The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Saturday he is sending a delegation of senior officials to Qatar to try to negotiate a hostage release-cum-ceasefire in Gaza.
The decision comes after Netanyahu met in Jerusalem with Steve Witkoff, the President-elect Donald Trump’s envoy for the Middle East, and with officials from the Biden administration along with top officials of Israel. Following that meeting, Netanyahu instructed the chiefs of Mossad spy agency, the Shin Bet security agency, General Nitzan Alon, and foreign policy adviser Ophir Falk to visit Doha to move along the hostage release negotiations.
The United States has been brokering talks with Qatar and Egypt for more than a year in an effort to reach a deal that would quiet the war in Gaza and free the hostages.
News that was welcomed by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, an umbrella group representing those held in Gaza, as “a historic opportunity to secure the release of all our loved ones.” They called on negotiators to “leave no stone unturned” in their efforts to ensure the return of all hostages.
Indirect talks between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas, revived last weekend in Qatar, centered on the immediate release of hostages in exchange for Hamas’s October 7, 2023 assault on Israel.
President Biden, who is due to stand down on 20 January said on Thursday that “real progress” was being made. By contrast, the incoming president, Donald Trump, said there would be “hell to pay” if no hostages were released before his inauguration.
The October 7 attack sparked the conflict in Gaza, killing 1,208 people in Israel, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures. The same assault saw Palestinian militants take 251 hostages, with 94 still thought to be in the Gaza Strip, including 34 people the Israeli military has reported as dead.
Since then, Israeli military operations in Gaza have killed 46,537 people, most of them civilians, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory whose figures the United Nations says are reliable.
