As pressure built for a settlement to stop the spread of a war that the health ministry of the Hamas-run enclave reported has killed 40,005, the United States praised a “promising start” to the ceasefire talks in Gaza on Thursday.
The violence that resulted from Hamas’s historic onslaught on Israel on October 7th has destroyed Gaza, forced almost all of its residents to flee their homes at least once, and created a dire humanitarian situation.
According to US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, William Burns, the director of the CIA, began holding talks in the capital city of Doha, Qatar.
“Today is a promising start,” Kirby told reporters in Washington, adding: “There remains a lot of work to do.”
He indicated that he anticipated the negotiations to continue on Friday. Osama Hamdan, a representative for Hamas, stated that although the organisation did not attend the conference on Thursday, it was prepared to participate in indirect talks provided Israel made fresh promises.
The Palestinian organisation has called for the execution of a cease-fire proposal that US President Joe Biden presented in late May.
“If the mediators succeed in forcing the (Israeli) occupation to agree, we would, but so far there’s nothing new,” Hamdan told news agency.
He said Hamas would not take part in protracted negotiations that “give (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu more time to kill the Palestinian people”.
There has only been one truce thus far, which took place in November when Gaza militants freed 105 hostages that had been taken during the attack on October 7 in exchange for 240 Palestinian detainees who were being held in Israeli jails.
The most recent diplomatic effort coincides with the announcement by the Gaza health ministry that the death toll in the besieged Palestinian enclave has topped 40,000. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said this as “yet another reason” why an immediate ceasefire was required.
“Given the… disturbing number of people who remain unaccounted for, who may be trapped or dead under the rubble, this number may, if anything, be an undercount,” his spokesman Farhan Haq said.
“This is yet another reason why we need to have a ceasefire now, as well as the release of all hostages and unimpeded humanitarian assistance.”
The Gaza Health Ministry claimed that 40 people had died in the preceding 24 hours, although it does not break down the number of civilian and militant casualties.
The Israeli military said it had killed “more than 17,000” Palestinian militants in Gaza since the war began.
British foreign minister David Lammy and his French counterpart Stephane Sejourne are to discuss the truce talks with Israel’s top diplomat Israel Katz on Friday.
In Beirut on Wednesday, visiting US envoy Amos Hochstein said a deal in Gaza “would also help enable a diplomatic resolution here in Lebanon and that would prevent an outbreak of a wider war”.
“We have to take advantage of this window for diplomatic action and diplomatic solutions. That time is now,” he added.
Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel triggered the war and resulted in the deaths of 1,198 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Militants also seized 251 people, 111 of whom are still held in Gaza, including 39 the military says are dead.
Mediation efforts have repeatedly stalled since the week-long truce in November.
Hamas officials, some analysts and critics in Israel have said Netanyahu has sought to prolong the war for political gain.
Israeli media this week quoted Defence Minister Yoav Gallant as privately telling a parliamentary committee that a hostage release deal “is stalling… in part because of Israel”.
Netanyahu’s office accused Gallant of adopting an “anti-Israel narrative” and said Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is “the only obstacle to a hostage deal”.
The latest mediation push follows the July 31 killing of Sinwar’s predecessor, Hamas political leader and truce negotiator Ismail Haniyeh. His killing during a visit to Tehran sent fears of a wider conflagration soaring.
Iran and its regional allies blamed Israel and vowed retaliation. Israel has not claimed responsibility for the attack.
Western leaders have urged Tehran to avoid hitting Israel over Haniyeh’s killing, which came hours after an Israeli strike in Beirut killed Hezbollah’s military commander.
Fallout from the conflict has drawn in Iran-aligned groups from Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Syria.
More than 370 Hezbollah members have been killed in 10 months of near daily cross-border fire with Israeli forces, according to an AFP tally, more than the Iran-backed movement lost in the 2006 war with Israel.
On the Israeli side, 22 soldiers and 26 civilians have been killed, including in the annexed Golan Heights, according to military figures.
There weren’t many deaths reported in Gaza on Thursday, despite the fact that the conflict has devastated much of the region’s infrastructure and buildings.
Emergency services reported that five persons were killed by air strikes in Gaza City during the worst onslaught.
The Israeli military reported that in Rafah, southern Gaza, they had killed roughly twenty militants.
Following an Israeli strike, dead and injured, including toddlers covered in blood, arrived at Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Yunis on Wednesday.
One distraught man said, “I was not pro-Hamas but now I support them and I want to fight.”
