Weekly demonstrations were held Saturday night in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and dozens of other locations throughout the country demanding the return of hostages held in Gaza as well as calling for new elections.
Protests have been held every weekend for months focusing on a demand for a deal to bring back hostages. However, the rallies also often feature calls for the government to be replaced over what demonstrators see as its many failures before and throughout the war in the Strip.
At the same time, the Hamas terror group sent a delegation to Cairo to be briefed on the latest efforts to reach a ceasefire-for-hostages deal in Gaza.
Qatar’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani was also expected to attend Saturday’s talks, a source familiar with the negotiations tells Reuters.
A high-level Israeli delegation was in Cairo this week and Doha last week to discuss the latest offer for a deal with US, Egyptian and Qatari negotiators.
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After refusing to firmly press Hamas to accept the bridging offer presented by the US last week, Egypt reportedly passed the amended sections regarding the Rafah Border Crossing and the Philadelphi Corridor to the Gaza terror group Friday.
Hamas’s deputy chief in Gaza Khalil al-Hayya will lead the Palestinian delegation, according to Arab media reports, though the terror group has said it will not take part in indirect negotiations. “The delegation will meet with senior Egyptian intelligence officials to be briefed on developments in the ongoing round of Gaza ceasefire talks… but this does not mean it will take part in the negotiations,” a Hamas official said. “Hamas has said from the beginning that it will not participate in this round of negotiations, which began last week in Doha.”
Hamas also said it would continue to insist on its demands for an end to the war and a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.
Khalil al-Hayya speaks during an interview with The Associated Press, in Istanbul, Turkey, April 24, 2024. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra)
After Israel’s high-level negotiating team returned from Egypt, an unnamed source familiar with the talks told Army Radio Friday that they were “constructive.”
According to the report, progress was made in closing gaps with Cairo over the Rafah Border Crossing, which has been shuttered since Israel occupied the Palestinian side of the Gaza-Egypt border in May.
“There has been progress made,” said a White House spokesman on Friday in a briefing with reporters.
Though a deal will ultimately have to be made between Israel and Hamas, discussions this week centered on finding a formula that Jerusalem and Cairo could agree upon. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists that an Israeli presence on the Philadelphi Corridor — the 14-kilometer (9-mile) buffer strip that separates Egypt from Israel and Gaza Strip — is vital to preventing Hamas from re-arming, while Hamas and Egypt want to see Israeli forces withdraw entirely.
Egypt-based Alghad TV reported Saturday, citing an unnamed informed source, that Israel had notified Cairo it was prepared to withdraw under a deal from five security points out of eight discussed along the Philadelphi Corridor. There was no other confirmation of the report.
View of the Philadelphi Corridor between the southern Gaza Strip and Egypt, on July 15, 2024. (Oren Cohen/Flash90)
An Arab media report Saturday said Israel is demanding that Hamas release five living hostages per week in the first, six-week phase of a potential ceasefire in Gaza instead of three per week.
The sources quoted by the Saudi Asharq News network said that there is also a gap in the parties’ demands for Palestinian security prisoners to be released in exchange for hostages kidnapped by Hamas on October 7.
According to the report, Israel is demanding the right to veto 65 prisoners requested by Hamas for release along with the right to deport 150 other prisoners. The Palestinian terror group has reportedly rejected this demand.
On Friday, meanwhile, during a meeting with former hostages and family members of captives held in Gaza, Netanyahu said that no deal was currently on the table.
Netanyahu’s remarks tossed more cold water on the ongoing hostage negotiations, which the US has sought to frame in an optimistic matter, even as the sides remain far apart on key issues.
In a recording of the Friday meeting leaked to Channel 12, a daughter of one of the hostages can be heard telling the prime minister, “You can be remembered as the one who led the country to a better place or as the one who wreaked havoc here. You are the prime minister and you are responsible for the abductees, not Hamas and not anyone else. You are supposed to reach a deal that will bring all the abductees.”
“What’re you proposing that I do?” Netanyahu plainly responded.
“I’m proposing that you sign a deal that will bring the hostages home,” the hostage’s daughter said. “There’s a deal on the table!”
“What deal? Which deal?” the premier shot back. “Whoever told you that there was a [hostage-ceasefire] deal on the table and that we didn’t take it for this reason or that reason, for personal reasons, it’s just a lie.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Knesset plenum in Jerusalem, July 17, 2024. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Early last month, Hamas submitted a hostage deal proposal that for the first time saw it cave on its main demand that Israel commit up-front to a permanent ceasefire. In exchange, it made a series of amendments to the previous Israeli proposal.
Netanyahu rejected many of the changes and went on to issue its own new demands, including that the IDF maintain its presence in the Philadelphi Corridor along the Egypt-Gaza border to prevent weapons smuggling. He also has insisted that a mechanism be established to prevent armed Gazans from returning to northern Gaza — both new demands have become sticking points that the American, Qatari and Egyptian mediators have worked to overcome.
A US bridging proposal submitted last week tries to compromise on the issue of Israeli troop deployment, but two Arab officials from mediating countries told The Times of Israel that it over-catered to Jerusalem’s concerns. A Netanyahu aide said the US offer indeed addressed Israel’s security needs.
Earlier this week, the IDF recovered the bodies of six hostages killed in captivity. They were all believed to have been alive as of earlier this year.
“They’re dying, and every day you’re killing someone else,” a former hostage told Netanyahu in the recording of the Friday meeting leaked to Channel 12. “Twenty hostages entered alive and you brought back 20 of them dead.”
Palestinians find their way amid the dust and smoke after an Israeli strike on a building in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip on August 22, 2024. (Eyad Baba/AFP)
In between outbursts of dissatisfaction from the group, Netanyahu interjected, “I’m trying to come to a deal that will maximize the number of hostages released. I won’t [agree to a deal] for 12 hostages… because I’d just be leaving people there who are sick, who are elderly, the devil only knows. Would you do a thing like that? I won’t.”
The hostages were kidnapped on October 7, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists burst across the border into Israel by land, air and sea, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages, mostly civilians.
It is now believed that 105 of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of 34 confirmed dead by the IDF. Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the bodies of two IDF soldiers who were killed in 2014.
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