Hamas said it would head to Cairo on Saturday to meet with mediators ahead of a new round of Gaza cease-fire talks, as the United States, Qatar and Egypt push to reach an agreement they hope can stave off the growing threat of regional war.
The fighting in Gaza has raged on even as high-stakes efforts for a deal intensify, with Israeli strikes overnight killing dozens, according to the Civil Defense emergency service in Gaza. On Friday, the Israeli military announced that at least one soldier had been killed and several others were wounded in fighting in central Gaza.
While U.S. officials have insisted there is progress in negotiations, the main warring parties, Israel and Hamas, have been far more pessimistic in their assessment. In late July, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, stiffened Israel’s position on several key issues, including by demanding a postwar Israeli presence along Gaza’s border with Egypt.
Negotiators have been pushing for a major summit as early as Sunday to move ahead with the talks. Hamas said on Saturday that a delegation of its representatives would arrive in Cairo that evening to “hear the results” of a recent round of discussions between Israel, Egypt and the United States.
In a statement, the group said it was willing to move ahead with a proposal from early July, before Mr. Netanyahu set out his new conditions.
Hamas did not specifically say whether it would participate in a summit next week; its officials did not join a similar round of talks in Qatar earlier this month, calling it pointless given the new Israeli demands. But the visit to Cairo leaves the door open for further talks.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken visited Israel, Egypt and Qatar this week to push a “bridging proposal,” which aims to close the gaps between Israel and Hamas. But the proposal does not tackle several of the key sticking points between the two sides.
One of the main disputes is over Mr. Netanyahu’s insistence that Israeli forces maintain some presence along the Philadelphi Corridor, a section of the border between Egypt and Gaza. Mr. Netanyahu said that without Israeli oversight, Hamas would quickly use the area to smuggle weapons and rearm itself.
Both Hamas and Egypt have insisted that Israeli troops must leave the area, and Hamas officials have reiterated for months that any cease-fire agreement must lead to a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
Also left unresolved are disagreements over how many Palestinian prisoners would be released, and Mr. Netanyahu’s condition that displaced Palestinians returning to northern Gaza be searched for weapons.
The United States, Egypt, and Qatar are eager to reach a deal they hope can tamp down tensions that have flared across the Middle East since the assassination last month of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, hours after an Israeli airstrike killed a senior Hezbollah commander in the Lebanese capital of Beirut.
Both Hezbollah and Iran have vowed to retaliate against Israel for the killings, sparking fears of a rapid escalation that could tip the region out of the uneasy balance of tit-for-tat strikes that has held since Israel launched its war in Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks.
“The process is moving forward,” John F. Kirby, the White House national security spokesman, said on Friday. “It’s moving forward in the way we had outlined earlier.”
After his meetings across the region this week, Mr. Blinken had said that Israel had accepted the U.S. proposal, the details of which have not been made public, and that the onus was on Hamas to do the same. But officials in both Israel and Hamas said the proposal had left major issues unresolved, with even some Israeli negotiators privately taken aback by the United States’ attempt to project optimism over a proposal they said was likely to be unacceptable to Hamas.
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting from Haifa.
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