As Ramadan approaches, negotiations between Israel and Hamas have reached an impasse over whether Palestinian men can return to northern Gaza.
Weeks of ceasefire talks have entered their most dangerous phase as US and Arab mediators rush to reach an agreement to halt fighting in Gaza and free some hostages held there until the last day of Ramadan.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Egyptian officials with knowledge of the talks said Egypt’s intelligence chief, Abbas Kamel, stepped in to prevent Hamas from walking out of the talks late on Tuesday and persuaded it to stay at the table for another day even though the two sides appeared deadlocked.
Hamas said in a statement early yesterday that it had shown ‘the necessary flexibility’ to reach an agreement and would continue negotiations ‘to reach an agreement that meets the demands and interests of the people’.
Israel and Hamas are at loggerheads over whether men of fighting age should be allowed to return to the northern part of Gaza, which Israel has closed to entry during the ceasefire, Egyptian officials said. An Israeli official familiar with the matter denied that the issue was currently part of the negotiations.
According to the Israeli official, Israel is not negotiating directly with Hamas in the ceasefire talks brokered by the US, Egypt and Qatar, and is still waiting for Hamas to respond. The main questions Israel wants answered are how many and which Palestinian prisoners Hamas is demanding for each hostage it releases, and how many of the sick, elderly and female hostages it is holding are still alive. Israel has put the number at around 40 and says it will not send a negotiating team to Cairo until it receives the answers. Hamas, for its part, says it needs several days without fighting to calculate the number.
Israeli officials say Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, is not interested in a deal, hoping instead that continued fighting will lead to an escalation of tensions in the West Bank and Jerusalem during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which begins on Sunday.
“We got nothing. Nothing has changed. Sinwar wants tensions to escalate in the Middle East and especially in Israel, and he wants his own people to suffer,” the Israeli official said.
If negotiations fail, Israel has threatened to launch a military operation against Rafah, a city of more than a million Palestinians, during Ramadan, which begins around March 10. The US has warned that such an operation, which Israel sees as crucial to ousting Hamas from the area, should not be undertaken without a plan to limit civilian casualties. Israeli leaders have also said they will not carry out such an operation without civilian casualties.
Politically, the consequences of a deal or failure are enormous. The occupation of Rafah, which Israel ordered the Palestinians to leave at the start of the war, could inflame tensions in the region and trigger a wider conflict on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. Hezbollah and the Israeli army have exchanged fire on the border since Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October.
Global shipping routes have also been disrupted by attacks in the Red Sea, which Yemen’s Houthis say are aimed at forcing an end to the war in Gaza. On Wednesday, a Barbados-flagged bulk carrier was hit in an attack claimed by the Houthis, killing three people on board – the first known casualties since the Iran-backed group began attacking merchant ships in late November, according to the US military.
The Biden administration, under electoral pressure over the scale of the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza, has stepped up talks in the hope of securing a six-week pause in hostilities to facilitate the delivery of more humanitarian aid.
Egyptian officials said Hamas wanted a commitment to a permanent ceasefire, followed by a six-week break in hostilities, in return for Israel’s full withdrawal from Gaza, allowing hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians to return to their homes in the north, and the release of living Israeli hostages.
