An Israeli negotiating team arrived in Paris on Friday for talks about a potential ceasefire in Gaza in the latest sign of tentative progress towards an agreement that could end the five-month-old war.
The Israeli delegation, which includes the heads of its internal and external intelligence services, will meet the director of the CIA, Qatar’s prime minister and Egypt’s most senior intelligence official for talks over the weekend in what appears to be the most serious push for weeks to halt the fighting.
Pressure on Hamas and Israel to conclude a deal is mounting. There are widespread concerns among observers that an imminent Israeli offensive on the city of Rafah in southern Gaza will cause further extensive civilian casualties and that the start of Ramadan in less than three weeks could ignite widespread unrest in the occupied West Bank and exacerbate risks of a regional conflagration.
Israel says Hamas has four battalions of militants in or around Rafah and that its offensive will go ahead if no ceasefire deal is reached soon. Washington has called on its close ally not to launch an assault on a city packed with more than 1 million people displaced from elsewhere in Gaza.
Rafah is also the entry point for much of the desperately needed aid that is reaching Gaza, and any further disruption to the already inadequate flow of assistance would worsen an acute humanitarian crisis.
Hamas is waiting to see what mediators from the US, Qatar and Egypt bring back from the weekend talks with Israel in Paris, an official from the militant group said on Friday.
“We discussed our proposal with [the Egyptians] and we are going to wait until they return from Paris,” he said.
About 150 of 250 hostages seized by Hamas during its attack on southern Israel in October were released in a swap for Palestinian prisoners during a weeklong ceasefire in November. The attack, which triggered the Israeli offensive in Gaza, also killed 1,200 people, mostly in their homes or at a music festival.
At least 29,514 Palestinians have been killed and 69,616 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since the beginning of the war, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Friday. Israel blames civilian deaths on Hamas, which has ruled the territory since 2007, saying it uses residents as a human shield.
Though talks on a new deal involving a series of phased ceasefires – each involving the release of a batch of the about 100 hostages still held by Hamas – have repeatedly broken down, both sides may now make concessions, observers say.
Hamas has seen that allied groups such as Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based militant Islamist movement, are not ready to risk all-out war with Israel to support it and has suffered significant casualties, even if no senior leaders have yet been killed in the Israeli onslaught.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, needs to improve increasingly fractious relations with Washington and answer accusations inside Israel that he has sacrificed the return of hostages for his own political survival, analysts say. Between 30 and 50 of the hostages are now thought to be dead and representatives of relatives say time is running out for the remainder.
But a deal would involve painful concessions by Israel – such as the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners from its jails – and a withdrawal from Gaza, so would be opposed by far-right politicians whose support allows Netanyahu to remain in power.
Writing in Yedioth Ahronoth, a mass-market newspaper, columnist Nahum Barnea said the chances of reaching an agreement were about 50%.
“No agreement has been reached yet about an exchange deal – responsible sources put the chances at 50% – but a resumption of negotiations appears to be near at hand. After almost a month of impasse, there is hope,” Barnea said.
Throughout the conflict, Netanyahu has said military pressure on Hamas would force concessions and the early return of the hostages.
Israeli planes and tanks continued airstrikes and bombardments overnight, residents and health officials said. The Gaza health ministry said 104 people had been killed and 160 others wounded in Israeli military strikes in the past 24 hours.
Late on Thursday, Netanyahu presented his security cabinet with an official plan for Gaza after the war.
According to the document, Israel would maintain security control over all land west of Jordan, including the occupied West Bank and Gaza – territories where Palestinians want to create an independent state. Any rehabilitation of Gaza, much of which has been reduced to ruins during the war, is conditional on “complete demilitarisation”.
Netanyahu proposes an Israeli presence on the Gaza-Egypt border in the south of the territory and cooperation with Egypt and the US in that area to prevent smuggling attempts, including at the Rafah crossing.
To replace Hamas rule in Gaza while maintaining public order, the plan proposes working with local representatives “who are not affiliated with terrorist countries or groups and are not financially supported by them” and calls for shutting down UNRWA, the UN Palestinian refugee agency, and replacing it with other international aid groups, emphasising that Israel expects to maintain security control over the territory.
The proposed new administration may involve local clan or community leaders but there is no role for the Palestinian Authority based in the West Bank – the preferred option of Washington.
A spokesperson for Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, told Reuters that Netanyahu’s proposal was doomed to fail, as were any Israeli plans to change the geographic and demographic realities in Gaza.
The last time similar ceasefire talks were held in Paris, at the end of January, they produced an outline for the first extended ceasefire of the war, approved by Israel and the US. Hamas responded with a counterproposal, which Netanyahu then rejected as “delusional”.
The current talks in the French capital are aimed at establishing procedural rules for further negotiations that will hammer out a deal, Israeli media reported.
