Mideast peace talks to resume, but no sign yet that Hamas will take part
Israeli and American negotiators are scheduled to return to Qatar over the weekend in an effort to revive cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas, the Israeli prime minister’s office said Thursday.
But the announcement came amid new Israeli bombardment both in the Gaza Strip and in Lebanon on Thursday, and uncertainty from U.S. and Qatari officials about whether Hamas might soon rejoin the talks.
“We haven’t yet really determined whether Hamas is prepared to engage,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at a news conference in Doha, the Qatari capital. “The fundamental question is: Is Hamas serious?”
Blinken met for an hour with Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Qatar’s prime minister and foreign minister, discussing how to end the wars in Gaza and Lebanon. Appearing together afterward at the news conference, they said they had no indication that Hamas was more willing to negotiate since Israel killed its leader, Yahya Sinwar, last week.
The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said that David Barnea, the head of the country’s Mossad foreign intelligence service, would depart on Sunday to a meeting in Doha with Al Thani and CIA Director William Burns.
Before leaving Qatar for London on Thursday, Blinken announced that the United States would provide an additional $135 million in humanitarian assistance for “Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank as well as in the region” and said the current humanitarian crisis in Gaza was especially urgent with winter approaching.
Video distributed by multiple news agencies, from outside a bakery in the city of Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, spoke to the desperation in the enclave, showing a sea of grasping hands as scuffles broke out for food.
This week, the main emergency service in Gaza ceased all rescue operations in the northern part of the territory amid a renewed Israeli offensive there.
The Israeli military, which says it is trying to eliminate a regrouped Hamas presence in the north, has killed scores of people there in recent days. Roughly 400,000 people remain in northern Gaza, according to the United Nations.
Lebanon’s military said on Thursday that an Israeli attack had killed three more of its soldiers in the southern part of the country, hours after a new wave of airstrikes hit residential areas near Beirut overnight.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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