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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Israel and Hamas in ‘final stages’ of Gaza ceasefire talks, officials say

Protesters chant as they hold posters of the hostages held in Gaza, on Tuesday in Tel Aviv. (MUST CREDIT: Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)  (Heidi Levine/FTWP)
By Gerry Shih, Claire Parker, Miriam Berger, Hazem Balousha and Heba Farouk Mahfouz Washington Post

JERUSALEM – Israel and Hamas on Tuesday edged closer to reaching a ceasefire deal in the Gaza Strip, as officials from both sides, as well as third-country mediators, confirmed that the broad contours of an agreement had been reached but that thorny, round-the-clock talks were underway to hammer out details.

The negotiations – more advanced now than at any other point since the war began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas launched an attack that resulted in roughly 1,200 dead and 250 people taken hostage – raised hopes of at least a temporary truce that would see the remaining captives freed and an influx of aid to Palestinians in Gaza.

The population there has borne the brunt of a war that has destroyed much of the territory, caused widespread hunger and killed more than 46,500 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children.

U.S., Egyptian and Qatari mediators shuttled between Hamas and Israeli delegations in Doha, the capital of Qatar, on Tuesday to finalize the deal.

“We believe that we have reached the final stages … . All we can say is that today we are the closest than at any time in the past to a deal,” Qatar’s foreign ministry spokesman, Majed al-Ansari, told reporters.

Under the current proposal, Hamas would gradually release 33 Israeli hostages, most of whom are presumed to be alive by Israeli officials, over the course of 42 days - the duration of the deal’s first phase, said an Israeli official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive, ongoing negotiations.

In exchange, Israel would free hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and allow displaced civilians to pass through the Netzarim Corridor, a heavily fortified strip of land controlled by the Israeli military, and return to their homes in northern Gaza.

A Hamas official in Doha, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk freely about the negotiations, said late Tuesday that all of the issues with Israeli negotiators have been resolved, except for some logistical details. Israel has not yet provided maps showing how or where its forces would be deployed during the ceasefire, the Hamas official said.

One major point of contention has been over whether the deal would usher in a permanent end to the war. Hamas officials say they have sought guarantees that the agreement would mark the permanent cessation of hostilities, but the Israeli official on Tuesday said that the deal being discussed was “only a ceasefire, many weeks long.”

The official also warned that Israeli troops would not leave Gaza until all of the hostages - dead or alive - are released. The military will stay in the Philadelphi Corridor in Rafah, in southern Gaza, which borders Egypt, the official said. Israel has argued that Hamas used the porous border region, including a vast network of tunnels linking Egypt to Gaza, to smuggle in weapons and material.

Israeli officials believe that 98 hostages remain in Gaza and that about 60 are still alive. More than 100 hostages were released during a week-long truce in November 2023. Since then, some have died in captivity, while others were rescued by Israeli forces.

On Tuesday afternoon, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with hostages’ families and said a deal may be signed “within hours or days.”

Under the current proposal, the remaining hostages not included in the first phase, including male Israeli soldiers, would be gradually released in a second phase of the ceasefire.

Netanyahu has come under withering criticism from within Israel and internationally for declining to accept a similar deal in mid-2024. But his government’s officials on Tuesday said he made significant compromises in recent talks and gave Israeli negotiators the mandate and latitude to close a deal.

The officials said Hamas had refused to negotiate in good faith until recently, when many of their regional allies, including Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, suffered strategic defeats at the hands of the Israeli military and intelligence services.

Israel and the Biden administration both put the onus on Hamas to clinch the deal.

“On Sunday, the United States, Qatar and Egypt put forward a final proposal,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday in Washington. “If Hamas accepts, the deal is ready to be concluded and implemented. I believe we will have a ceasefire.”

Even as his negotiators worked toward an agreement, Netanyahu on Tuesday faced mounting pressure from two of his key domestic political partners to scuttle the talks once more.

On Monday, Netanyahu’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, called the deal a “national security catastrophe” and urged the prime minister to “continue to at full strength, conquer and clean the entire Strip” and to “open the gates of hell on Gaza” to force Hamas’s unconditional surrender.

A day later, Netanyahu’s hard-line national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, also spoke out and urged Smotrich to join him to force the collapse of Netanyahu’s government if the prime minister were to strike an accord with Hamas. Although Netanyahu is expected to have enough votes among his cabinet members and in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, to ratify a ceasefire, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir’s threats could destabilize his government.

“In the past year, through our political strength, we succeeded in preventing such a deal from being made, time and again,” Ben-Gvir wrote Tuesday in a long post on X.

“The pending deal is terrible, I know its details well,” he wrote. “It includes the release of hundreds of murderous terrorists from prison, the return of Gazans to the northern part of the Strip, the withdrawal of the IDF from the Netzarim Corridor and the renewed threat to the residents of the Gaza border area. In fact it wipes out the achievements gained by the blood of our fighters thus far, in Gaza.”

Israeli airstrikes continued to pound Gaza on Monday and Tuesday, with bombing particularly intense in Rafah, according to residents. Israeli forces appeared to be focusing their fire on empty buildings near the perimeter to create leveled land for a buffer zone, said Amanda Bazerolle, emergency coordinator for Gaza at Doctors Without Borders.

Israeli and Hamas officials say they have been negotiating the size of the buffer zone in recent days. Israel has required that a two-kilometer buffer zone be maintained along at least parts of the Gaza Strip, according to a former Egyptian official familiar with the negotiations.

Still, the palpable progress in the talks has lifted hopes for both Israelis and Palestinians. At the Sourasky Medical Center in Tel Aviv, staff were making preparations to receive hostages and provide them adequate privacy, according to a person familiar with the plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the arrangements.

In the city of Holon near Tel Aviv, Yosi Shnaider said he was a bundle of nerves as the deal approached. Four of his relatives, including his cousin Shiri Silberman Bibas and her 1-year-old son, Kfir, the youngest hostage in captivity, were taken on Oct. 7.

During the short-lived truce in November 2023, Shnaider waited every morning for a text message informing him that his relatives would be released that day, only for the ceasefire to collapse prematurely, he said.

Now, Bibas, her husband, Yarden, and her two children are among 33 hostages set to be released in the first phase of the deal, Shnaider said.

Less than 50 miles away inside Gaza, Ghassan Muqdad, 40, recounted how he was forced to evacuate with his wife and three children after their home in Gaza City was targeted by Israeli strikes on the third day of the war.

They moved 10 times across the enclave, living for days in conditions “that are not even fit for animals,” he said, before finally settling into a tent in Mawasi in southern Gaza, where the United Nations says more than 1 million displaced people are sheltering.

Returning home, even to a pile of rubble, Muqdad said, will “feel like Eid,” the holiday marking the end of Ramadan.

“There is nothing bad that we have not experienced, even the idea of ​​our homes being destroyed no longer terrifies us,” he said. “I will kiss the stones of the rubble of my home as soon as I arrive, and I will cry a lot for all the days that we suffered and were not even allowed to cry.

“And then, I will search for any of the remaining furniture in my home so that we can continue living.”

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Balousha reported from Toronto, Berger from Tel Aviv and Mahfouz from Cairo. Mohamad El Chamaa in Beirut and Hajar Harb in London contributed.