Tag: qatar

Israel has pulled its Mossad negotiators from Qatar, which along with Egypt and the United States is mediating talks to secure a renewed pause in the Israel-Hamas war.

“Following the impasse in the negotiations and at the direction of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, David Barnea, head of the Mossad, ordered his team in Doha to return to Israel,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement on Saturday.

The statement accused Hamas of not fulfilling its side of an agreement to extend the truce in Gaza. The deal had included the release of all women and children held in Gaza in accordance with a list conveyed to Hamas and agreed upon, the statement said.

Hours later, Hamas said there will be no further prisoner exchange with Israel until the war on Gaza is over.

“Our official stance is there will be no further prisoner swap until the war ends,” deputy head of the group, Saleh al-Arouri, told Al Jazeera.

“Israeli prisoners will not be released until our [Palestinian] prisoners are liberated and after a ceasefire comes into effect.”

“What we have left of Israeli prisoners are soldiers and civilians serving in the army,” he added.

The Hamas official said the group was ready to exchanges the “bodies of dead Israelis in exchange for our own martyrs, but we need time to exhume these bodies”.

“The Israeli occupation insists that we are still holding women and children but we have already released them all,” he said.

Reporting from Doha, Al Jazeera’s Ali Hashem said: “Given the fact that the demands now are changing, the Israelis are demanding that Hamas should release women soldiers.”

“To Hamas, that has a different price,” he said, referring to the previous agreement of three Palestinians prisoners released for every captive held in Gaza under the weeklong truce that ended early on Friday. “The main issue is also that Hamas was from the beginning offering all for all – the Israeli captives for all the Palestinian prisoners in Israel.

“Now, we are facing this deadlock with the Israelis withdrawing. This doesn’t mean that negotiations are coming to an end. There may be another mediation and new ideas from different parties,” he said.

The temporary truce between Israel and Hamas collapsed after mediators were unable to extend it. The humanitarian pause saw the release of 80 Israeli captives in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners.

Israel and Hamas have traded blame over the truce’s collapse.

Macron in Qatar

Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron said France is “very concerned” by the resumption of violence in Gaza as he landed in Qatar on Saturday to help kick-start a new truce.​​​

Macron said at a press conference at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai that the situation required the doubling-down of efforts to obtain a lasting ceasefire and the freeing of all captives.

He also urged Israel to clarify its goals towards Hamas.

“We are at a moment when Israeli authorities must more precisely define their objectives and their final goal: the total destruction of Hamas – does anyone think it is possible? If this is the case, the war will last 10 years,” he said.

“There is no lasting security for Israel in the region if its security is achieved at the cost of Palestinian lives and thus of the resentment of public opinion in the region. Let’s be collectively lucid,” Macron added.

Asked for a response to those remarks, Mark Regev, senior adviser to Netanyahu, told reporters Israel does not want to see Gaza civilians caught in the crossfire as battles resume.

“Israel is targeting Hamas, a brutal terrorist organisation that has committed the most horrific violence against innocent civilians. Israel is making a maximum effort to safeguard Gaza’s civilians,” Regev said.

Jabalia camp hit again

But the civilian death toll continues to mount in the enclave.

At least 100 Palestinians were killed by Israeli air strikes on the Jabalia refugee camp in the north of the strip on Saturday. Rescuers used their bare hands to dig through rubble in search of survivors.

Palestinian authorities said at least 240 people have been killed since the bombings resumed early on Friday.

Fadel Naim, chief doctor at al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, said his morgue has received 30 bodies since Saturday morning, including seven children.

“The planes bombed our houses. Three bombs, three houses destroyed,” Nemr al-Bel, 43, told the Agence France-Presse news agency, adding that he had counted 10 dead in his family and “13 more still under the rubble”.

The United Nations estimated at least 1.7 million people in Gaza – 80 percent of its population – have been displaced since the war began on October 7.

Since then, the Israeli campaign in Gaza has killed more than 15,000 people, most of them civilians. In Israel, the official death toll stands at about 1,200.

Talks between US and Israeli spy agencies in Qatar, which is key mediator, include issue of captives held in Gaza.

The heads of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Israel’s Mossad have met in Qatar to discuss the extension of a truce between Israel and Hamas as well as the captives being held by the Palestinian group in Gaza.

CIA Director William Burns and David Barnea, head of the Mossad intelligence service, held talks with Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, on Tuesday, a day after Doha announced a two-day extension of an original four-day humanitarian pause in Gaza that had been due to expire.

“We have to read a little bit between the lines here: [The intelligence chiefs were] important in the last meeting, which was on November 9. We believe that was one of the stepping stones getting us to the initial four-day deal,” Al Jazeera’s diplomatic editor James Bays said.

“The fact that we’ve got intelligence chiefs sitting here with the Qatari prime minister, who is also the foreign minister, is interesting because they’ve got the intelligence picture. But also I think it’s interesting partly because of who the US has got leading this effort,” he said, adding that Burns is “more experienced a negotiator than Antony Blinken”, the United States secretary of state. 

Both Israel and Hamas have accused each other of violating the original truce. But they have continued to swap captives for prisoners. Hamas has released captives in its custody, with another 12 freed on Tuesday.

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Our teams have successfully facilitated the release and transfer of 12 hostages held in Gaza.

We have been able to carry out this operation thanks to our neutral intermediary role.

— ICRC in Israel & OT (@ICRC_ilot) November 28, 2023

Majed al-Ansari, a spokesperson for Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a post on X that 30 Palestinian prisoners are set to be released.

On Monday, mediator Qatar said a humanitarian pause in fighting between Israel and Hamas would be extended by two days, hours before the initial four-day truce in Gaza was set to expire.

Qatar, the US and Egypt have engaged in intense negotiations to establish and prolong the truce in Gaza.

Over the course of the initial pause, Hamas released 69 captives – 51 Israelis and 18 people from other nations.

In exchange, 150 Palestinian prisoners– 117 children and 33 women – held in Israeli prisons were released and more humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza.

The talks between the US and Israeli intelligence chiefs and Qatar were also attended by Egyptian officials.

“Is there a way that they can try and deal with the central problem here of keeping this [current truce] going while Israel at the same time wants to remove Hamas?” Bays asked.

“We don’t know anything from the information on the ground, but one possibility that some are suggesting is perhaps a deal could be done for the Hamas military leadership to be persuaded to go into exile in another country,” he said.

“That’s certainly not what we’re hearing from Israeli media sources; the latest we’re hearing from them is that the Israeli government does not want an extension beyond 10 days in total, taking us until the end of Sunday,” according to Bays.

Meanwhile, far-right Israeli Minister for National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to allow soldiers to return to fighting in Gaza to “crush Hamas” as he reacted to an army statement that three explosive devices were detonated in two locations near troops in northern Gaza.

“We must not wait until our fighters are killed. We must once again act in accordance with the goal of the war: the total destruction of Hamas,” the minister posted on X.