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