Israel withdraws from ceasefire talks after ‘delusional’ Hamas demands
Israel has recalled its negotiators from Doha after deeming mediated talks on a Gaza truce “at a dead end” due to demands by Hamas, a senior Israeli official has said.
The official, who is close to the Mossad spymaster heading the talks, accused Hamas’s Gaza leader, Yahya Sinwar, of sabotaging the diplomacy “as part of a wider effort to inflame this war over Ramadan”.
The warring sides had stepped up negotiations, mediated by Qatar and Egypt, on a six-week suspension of Israel’s offensive in return for the proposed release of 40 of the 130 hostages still held by the Palestinian militant group in Gaza.
Hamas has sought to extend any deal into an end to the fighting and withdrawal of Israeli forces. Israel has ruled this out, saying it would eventually resume efforts to dismantle the governance and military capabilities of Hamas.
Hamas also wants hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled Gaza City and surrounding areas southward during the first stage of the almost six-month-old war to be allowed back north.
The Israeli official said that Israel had agreed to double the number of Palestinians it would release for the hostages at to 700-800 prisoners and allow some displaced Palestinians to return to northern Gaza.
The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said yesterday that Hamas had made “delusional” demands, which showed the Palestinians were not interested in a deal. Hamas has accused Israel of stalling at the talks while it carries out its offensive.
The discussions are continuing as a humanitarian crisis devastates Palestinians in Gaza with severe shortages of food, medicine and hospital care. Concerns are growing that famine will take hold.
Yesterday a UN expert told the body’s Human Rights Council she believed that Israel’s military campaign amounted to genocide and called on countries to impose sanctions and an arms embargo.
“I find that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met,” Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Territories, told the UN rights body in Geneva.
Israel’s diplomatic mission in Geneva said the use of the word genocide was “outrageous” and that the war was against Hamas and not Palestinian civilians.