By Samia Nakhoul, Muhammad Al Gebaly and Nidal al-Mughrabi
DUBAI/CAIRO (Reuters) – Hamas has accepted a U.S. proposal to begin talks on the release of Israeli hostages, including soldiers and men, 16 days into the first phase of a deal aimed at ending the Gaza war, a senior Hamas source told Reuters on Saturday.
The source, speaking on condition of anonymity because the talks are private, told Reuters that the movement had dropped its demand that Israel first commit to a permanent ceasefire before signing the agreement, and would allow the negotiations to achieve that throughout the first six-week phase.
A Palestinian official close to international peace efforts said the proposal could lead to a framework agreement if adopted by Israel and would end the nine-month war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
A source in the Israeli negotiating team, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Friday that there was now a real chance of reaching an agreement. This was in stark contrast to previous instances during the nine-month war in Gaza, when Israel said Hamas’s terms were unacceptable.
A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. His office said Friday that the talks would continue next week and stressed that gaps between the two sides remained.
A US official declined to confirm Hamas’s decision, adding: “There is real progress, but there is still a lot of work to be done.”
The conflict has killed more than 38,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, since Hamas attacked southern Israeli cities on October 7, killing 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages, according to official Israeli figures.
A Hamas source said the new proposal would see mediators guarantee a temporary ceasefire, aid deliveries and Israeli troop withdrawals as long as indirect talks to implement the second phase of the deal continue.
Efforts to secure a ceasefire and release the hostages in Gaza have intensified in recent days with active shuttle diplomacy between Washington, Israel and Qatar, which is leading the mediation efforts from Doha, where Hamas’s exiled leadership is based.
A regional source said that the US administration is working hard to ensure that an agreement is reached before the presidential elections in November.
Netanyahu said on Friday that the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency had returned from an initial meeting with mediators in Qatar and that negotiations would continue next week.
Several families of the hostages made statements to reporters on Saturday ahead of the weekly hostage gathering in Tel Aviv, urging Netanyahu to move forward with the deal.
“For the first time in months, we feel hope. This is an opportunity that cannot be missed,” said Einav Zangawker, the mother of Matan Zangawker, 24, who was kidnapped from his kibbutz home on October 7.
The fighting is raging
Meanwhile, Israeli forces have stepped up military strikes across the Gaza Strip, killing at least 29 Palestinians in the past 24 hours and wounding 100 others, according to health officials in the territory.
Among those killed in separate airstrikes were five local journalists, bringing the death toll of journalists since October 7 to 158, according to the Hamas-led government media office in Gaza.
Israeli forces, deepening their incursions into Rafah near the border with Egypt, killed four Palestinian policemen and wounded eight others in an air strike on their vehicle on Saturday, health officials said.
The Hamas government’s Interior Ministry said in a statement that the four included Fares Abdel Aal, commander of the police force in the Tel al-Sultan neighborhood, west of Rafah.
The Israeli military said its forces continued “intelligence base operations” in Rafah, destroying several underground structures, seizing weapons and equipment, and killing a number of Palestinian militants.
Israel said its operations in Rafah were aimed at eliminating the last battalions of Hamas’s armed wing.
In the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza, one of the eight historic camps in the Strip, an Israeli air strike on a house killed 10 Palestinians, according to medical sources.
The Israeli military said it destroyed a Hamas rocket cell operating from an area designated for humanitarian purposes. It said it carried out a precision strike after taking precautions to ensure the safety of civilians. Hamas denies Israeli accusations that it uses civilian property for military purposes.
The armed wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad said their fighters attacked Israeli forces in several areas of the Strip with anti-tank missiles and mortar shells.
(Reporting and editing by Samia Nakhoul, Mohammed El-Gebali and Nidal El-Maghribi; Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell and Emily Rose in Jerusalem and Andrea Shalal in Wilmington, Delaware; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan, William Mallard, Toby Chopra and Daniel Wallis)