CAIRO — Diplomatic efforts to pause the fighting in Gaza and secure the release of Israeli hostages appeared to falter Wednesday, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Hamas of making “delusional demands.”
Officials involved warned that the two sides remained far apart on key details, and Israeli media reported that Netanyahu had ordered his negotiators not to return to Egypt.
“This is a scandalous decision that amounts to a death sentence and deliberate sacrifice of the 134 hostages languishing in Hamas’ tunnels,” said Liat Bell Sommer, head of the main umbrella group for families of Israeli hostages.
Pressed on reports that talks had broken down, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said: “I can’t speak to the specific tactics of a meeting on any given day, but the direction of travel has got to be everybody doing everything they can, including the government of Israel, to try to reach a deal that is good for Israel and is good for regional security.”
The start of the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan in March has added to pressure to reach a deal, as have growing fears for the more than 100 hostages held by Hamas and Israel’s stated plan for a military invasion of Rafah, where at least 1.4 million Palestinians have sought refuge. Fighting continued in other parts of the embattled enclave Wednesday, including at one of its last functioning hospitals.
Diplomatic discussions, which began Tuesday and were expected to last for two more days, are focused on a framework that would pause fighting for six weeks. CIA Director William J. Burns met with Israeli intelligence chief David Barnea and Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi separately on Tuesday as part of the talks.
“According to our side, the Egyptian side, it is very positive,” said a former Egyptian defense official briefed on the talks. Like others in this story, he spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive subject. The number of hostages who would be released, and how many Palestinians would be freed from Israeli prisons in return, remain key sticking points, he said.
Hamas wants Israeli forces to withdraw from Gaza’s cities during the pause and “to secure the corridors to let Palestinians go from the north to the south or from the south to the north,” the former official said. It is also pushing for Israeli surveillance planes and drones to be prohibited from flying over Gazan cities during the truce.
Egypt and Qatar are in direct contact with Hamas, which is “trying to be more flexible this time,” the former official insisted. The militant group initially said it would not negotiate without a permanent cease-fire, but now seems willing to accept a time-limited pause in fighting, he added.
But a diplomat in Cairo who was briefed on the talks described them as “inconclusive.” The biggest hurdle is the “guarantees that Hamas requires in order to be sure that if a cease-fire is signed, then it will be respected,” according to the diplomat.
The diplomat said the chief sticking point on the Israeli side is related to the list of Palestinian prisoners Hamas wants released. That account was echoed by a European diplomat, who said the Israelis “don’t want to consider [freeing] Marwan Barghouti,” a prominent Palestinian political leader jailed more than 20 years ago for murder.
A previous pause in late November ended with Hamas complaints that instead of senior and long-jailed Palestinian prisoners, Israel had released youths recently detained in the occupied West Bank. The group has now submitted a list of 1,500 prisoners to be freed in exchange for the hostages, according to people familiar with the talks.
“It’s more difficult now,” said a former Arab diplomat. “But is there a narrow space for agreement? I think yes, very narrow.”
As negotiations inch forward, the prospect of a major Israeli assault on Rafah has set off global alarm bells. U.S. officials have expressed opposition to the operation without a plan to protect civilians sheltering there; the United Nations has said it would compound an already disastrous humanitarian situation in the south.
“Military operations in Rafah could lead to a slaughter in Gaza,” Martin Griffiths, the U.N. undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, warned in a statement Tuesday.
South Africa, which filed a case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, said Tuesday it had made an urgent request for the court to intervene to prevent harm to civilians from an “unprecedented military offensive against Rafah.”
The prime ministers of Spain and Ireland sent a joint letter Wednesday to the European Commission warning of the risk of a “humanitarian catastrophe” in the city. They also pressed the European Union to urgently review whether Israel was complying with international human rights law.
The threatened incursion into Rafah has ratcheted up tensions between Israel and Egypt, already strained by the massive number of Palestinians crowded along the border. Cairo staunchly opposes any displacement of civilians into northern Sinai, worrying that hosting refugees on its territory would bring security risks and make Egypt complicit in the permanent dislocation of Palestinians from Gaza.
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The CIA director and Israeli intelligence chief met Tuesday in Egypt to continue negotiations for a possible hostage-release deal. Many Gazans are attempting to flee Rafah where about 1.4 million people are sheltering after strikes early Monday that killed at least 67 people.
For context: Understand what’s behind the Israel-Gaza war.
Israel’s war in Gaza has killed more than 28,500 people and wounded nearly 70,000, according to the Gaza Health Ministry; 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack that began the war, Israel says, and at least 232 of its troops have been killed during the ground offensive.
On Wednesday, Israeli troops continued to battle Hamas militants in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, warning displaced people who had been sheltering inside the city’s Nasser Hospital to evacuate the premises. Hazem Bahloul, a doctor at the hospital, said in a WhatsApp message that the army began issuing the instructions early Wednesday. Bahloul said between 5,000 and 7,000 displaced people were in the process of leaving.
“Everyone capable of moving must leave the hospital, whether they are displaced or seeking medical treatment,” he said, adding that Israeli forces were permitting some patients and medical staff to stay behind and had pledged to provide food and supplies.
“The troops opened a secure route to evacuate the civilian population taking shelter in the area,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement Wednesday, adding that the evacuation was “being conducted in a controlled and precise manner.”
The Israeli army began to surround the hospital last month. Fierce fighting made it impossible for the facility to accept new patients. The IDF alleged in late January that Hamas militants were operating “inside and around” the hospital. International doctors volunteering there said they had seen no sign of militant activity on the premises.
The situation at the hospital has grown increasingly dire in recent days. Seven Palestinians were killed and 14 were injured by sniper fire in the hospital’s courtyard, the Gaza Health Ministry said Monday. Israel also attacked nearby buildings, the ministry added, causing fires that destroyed the hospital’s storage sites for medical supplies and flooding the emergency department with sewage water.
In a statement, the IDF said it “will continue to operate in accordance with international law against the Hamas terrorist organization — which cynically embeds itself within hospitals and civilian infrastructure.”
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, said that Israel had denied two WHO missions access to the hospital over the past four days, and that the organization had lost touch with medical staff there.
“Civilians killed, orders to evacuate people seeking shelter, the northern wall demolished: I am alarmed by what is reportedly happening at Nasser Medical Complex in Gaza,” he said in a statement Wednesday. “Nasser is the backbone of the health system in southern Gaza. It must be protected.”
Beatriz Ríos in Brussels, Lior Soroka and Shira Rubin in Tel Aviv, Sarah Dadouch in Beirut, Karen DeYoung in Washington and Heba Farouk Mahfouz in Cairo contributed to this report.
