Hamas received Gaza truce proposal, Palestinian official confirms, as Egypt talks intensify

Official says plan would see 60-day truce, hostage release in two phases; Qatari PM said to travel to Egypt to meet Egyptian, Hamas officials; PA forming committee to govern Gaza

Hamas received a new proposal for a 60-day truce and hostage release in two phases, an anonymous Palestinian official said Monday, as Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani was reportedly en route to Egypt amid intensifying talks.

No details of the proposal were released. It was not immediately clear how many hostages would be freed in each phase.

“The proposal is a framework agreement to launch negotiations on a permanent ceasefire,” a Palestinian official told AFP on condition of anonymity. The official added that “Hamas will hold internal consultations among its leadership” and with leaders of other Palestinian factions to review the proposal.

The renewed diplomatic flurry comes as the international community tries to head off  Israeli plans to step up its offensive in the Strip and capture Gaza City.

According to Qatari channel Al-Araby, the Gulf state’s leader was headed to Egypt’s El Alamein, and the Hamas delegation has been asked to provide a response to the proposal within hours.

Axios reporter Barak Ravid wrote on X that Al Thani was headed to Egypt after the talks on Sunday had not yielded satisfactory results. He was expected to meet with Hamas representatives and Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.

The talks have been mediated by Qatar, Egypt and the United States, with Turkey involved in brokering their resumption last week.

According to Saudi channel Al-Arabiya, the new proposal represents a compromise between a partial ceasefire deal and an agreement that would fully end the war and release all the hostages, which Israel is now publicly demanding.

The proposal reportedly includes clauses amending Hamas’s response to the last proposal, which had concerned a framework agreement for a 60-day ceasefire.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty, visiting the Rafah border crossing with Gaza on Monday, said that “as we speak now, there are Palestinian and Qatari delegations present on Egyptian soil working to intensify efforts to put an end to the systematic killing and starvation.”

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa accompanied Abdelatty to the Rafah crossing on Monday, and said the PA is laying the groundwork to eventually retake control of the Gaza Strip.

“We will soon announce the establishment of a temporary committee to manage the affairs of the Strip under the auspices of the Palestinian government,” Mustafa said.

Mustafa said the body will not be new but rather a reactivation of institutions of the “State of Palestine and its government in Gaza,” which he stressed is “an inseparable part of the State of Palestine.”

The PA, which governs daily affairs in parts of the West Bank, was in charge of running Gaza until 2007, when it was ousted by Hamas in a bloody coup. Israel has said it will not agree to handing over control to the PA, but has yet to formulate an alternative acceptable to the international community.

Mustafa said Israel’s military campaign does not grant legitimacy to any local or international body to impose “arrangements” on the Gaza Strip, hinting at US pressure on Egypt to accept Gazans into Egyptian territory. In late July, Abdelatty said Egypt was training hundreds of Palestinians to take on security roles in Gaza when the war ends.

More than two weeks of negotiations over an agreement in the Qatari capital Doha ended last month with no breakthrough.

While Israel has said it is demanding a deal that would see all the hostages released, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prepared to consider a partial ceasefire and hostage-release agreement with Hamas, despite his recent statements to the contrary, according to Hebrew media reports on Sunday, citing a senior Israeli official.

Channel 12 reported that an Israeli official involved in the negotiations recently told relatives of hostages that “if Hamas agrees to a partial deal under conditions that are acceptable here, don’t be surprised if the red line suddenly shifts.”

Channel 13, quoting a senior member of Israel’s negotiating team, said Netanyahu was willing to discuss “a ‘phased’ deal” with Hamas.

The reports came after the Prime Minister’s Office issued a statement on Saturday in which it insisted that Israel was strictly seeking a comprehensive deal in which all hostages were released at once and all of Netanyahu’s conditions were met, following claims that Hamas had renewed its willingness to pursue a phased ceasefire-hostage arrangement.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets on Sunday in a call for a hostage deal and end of the war.

Polls consistently show a large majority of Israelis are in favor of an end to the fighting if it would see the release of the captives held in Gaza.

Terror groups in the Gaza Strip are holding 50 hostages, including 49 of the 251 abducted in the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023, which sparked the war in Gaza.

They include the bodies of at least 28 confirmed dead by the IDF. Twenty are believed to be alive, and there are grave concerns for the well-being of two others, Israeli officials have said. Hamas is also holding the body of an IDF soldier killed in Gaza in 2014.

The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 60,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters.