Hamas said on Wednesday it had exchanged a list of the names of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners to be released under a swap deal and that it was optimistic about talks in Egypt on US president Donald Trump’s plan to end the war in Gaza.
Negotiations are focused on the mechanisms to halt the conflict, withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and the swap deal, the Palestinian militant group added.
The timing of the implementation of the first phase of Mr Trump’s 20-point initiative has not been agreed so far during talks in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, said a Palestinian source close to the negotiations.
Mr Trump expressed optimism about progress toward a deal on Tuesday, the second anniversary of Hamas’s attack on Israel that triggered Israel’s assault on Gaza.
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A US team including special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Mr Trump’s son-in-law who served as Middle East envoy during Mr Trump’s first term, will take part in the talks over a plan that has come closest to silencing the guns.
But officials on all sides urged caution over the prospects for a rapid agreement.
Israeli strategic affairs minister Ron Dermer - prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s close confidant - was due to join the talks on Wednesday afternoon, according to an Israeli official.
Qatari prime minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, a key mediator, and Turkish spymaster Ibrahim Kalin, will also take part in the ceasefire negotiations in Sharm el-Sheikh on Wednesday, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Hamas wants a permanent, comprehensive ceasefire, a complete pullout of Israeli forces and the immediate start of a comprehensive reconstruction process under the supervision of a Palestinian “national technocratic body”.
Israel, for its part, wants Hamas to disarm, which the group rejects.
US officials suggest they want to initially focus talks on a halt to the fighting and the logistics of how the Israeli hostages in Gaza and Palestinian detainees in Israel would be freed.
In the absence of a ceasefire, Israel has pressed on with its offensive in Gaza, increasing its international isolation.
Israel’s far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir visited the flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem on Wednesday and called on Mr Netanyahu to pursue “complete victory” over Hamas in Gaza.
In a video on the edge of one of the most sensitive sites in the Middle East, Mr Ben-Gvir said Israel was “winning” the war in Gaza, at the Jerusalem compound known to Jews as Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary.
“Every house in Gaza has a picture of the Temple Mount, and today, two years later, we are winning on the Temple Mount. We are the owners of the Temple Mount,” Mr Ben-Gvir said in the video released by his Jewish Power party.
“I only pray that our prime minister will allow a complete victory in Gaza as well – to destroy Hamas, with God’s help we will return the hostages, and we will win a complete victory,” Mr Ben-Gvir said.
Ben-Gvir, known as a hardliner well before he helped Mr Netanyahu form the most right-wing coalition government in Israel’s history, heads the pro-settler, nationalist-religious Jewish Power party. He has previously threatened to quit Mr Netanyahu’s government unless Hamas is utterly destroyed.
The Al-Aqsa compound, in Jerusalem’s walled Old City, is Islam’s third holiest site and the most sacred in Judaism. Under a delicate decades-old “status quo” arrangement with Muslim authorities, the Al-Aqsa compound is administered by a Jordanian religious foundation and Jews can visit but may not pray there.
Ben-Gvir has previously challenged those rules, prompting Netanyahu to issue statements saying Israel was committed to the status quo there.
Suggestions that Israel would alter rules at the Al-Aqsa compound have sparked outrage in the Muslim world and ignited violence in the past.
Global outrage has mounted against Israel’s assault on Gaza, which has internally displaced nearly the entire population of the strip and set off a starvation crisis. Multiple rights experts, scholars and a UN inquiry say it amounts to genocide. Israel calls its actions self-defense after the 2023 Hamas attack.
[ Two years after the October 7th attack, Israeli families still live in its shadowOpens in new window ]
According to Gaza authorities, more than 67,000 people have been killed in Israel’s assault that followed the October 7th, 2023 attack by Hamas, when 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken to Gaza as hostages, according to Israel’s tallies. - Reuters
