CAIRO/RAFAH, Gaza Strip: Israel boycotted cease-fire talks in Cairo on Sunday after Hamas rejected its demand for a full list of the names of hostages who are still alive, an Israeli newspaper said.
A Hamas delegation arrived in Cairo for talks seen as a possible final hurdle to a deal that would halt fighting for six weeks. But in the early evening there was no sign of the Israelis.
“There is no Israeli delegation in Cairo,” Ynet, the online version of Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, quoted an unidentified Israeli official as saying. “Hamas refuses to give clear answers, so there is no reason to send an Israeli delegation.”
Washington has insisted that a ceasefire deal is close and should be concluded in time to stop the fighting by the start of Ramazan, a week from now. But the warring parties have not publicly indicated that they are backing down from previous demands.
After the Hamas delegation arrived, a Palestinian official told Reuters there was “no deal yet”. There was no official comment from the Israeli side.
One source briefed on the talks said on Saturday that Israel may stay away from Cairo unless Hamas first presents its full list of hostages who are still alive. A Palestinian source told Reuters that Hamas had so far rejected the demand.
In past negotiations, Hamas has tried to avoid discussing the welfare of individual hostages until conditions for their release have been set.
One US official told reporters on Saturday: “The path to a ceasefire right now, literally at this hour, is direct. And there’s a deal on the table. There is a framework agreement.”
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Israel has agreed to the framework and it is now up to Hamas to respond, the US official said.
The deal would bring the first extended truce of the war, which has so far raged for five months with just a week’s pause in November. Dozens of hostages held by the militants would be freed in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian detainees.
Aid will be increased for Gazans who will be pushed to the brink of famine. The fighting would stop in time to avert a massive planned Israeli assault on Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are trapped against a fence on the enclave’s southern border with Egypt. Israeli forces would withdraw from some areas, leaving Gazans to return to abandoned homes.
But the proposal appears to fall short of Hamas’s main demand for a permanent end to the war, while leaving the fate of more than half of the more than 100 remaining hostages — including Israeli men exempt from the conditions of release for women, children, the elderly and the wounded — unresolved.
Egyptian mediators suggested that these issues be set aside for now, with assurances that they would resolve them at a later stage. A Hamas source told Reuters the militants were still waiting for a “package deal”.
