The United States and Qatar have announced a resumption of negotiations on a Gaza ceasefire, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said mediators are exploring new options after months of failure to seal a US-led plan.
With less than two weeks before US elections, Blinken is paying his 11th trip to the region since Israel launched its assault on Gaza, which killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar last week, following the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
Blinken said Thursday negotiators would resume talks “in the coming days” on ways to end the yearlong Gaza war and free dozens of captives seized by Hamas.
“We talked about options to capitalise on this moment and next steps to move the process forward,” Blinken said, after talks with Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani.
He said that the two partners were seeking a plan “so that Israel can withdraw, so that Hamas cannot reconstitute, and so that the Palestinian people can rebuild their lives and rebuild their futures”.
“This is a moment to work to end this war, to make sure all the hostages are home, and to build a better future for people in Gaza,” he said.
The Qatari prime minister said Israeli and US delegations would meet in Doha to discuss a potential ceasefire.
Qatar and Egypt have acted as mediators between Israel and Hamas in months of talks that broke down in August without an agreement to end the war.
US President Joe Biden on laid out a plan on May 31 that would temporarily halt fighting and seek the release of Israeli captives still held by Hamas in Gaza.
But talks became bogged down, with a major sticking point being Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence on an Israeli troop presence on the Gaza-Egypt border.
Since killing Sinwar last week, Israel has pressed on with intensive operations in besieged northern Gaza, in what Palestinians and UN agencies fear could be an attempt to seal off the north from the rest of the enclave.
Blinken, on the third stop of a tour that took him to Israel and Saudi Arabia, repeated his assertion that Sinwar was the main impediment to an agreement and that his death offered an opportunity.
Sheikh Mohammed said there was so far “no clarity what will be the way forward” from Hamas but that Qatari mediators had “re-engaged” with the group since Sinwar’s death.
“There has been an engagement with the representatives from the political office in Doha. We had some meetings with them in the last couple of days,” he said, adding that Egypt has “ongoing” discussions with Hamas.
US officials had described Sinwar as intransigent in negotiations brokered by the US, Qatar and Egypt on a ceasefire that would also see the release of captives from Gaza.
Critics have said the issue was not just Hamas, but the Biden administration’s failure to secure the support of Israel, which has received a near continuous flow of billions of dollars in US weapons.
At least 42,847 people have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza and 100,544 others wounded since October 2023, according to Palestinian health authorities.
At least 1,139 people were killed in the Hamas-led attack on Israel, according to an Al Jazeera tally based on Israeli statistics, and approximately 250 others were taken captive.
