Hamas has sent a delegation to Cairo to brief them on progress in peace talks, but an official in the group said it would not participate directly in the talks, which have been boycotted for the past 10 days.
Hamas representatives are expected in the Egyptian capital on Saturday, where negotiators from Israel, the United States, Egypt and Qatar are negotiating an elusive deal that includes the release of Israeli hostages, the release of Palestinian prisoners and a ceasefire.
A senior Hamas official, Izzat al-Rishq, confirmed the delegation in a statement, but another unnamed Hamas official was quoted by French news agency AFP as saying that Hamas representatives would not participate in the talks.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence that the current focus of the negotiations is to allow an Israeli presence along the Egypt-Gaza border, a strip of land and road that bisects it, known as the Philadelphia Corridor. Gaza Strip, Netzarim Corridor.
Hamas has rejected such a presence, saying it violates the three-phase peace plan announced by Joe Biden in late May and later endorsed by the UN Security Council.
Hamas has said it accepts the deal, but has boycotted the current round of talks on the grounds that the plan has been fundamentally altered, and has rejected US claims that it has withdrawn from the deal.
The White House insists Israel has accepted the peace plan outlined by Biden, but Netanyahu has repeatedly questioned its terms, vowing his government will continue the war until Hamas is completely destroyed.
The Prime Minister insists that an Israeli presence in the Philadelphia Corridor is necessary to prevent arms smuggling from Egypt to Hamas. However, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government in Cairo has cracked down on smuggling and cross-border smuggling tunnels, arguing that the Israeli presence raises questions about Egyptian sovereignty and territorial integrity.
After US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken visited the region, the United States said it had confirmed an Israeli agreement on a compromise settlement, which Hamas urged it to accept, but has yet to release details of what it called a “bridge proposal”.
CIA Director William Burns and US special envoy for the region Brett McCurk are representing the US at the Cairo talks.
As talks continued in Cairo, Israel continued its military campaign, now in its 11th month, in a surprise attack by Hamas on southern Israel on October 7 that killed nearly 1,200 people and took 250 hostages. More than 100 hostages are still in Gaza but many of them are feared dead.
According to Gaza health officials, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza during Israel’s retaliatory military operation. In recent weeks, Israel has issued a large number of evacuation orders to Palestinians in Gaza, all of whom have already been displaced multiple times by the onslaught and live in makeshift camps.
Many Palestinians who took refuge in areas previously identified by Israel as “humanitarian zones” have been ordered to leave this month, resulting in displaced populations confined to ever-shrinking areas with limited access to food and water.
Health conditions continue to deteriorate and the World Health Organization has confirmed the first case of polio in Gaza in more than a quarter of a century, with a child partially paralyzed by the virus but reported to be in stable condition.
