Hamas delegation in Cairo for cease-fire talks

With Israel and Hamas under increasing international pressure to halt fighting in the Gaza Strip after seven months of war, a delegation of Hamas leaders traveled to Cairo on Saturday for talks aimed at clinching a cease-fire and hostage-release agreement, the group’s officials said.

Over the past few days, Israel and mediators in the talks – Egypt, Qatar and the United States – have been waiting for Hamas’ response to the latest cease-fire proposal from Israel. Husam Badran, a senior Hamas official, said in a text message that the group’s representatives arrived in Cairo “with great positivity” toward the latest proposal.

As Saturday drew to a close, though, mediators were still waiting for an answer. Hamas officials said they were still talking about the central impasse in negotiations: Hamas is seeking a deal that would lead to a permanent cease-fire and the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, while Israel wants a temporary cease-fire and has pledged to eventually carry out a ground offensive against Hamas in the southern city of Rafah.

“We are still talking about the main issues, which are the complete cease-fire and complete withdrawal from Gaza,” a spokesperson for Hamas, Osman Hamdan, said in an interview with the Al Jazeera television network.

Qatari mediators also arrived in Cairo on Saturday, a Qatari official said, joining CIA Director William Burns, who reached the city Friday to help shepherd the talks.

Israel has yet to dispatch a delegation to Cairo as it did in previous rounds of talks, according to two Israeli officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Even if Hamas announces in Cairo that it has accepted the proposed deal, the truce would not start right away, one of the Israeli officials said. Hamas’ approval would be followed by intensive negotiations to hash out the details of a cease-fire, and such talks are likely to be protracted and difficult, the official said.

Although the details are still being negotiated, the current proposed agreement has three phases and would begin with a six-week truce, during which up to 33 hostages held in Gaza would be released in exchange for hundreds of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, the officials said.

The deal would also allow the return of hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinian civilians to northern Gaza with few restrictions, officials say, previously a major sticking point for Israel.

Fuad Khuffash, a political analyst close to Hamas, said Hamas officials view the proposal as being closer to their preferred framework than previous Israeli positions. “Israel has slowly retreated from its demands due to rising pressure, even as Hamas has stayed steadfast.”

In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces substantial opposition within his governing coalition to the proposed deal. Some of his far-right partners have harshly criticized its provisions as a Hamas victory and threatened to oppose it, particularly if it were to put a definitive end to the war.

Agreeing to the deal would be “humiliating surrender,” Bezalel Smotrich, the country’s finance minister, wrote on Facebook late last month. “It would bestow victory to the Nazis on the backs of hundreds of heroic soldiers who died in battle.”

For weeks, Netanyahu has vowed that Israeli forces will enter Rafah, where many of Hamas’ remaining military forces are believed to be arrayed alongside some of its leaders. The plan has prompted widespread criticism, including from the Biden administration, fueled by concern for safety of the over 1 million Palestinians sheltering there.

Senior Biden administration officials have spoken repeatedly with their Israeli counterparts to discuss how Israel might safely evacuate and protect Palestinian civilians during a ground operation in Rafah. Israel has yet to present an acceptable proposal to the United States, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.

“Absent such a plan, we can’t support a major military operation going into Rafah, because the damage it would do is beyond what’s acceptable,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.