Israel dispatches team to Qatar for ceasefire talks, kills 78 in Gaza

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office says Hamas’s requests for changes to truce proposal ‘unacceptable’.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced plans to send a negotiating team to Qatar for talks on a Gaza ceasefire proposal as Israeli forces continued to bombard the Palestinian enclave, killing at least 78 people in the past 24 hours.

Netanyahu’s office said the team would travel to the Qatari capital, Doha, on Sunday after the Israeli leader instructed negotiators “to accept the invitation for close talks”.

But the statement said that “the changes Hamas is requesting to make to the Qatari proposal were delivered to us last night and are unacceptable to Israel”.

It did not elaborate on what changes were being requested.

The announcement came after Hamas said on Friday that it had provided a “positive” response to a United States-brokered proposal that would involve a 60-day truce in Gaza, renewing hopes of a possible end to Israel’s deadly assault on the Palestinian enclave.

At least 57,338 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s war on Gaza, which began in October 2023, while at least 135,957 others have been wounded. Israeli attacks have laid waste to Gaza, spurring a dire humanitarian crisis and left the territory on the brink of famine.

media’s Hamdah Salhut, reporting from Amman in Jordan, explained that Hamas has made requests for three core amendments to the proposal.

“They wanted the talks for ending the war to continue if there was a pause in the fighting, if that 60 days was over,” she said.

The Palestinian group also wants humanitarian aid to be delivered to Gaza through United Nations-led international mechanisms instead of the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

More than 700 Palestinians have been killed and thousands wounded while seeking aid at GHF sites since the foundation began operating in the Strip in late May.

“The third [request] was about where Israeli forces could be in the Gaza Strip as part of this deal,” Salhut added.

Hamas’s requests

The announcement from Netanyahu’s office came as families and supporters of Israeli captives rallied in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa, demanding a deal to secure the return of their loved ones. Some 50 of the 200 people taken captive during the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023 remain in Gaza. Israel believes some 27 of them are dead.

The families have accused Netanyahu, who is on trial on corruption charges, of blocking attempts to reach a deal for his personal gain.

Trump will host Netanyahu for talks at the White House in Washington, DC, on Monday.

Earlier on Saturday, Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a key member of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, called on the Israeli prime minister to “abandon the path of surrender”.

In a post on X, Ben-Gvir wrote that any ceasefire deal that would include Israel’s withdrawal from “conquered territories”, the release of Palestinian prisoners, or the “revitalisation of Hamas with humanitarian aid” would constitute a “reward for terrorism”.

“The only way to achieve victory and securely return our hostages is through the complete conquest of the Strip, a total cessation of ‘humanitarian’ aid, and the encouragement to emigration,” he said.

“I call on the prime minister to abandon the path of surrender and return to the path of victory.”

Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American scholar of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, told media that he believes Netanyahu “does not want to end the war in Gaza”.

If Netanyahu stops fighting, it could lead to the fall of his government, so “what he’s doing now is hedging his bets”, Bartov said.

“What he’s trying to negotiate is something that feels really cynical – both from the point of view of the war that is constantly happening in Gaza, and from the point of view of the families of the hostages,” he said.

He said this is because the ceasefire proposal only provides for the return of 10 Israeli captives held by Hamas, “out of presumably 20 who are still alive”.