Massachusetts-based Indian-American industrialist, has organised fundraisers for Democrats since 1988.

“I think it’s time for him to pass the torch,” Mr Kapur told the BBC this week. “I know he has the drive, but you can’t fight Mother Nature.”

“What I know of him, he will decide what’s good for the country,” he added.

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There are some who are worried there’s not enough time left for a new candidate to join the race, and they have decided to back Biden if he stays on.

A mega-donor the BBC spoke to this week, who declined to be named, said he planned to go ahead with a fundraiser for the president scheduled for later this month at his Virginia home.

“We all want to keep Donald Trump out of the White House, and probably that will keep us together,” he said.

The Biden campaign has said it raised $38m from debate day through to the weekend, mainly through small donations – and a total of $127m in June alone.

The Biden team and the president have conceded he had a difficult debate but have said he is ready to show the public he has the stamina for the campaign.

On Friday, he is scheduled to sit down with ABC – the first television interview after the debate – to help quell concerns about his age and mental faculties.

He will also travel to Madison, Wisconsin to campaign with Governor Tony Evers.

But the president is facing a series of negative polls which suggest his Republican rival’s lead has widened in the wake of the Atlanta debate.

A New York Times poll published on Wednesday suggested Trump was now holding his biggest lead yet at six points.

And a separate poll published by the BBC’s US partner CBS News suggested a slight shift towards Trump, who had a three-point lead over Mr Biden in the crucial battleground states.

Biden faces donor pressure in his re-election bid

BBC

Coastguards recover 89 bodies of migrants from sunk boat in Atlantic

Coastguards in Mauritania have recovered 89 bodies of migrants from a boat that capsized in the Atlantic Ocean on Monday.

Nine people – including a five-year-old girl – were rescued, but dozens more are missing.

Survivors say the vessel – a traditional fishing boat – set sail last week from the Senegalese-Gambian border area with 170 people on board. It capsized off Mauritania’s south-western coast.

Mauritania is a key transit point for migrants trying to reach Europe from West Africa, with thousands of boats departing from the country last year.

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The most common destination on the perilous route is Spain’s Canary Islands.

The Spanish government says nearly 40,000 people arrived there last year – double the number from the previous year.

Desperate to get to Europe, migrants often travel in overloaded boats.

More than 5,000 migrants died while trying to reach Spain by sea in the first five months of 2024, the Ca-minando Fronteras charity estimates.

In April, the EU granted Mauritania €210m (£177m; $225m) in aid – almost €60m of which will be invested in the fight against undocumented migration to Europe.

Coastguards recover 89 bodies of migrants from sunk boat in Atlantic

BBC