• Hamas to stay out of talks, but may meet mediators afterwards
• Israeli spy chiefs to attend meetings

DOHA: Qatar will host Gaza ceasefire talks on Thursday, sources close to the negotiations said, seeking a so-far elusive agreement that the United States hopes would stop Iranian retaliation against Israel and avert a wider conflict.

US, Qatari and Egyptian mediators have invited Israel and Hamas for negotiations aimed at ending fighting that the health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip says has claimed nearly 40,000 lives in the Palestinian territory.

Hamas said it would not take part in a new round of Gaza ceasefire talks, but an official briefed on the talks said mediators expected to consult with the Palestinian group afterwards.

The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the heads of Israel’s Mossad spy agency and Shin Bet secret service would go to Doha. On Tuesday, Netanyahu’s office detailed Israel’s conditions for a truce including “a veto on certain prisoners” being released from its jails.

The talks will be held in the Qatari capital Doha, a source close to Hamas and a second source close to the negotiations said.

According to a US source familiar with the Doha meeting, CIA director William Burns is scheduled to take part.

Mediation efforts have repeatedly stalled since a week-long ceasefire in November — the only pause so far in the war — when several of prisoners were released by militants in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

A Hamas official said the movement was “continuing its consultations with the mediators”, after demanding the implementation of a three-phase proposal that US President Joe Biden laid out on May 31, instead of holding more talks.

US State Department spokesman Vedant Patel told reporters that “our Qatari partners have assured us that they are working to ensure that there is Hamas representation as well” in Doha.

The latest mediation push comes as regional tensions have soared following the July 31 killing of Hamas political leader and truce negotiator Ismail Haniyeh during a visit to Tehran.

‘No one knows’

Western leaders have urged Tehran to avoid attacking Israel over Haniyeh’s killing, which came hours after an Israeli strike in Beirut killed a senior commander of Hamas ally Hezbollah.

A truce deal in Gaza, based on “the framework agreement that’s on the table”, could help de-escalate regional tensions and “prevent an outbreak of a wider war”, said US envoy Amos Hochstein on a visit to Beirut on Wednesday.

Asked whether a ceasefire agreement in Gaza could stave off a feared Iranian retaliation on Israel, Biden said: “That’s my expectation”.

The US president added that while negotiations were “getting hard”, he was “not giving up”.

Iran rejects Western calls “to take no deterrent action against a regime which has violated its sovereignty and territorial integrity”, foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani said, referring to Israel.

Iran’s mission to the United Nations said last week: “We hope that our response will be timed and conducted in a manner not to the detriment of the potential ceasefire” in Gaza.

In Israel’s commercial hub of Tel Aviv, flight attendant Avigail Ginzburg, 22, said she was “very, very stressed about the (Iranian) retaliation”, but “no one knows what will happen”.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on social media platform X that the country remained on “high alert” over “the hate-filled threats of the Iranian regime and its terrorist proxies”.

The escalation has prompted governments to issue advisories against travel to Lebanon and also prepare contingency plans to evacuate their nationals from the region if full-scale war breaks out.

The United States has deployed an aircraft carrier strike group and a guided missile submarine to the region in support of Israel. And the Biden administration approved more than $20 billion in new weapons sales to Israel, including 50 F-15 fighter jets.

‘We are all suffering’

Civil defence rescuers reported artillery shelling and air strikes across the Gaza Strip, with four family members killed in a residential complex near Khan Yunis. With negotiators planning to meet, Palestinian Ibrahim Makhamer Said in central Gaza’s Deir Al Balah: “We hope for the end of the war.”

“We are all suffering,” said Makhamer, denouncing “a policy of starvation” and shortages of medical supplies in the territory, where the vast majority of its 2.4 million people have been displaced at least once by the conflict.

But Khaled Jaber, another Gazan, said his expectations for the Doha talks were “very low”. “Every time Hamas agrees, Netanyahu comes out with impossible conditions,” he said.

Published in Dawn, August 15th, 2024