Report: Israel enters hostage talks with new proposal

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Lerato Khumalo

Prime Minister Netanyahu is upping the ante. Israeli military is to remain permanently at strategic locations in the Gaza Strip. The negotiations are on a knife edge.

According to a media report, Israel is going into the indirect hostage negotiations planned for Sunday in Rome with a modified proposal. The proposal had already been sent to the American mediators in advance, wrote the well-connected Israeli journalist Barak Ravid on the portal “walla.co.il”. He based his statement on three informants who are said to be privy to the proceedings.

The indirect talks between Israel and the Islamist Hamas, in which the USA, Qatar and Egypt are mediating, have been very slow for months. Since May, they have revolved around a multi-stage plan by US President Joe Biden, which ultimately envisages a permanent ceasefire in the Gaza war. In addition, the hostages held by Hamas are to be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons.

The updated proposal with which Israel intends to go into the next round of talks in Rome is said to contain – as Ravid writes – additional demands recently made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. These amount to Israel’s military being able to occupy strategically important positions in the Gaza Strip for an indefinite period of time.

In this context, Netanyahu mentioned a corridor that divides the Gaza Strip in the middle, the occupation of which would allow control of the movement of people and goods through the sealed-off coastal area, as well as the border area with Egypt in the south.

According to Ravid, high-ranking officials of the Israeli negotiating delegation and the security apparatus assume that Hamas will not accept these conditions. This would lead to a crisis in the negotiations. The Gaza war was triggered by the unprecedented massacre in which more than 1,200 people were killed, which terrorists from Hamas and other groups carried out in Israel on October 7 last year.