Hamas has sent a delegation to Cairo to be briefed on progress in peace talks, but an official from the group said it would not participate directly in the negotiations it had been boycotting for the past 10 days.
Hamas representatives were expected on Saturday in the Egyptian capital, where negotiators from Israel, the US, Egypt and Qatar have been holding talks on a elusive deal that would involve the release of Israeli hostages, the freeing of Palestinian detainees and a ceasefire.
The delegation was confirmed in a statement by a senior Hamas official Izzat al-Rishq, but another unnamed Hamas official, quoted by the French press agency AFP, said the Hamas representatives would not take part in the talks.
The current sticking point in the negotiations is the insistence of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that any peace agreement must allow an Israeli presence along the Egypt-Gaza border, a strip of land known as the Philadelphi corridor, and on a road bisecting the Gaza Strip, the Netzarim corridor.
Hamas has rejected any such presence, saying it contravenes a three-stage peace plan announced by Joe Biden at the end of May, and later endorsed by the UN security council, which ultimately envisages a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
Hamas has said it accepts that deal, but has boycotted the current round of talks on the grounds that the proposal has been fundamentally changed, and it has rejected US claims that it has backed away from the agreement.
The White House insists that the peace plan outlined by Biden has been accepted by Israel, but Netanyahu has repeatedly called its terms into question, vowing his government would continue the war until Hamas is completely obliterated.
The prime minister insists that an Israeli presence in the Philadelphi corridor is essential to prevent arms smuggling to Hamas from Egypt. The government of Abdel Fatah al-Sisi in Cairo, has argued, however, that it has taken rigorous action against the smuggling and the cross-border smuggler tunnels and that an Israeli presence would raise questions about Egyptian sovereignty and territorial integrity.
After a visit to the region by the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, the US claimed to have secured Israeli agreement to a compromise solution, which it urged Hamas to accept, but has not so far released details of what it claimed was a “bridging proposal”.
The US is represented at the Cairo talks by the Central Intelligence Agency director, William Burns, and the US special envoy to the region, Brett McGurk. Israel’s lead negotiators are the directors of the Mossad spy agency and the Shin Bet security agency, David Barnea and Ronen Bar. The Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, was expected to arrive in Cairo on Saturday.
As the talks continue in Cairo, Israel has kept up its military campaign, now in its 11th month, triggered by a Hamas surprise attack on southern Israel on 7 October, which killed nearly 1,200 people, while another 250 were taken hostage. More than 100 hostages are still in Gaza but many of them are feared dead.
According to the Gaza health authorities, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza during Israel’s retaliatory military campaign. Fifty Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire in Gaza on Saturday alone. In recent weeks, Israel has issued an increasing number of evacuation orders to Palestinians in Gaza, nearly all of whom have already been displaced multiple times by the offensive and are living in makeshift camps.
Many Palestinians sheltering in areas previously identified by Israel as “humanitarian zones” have been ordered to leave this month, with the result that the displaced population is being crammed into an ever shrinking area with minimal provision of food and water.
Health conditions have constantly worsened and the World Health Organization has confirmed the first case of polio in Gaza for more than a quarter of a century, a baby partially paralysed by the virus, but reported to be in a stable condition.
While the US and its regional allies have tried to keep negotiations alive to stop the bloodshed in Gaza, there have been persistent signs that the conflict has the capacity to spread across the region. Iran’s ally, Hezbollah, has been exchanging fire with Israeli forces daily across the Lebanese-Israeli border, and there is a rising tide of violence on the West Bank, largely driven by extremist Israeli settlers.
Bar has described the settler attacks on Palestinians as terrorism and a substantial threat to Israeli national security, because of the likelihood of them starting a spiral of violence.
On Saturday afternoon, local media reported that two Israeli men had gone missing in the West Bank town of Qalqilya. An Israeli army effort to rescue them was met by roadside bombs, and an exchange of fire, the reports said. The fate of the two missing men was unclear by Saturday evening.
