Israel and Hamas are making progress towards a deal that would bring about a ceasefire and free hostages held in the Gaza Strip, officials with knowledge of the talks have said.
The US national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, speaking as negotiations were held in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, said: “They’ve been constructive and moving in the right direction.”
The talks came as calls grew for Israel not to go ahead with a planned assault on the territory’s southernmost city, Rafah, crammed with more than a million displaced people. Israel has faced a mounting wave of international criticism for its conduct of the war in Gaza and for settler violence in the occupied West Bank.
Calling Israel’s military offensive in Gaza “disproportionate”, the Italian foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, said there were “too many victims” in Gaza, as South Africa – which has lodged a genocide complaint against Israel at the international court of justice – returned to the ICJ to demand it take action over recent attacks on the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
On Tuesday, France became the latest country – after the US and the UK – to announce it was imposing sanctions against several dozen Israeli settlers involved in violent acts targeting Palestinians.
Israeli tanks shelled the eastern sector of Rafah, while Gaza health officials said an Israeli strike on a house in Nusseirat refugee camp in central Gaza killed 16 people.
Late on Tuesday, the Israel Defense Forces released a video that it said showed Hamas’s chief in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, and his family, being led through a tunnel.
The black and white footage filmed on 10 October is said to be the first images of Sinwar to emerge since the unprecedented 7 October attack on Israel, which he is accused of masterminding.
As the talks in Cairo got under way there were reports that the CIA director, William Burns, was flying in to join teams from Hamas and Israel for negotiations over a ceasefire and prisoner exchange as international pressure increases to advance the talks.
Israel’s delegation includes its heads of intelligence, David Barnea of the Mossad and Ronen Bar, the director of Shin Bet. Also attending are the Egyptian intelligence director, Abbas Kamel, and the Qatari prime minister, Mohammed bin Abdul Rahman Al Thani. A senior Egyptian official said the meeting would focus on crafting a final draft of a six-week ceasefire deal, with guarantees that the parties would continue negotiations toward a permanent ceasefire amid suggestions of progress.
Egypt’s intelligence agency has acted as a significant interlocutor in past conflicts between Hamas and Israel, while Burns’s presence is seen as underlining US pressure for an end to hostilities.
A US official, quoted in the New York Times, said Burns was travelling to Cairo after Joe Biden said on Monday that he was pressing for a deal including a ceasefire of at least six weeks in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza.
The hostages were seized in the 7 October raid on southern Israel by Hamas militants, which killed 1,200 people and triggered Israel’s military offensive in Gaza. Securing their return is a priority for the government of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, along with eradicating Hamas, which controls Gaza.
“The key element of the deals are on the table,” Biden told journalists at a briefing alongside the visiting Jordanian king, Abdullah II.
“There are gaps that remain, but I’ve encouraged Israeli leaders to keep working to achieve the deal,” he said, adding that Israel should not launch a ground offensive into the southern Gaza city of Rafah without a “credible plan” to safeguard the 1.4 million displaced civilians sheltering there.
Israel’s suggestion that it will attack Rafah next has triggered widespread international opposition, with a senior UN official on Tuesday saying that the UN would not participate in a forced evacuation.
A western diplomat in the Egyptian capital also said a six-week deal was on the table but cautioned that more work was needed to reach an agreement.
Netanyahu has publicly insisted on a hardline position, saying Israel would continue its offensive until total victory. However, behind the scenes, officials have suggested that progress was being made in negotiations for a second, longer ceasefire, according to two officials with direct knowledge of the talks.
Talks are moving forward even after Israel intensified its offensive in Rafah. An Israeli hostage rescue mission freed two captives held in the town along the Egyptian border, in a raid that killed at least 74 Palestinians, according to local health officials, and left a trail of destruction.
A deal would give people in Gaza a desperately needed respite from the war, now in its fifth month, and offer freedom for at least some of the 100-plus hostages. Efforts to bring about a deal have so been hobbled by the disparate positions of Hamas and Israel.
Israel has proposed a two-month ceasefire, in which hostages would be freed in exchange for the release of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, and top Hamas leaders in Gaza would be allowed to move to other countries.
Hamas rejected those terms and has laid out a three-phase plan of 45 days each in which the hostages would be released in stages, Israel would free hundreds of imprisoned Palestinians, including senior militants, and the war would be wound down, with Israel withdrawing its troops.
A deal in late November brought about a brief truce allowing the release of about 100 hostages in Gaza in exchange for about 240 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.
The threatened Israeli offensive against Rafah has triggered mounting alarm among those who have sought shelter in the city.
Samah, a mother-of-two who is a senior programme officer for ActionAid, said she was sharing a tent with 20 family members in Rafah after her home in Gaza City was destroyed.
“They [the IDF] asked us to go outside Gaza City to the south so we went to Khan Younis. We spent two months in Khan Younis and after that they told us we have to be evacuated to Rafah.
She said people in Rafah are terrified at the prospect of an all-out military assault on the town where 1.3 million are sheltering.
“It’s very scary. It would be a disaster, more than the disaster that we are already living in. Most of Gaza’s people are in Rafah now. There are a lot of people here in tents and we don’t know where we can evacuate,” she said.
