Cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas to end the war in Gaza and free the remaining hostages are quietly advancing behind the scenes, mediators and officials say, after the Israel-Hezbollah truce in Lebanon and pressure from President-elect Donald J. Trump.
While details about the latest proposals remain murky, several officials briefed on the negotiations said the talks are picking up steam.
“We have sensed after the election that the momentum is coming back,” the prime minister of Qatar, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, who is one of the main mediators, said at a conference in Doha on Saturday.
Mr. Al Thani added that Mr. Trump was encouraging a deal. In November, Steve Witkoff, who will serve as Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, met Mr. Al Thani in Doha to discuss the negotiations. The following day, Mr. Witkoff met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, according to an official familiar with the matter.
Since those meetings, the pace of the talks has quickened, said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Despite the renewed momentum, officials cautioned that an agreement was not yet in hand. For months, repeated rounds of talks, mediated by Qatar, Egypt and the United States, have seen hopes rise only to be dashed days later, with both Israel and Hamas blaming the other for the impasse.
Mediators have floated a deal beginning with a 60-day cease-fire, similar to the agreement Israel and Hezbollah reached to end the fighting in Lebanon, according to officials familiar with the talks. Hamas would begin releasing the 100 or so hostages held in Gaza in exchange for Palestinians jailed in Israel.
The new movement comes after months of cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas ended in a near-standstill by the fall, while Israel’s military campaign escalated in northern Gaza.
Israel and Hamas appeared to be stuck on seemingly irreconcilable terms for a truce. Hamas said it would not release its remaining 100 or so hostages — many of whom are presumed dead — until Israel ended the war and completely withdrew from Gaza.
Mr. Netanyahu has vowed to continue fighting until Hamas’s rule in Gaza was eradicated. The prime minister’s governing coalition relies on far-right parties that support perpetual Israeli control of Gaza, potentially forcing Mr. Netanyahu to choose between saving the remaining hostages and maintaining his grip on power.
Mr. Al Thani, the Qatari prime minister, said that whether Israel and Hamas reached a deal now was more a question of political will than technical details, most of which, he said, had been resolved.
“Is there a willingness to end the war, yes or no?” he said.
Mr. Trump has made it clear that he hopes to see the hostages released by his inauguration in January. Last week, he wrote on social media there would be “ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East” if the deadline was not met. The threat left Israel and Hamas — as well as Egypt and Qatar — eager not to be blamed for holding up a deal, analysts said.
A few weeks ago, Qatar, which hosts Hamas’s leaders in exile, raised the pressure by indicating that the group’s top officials might no longer be welcome in the country if the deadlock persisted, leading some to briefly leave Qatar. But the Gulf state has once again begun mediating between the two sides.
While Israel and Hamas seem reluctant to compromise on their core demands, they are facing rising pressure to reach a deal to stop the fighting and bring home the hostages.
Israel has received intelligence indicating that Hamas is ready to compromise on some of its conditions, according to five Israeli officials. But it was unclear where the Palestinian militants’ new red lines were and whether they had moved enough to meet Israel’s terms, the officials said.
Hamas has held high-level meetings with its Iranian and Turkish allies in Doha in recent days, and its top negotiator met the Egyptian intelligence chief in Cairo on Sunday, the militant group said in posts on the Telegram messaging app.
As part of the cease-fire proposal, Israel has demanded that its forces largely remain in two major corridors, the Netzarim corridor in central Gaza and another along the border with Egypt known as the Philadelphi Corridor, said the officials, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Mr. Netanyahu has called Israeli control of both axes essential to prevent Hamas from regaining control in Gaza.
Hamas officials are considering whether to allow Israeli forces to keep troops in Gaza longer than they had previously proposed, according to a person close to the group’s leadership who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Hamas still demands that Israel ultimately withdraw from Gaza, but the group’s leaders are now willing to tolerate an extended Israeli presence in parts of those two corridors, the person said.
The official familiar with the matter said Israel was also compromising on the issue of withdrawing from Gaza, without providing details.
That shift comes as Hamas faces one of its most difficult moments after more than a year of war.
Israel methodically assassinated its leaders, including Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that prompted Israel’s devastating campaign in Gaza.
Hezbollah, Hamas’s Lebanese ally that began firing rockets into Israel in solidarity with the Gaza militants last year, reached its own truce with Israel. That left Hamas to fight mostly on its own.
Iran, Hamas’s powerful regional backer, sustained blow after blow at the hands of Israel. Then, on Sunday, rebels swept into the Syrian capital, Damascus, toppling the Iran-backed government of Bashar al-Assad. The ouster of Mr. al-Assad was a severe blow to Iran’s regional strategy, which cultivated a network of allies, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Syrian government.
On Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu told relatives of the hostages in Gaza that Hamas had shown greater flexibility in its terms for reaching an agreement, according to three people who attended the meetings.
“He said there was a change, a crack in Hamas, that enabled us to reach better terms than in the past,” said Gil Dickmann, whose cousin Carmel Gat was killed by her Hamas captors in Gaza in August. “He didn’t go into details, but from his confidence, I got the impression that matters were relatively advanced.”
On Monday, Gideon Saar, the Israeli foreign minister, also said that Hamas “might have changed” its stance on conditions for releasing the hostages, without offering further details.
Sharon Sharabi, whose two brothers, Eli and Yossi Sharabi, were abducted during the Hamas-led attack last year, said the news of progress had prompted “new hope among the families of hostages that they might see their loved ones again — and at the same time, tension.”
Yossi Sharabi was killed while held hostage in Gaza, according to Israel. Eli Sharabi is still believed to be alive, but his wife and their two daughters were slain in the Hamas massacre in the Israeli border community of Be’eri, said Mr. Sharabi.
“We lost four people,” he said. “We don’t intend to fill a fifth coffin.”
Mohammad Fares, a displaced Palestinian in southern Gaza, said he was clinging to the hope that this time the cease-fire talks would be successful, even though every other round of negotiations had failed.
“We hear explosions when waking up every day; we are constantly fearing that we or people we know will be the next victim,” Mr. Fares said in a text message. “There are people here who just want to live a normal life, people who are suffering, people who are dying,” he added.
Source: nytimes.com
