Displaced people in the Gaza Strip, where food is scarce, gathered for bread outside a bakery amid the ruins of Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, on Thursday.
Credit...Haitham Imad/EPA, via Shutterstock

Israel and U.S. to Negotiate Cease-Fire Talks as Gaza and Lebanon Wars Rage On

Israel and the United States plan to send envoys next week to negotiations in Qatar, as the related wars in Gaza and Lebanon rage on.

by · NY Times

Israeli and American negotiators are scheduled to return to Qatar over the weekend in an effort to revive cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas, the Israeli prime minister’s office said on Thursday.

But the announcement came amid new Israeli bombardment both in the Gaza Strip and in Lebanon on Thursday, and uncertainty from U.S. and Qatari officials about whether Hamas might soon rejoin the talks.

“We haven’t yet really determined whether Hamas is prepared to engage,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said at a news conference in Doha, the Qatari capital. “The fundamental question is: Is Hamas serious?”

Mr. Blinken met for an hour with Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Qatar’s prime minister and foreign minister, discussing how to end the wars in Gaza and Lebanon. Appearing together afterward at the news conference, they said they had no indication that Hamas was more willing to negotiate since Israel killed its leader, Yahya Sinwar, last week.

The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said that David Barnea, the head of the country’s Mossad foreign intelligence service, would depart on Sunday to a meeting in Doha with Mr. Al Thani and William J. Burns, the director of the C.I.A.

Before leaving Qatar for London on Thursday, Mr. Blinken announced that the United States would provide an additional $135 million in humanitarian assistance for “Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank as well as in the region” and said the current humanitarian crisis in Gaza was especially urgent with winter approaching.

Video distributed by multiple news agencies, from outside a bakery in the city of Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, spoke to the desperation in the enclave, showing a sea of grasping hands as scuffles broke out for food.

This week, the main emergency service in Gaza ceased all rescue operations in the northern part of the territory amid a renewed Israeli offensive there.

The Israeli military, which says it is trying to eliminate a regrouped Hamas presence in the north, has killed scores of people there in recent days. Roughly 400,000 people remain in northern Gaza, according to the United Nations, and many have been trapped in their ruined neighborhoods by Israeli airstrikes.

The Palestinian Civil Defense, the emergency service, had been responding to the scenes of attacks to treat the wounded and try to pull people from rubble. But on Wednesday night, it said its work in northern Gaza had “completely ceased.”

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the main U.N. aid agency for Palestinians, issued a particularly stark assessment of the situation on Tuesday, writing in a social media post that “in northern Gaza, people are just waiting to die.”

Israeli strikes continued on Thursday across Gaza, where Israel is at war with Hamas, and Lebanon, where it is battling Hezbollah.

The Israeli military said it had struck a Hamas command center inside a compound formerly used as a school in Nuseirat, in central Gaza. Video obtained by the Reuters news agency and taken after the strike shows injured people, including children, at the compound, which has been housing displaced Palestinians.

Lebanon’s military said on Thursday that an Israeli attack had killed three more of its soldiers in the southern part of the country, hours after a new wave of airstrikes hit residential areas near Beirut overnight.

The Lebanese military said the three soldiers had been killed near the town of Yater while on an operation to evacuate wounded people from the area. It was not clear when the attack occurred.

Israel’s military said it was looking into whether its forces had struck Lebanese soldiers while conducting raids in the area against Hezbollah, the powerful militant group backed by Iran. It said in a statement that it “does not intentionally target soldiers of the Lebanese Army,” and added, “The incident is under review, and any lessons will be learned.”

Lebanon’s military is not a party to the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, but Lebanese troops have increasingly been caught in the crossfire. Thursday was at least the fourth time this month that Israeli troops had killed Lebanese soldiers amid their fight against Hezbollah. This week, the Israeli military apologized over the deaths of three other Lebanese soldiers, saying that it was “not operating against the Lebanese Army.”

France announced on Thursday that it would support the recruitment of thousands of extra troops for Lebanon’s military and donate more than $100 million to support people who have fled their homes because of the war.

Speaking in Paris at a conference on the Lebanese crisis, President Emmanuel Macron of France called for a cease-fire and said that Hezbollah, which has fired thousands of drones and missiles at Israel in the past year, should stop its attacks. He also had sharp words for Israel, reflecting the view even among Israel’s allies that it has used excessive force against its enemies, resulting in disproportionate casualties and destruction.

“There has been a lot of talk in recent days of a war of civilizations, or of civilizations that must be defended,” the French president said. “I’m not sure you can defend a civilization by sowing barbarism yourself.”

Hezbollah has regularly fired munitions into Israel, saying that it was acting in support of Hamas, which is also backed by Iran. While fighting both groups, Israel has also killed some Iranian military commanders, and in July it assassinated Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, on Iranian soil. In retaliation, Iran fired a barrage of missiles at Israel early this month, and much of the world is waiting nervously to see how Israel will respond.

The Biden administration hopes that restarting cease-fire talks for Gaza would de-escalate the entire intertwined set of conflicts.

U.S. officials had seen Mr. Sinwar, who took over from Mr. Haniyeh, as an obstacle to negotiations and hoped that after his killing, Hamas’s remaining leaders might be more open to making a deal to end the yearlong war in Gaza and release the dozens of hostages remaining there.

Mr. Al Thani said at the news conference that Qatar had “re-engaged” with Hamas, which maintains an office in Doha, in the week since Mr. Sinwar’s death, and sensed that Hamas maintains “the same position” as it has for months. Israel and Hamas have repeatedly dismissed each other’s truce conditions as unacceptable.

Mr. Al Thani added that “there are ongoing discussions between Egypt and Hamas,” but he did not elaborate. A Hamas-run channel, Al Aqsa TV, later confirmed that a Hamas delegation had arrived in Cairo to meet with Egyptian officials. Qatar and Egypt act as intermediaries in the talks because Hamas and Israel do not speak directly to each other.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a group representing the families of Israeli captives in Gaza, welcomed the resumption of cease-fire talks.

“We must leverage the last military achievements, particularly the elimination of Sinwar, to secure a single comprehensive deal for all hostages’ return,” the group said in a statement.

For months, the Biden administration has pursued a three-phase agreement that would begin with a six-week pause in fighting during which the remaining hostages would be released from Gaza in exchange for Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons. The second phase envisions a permanent cease-fire, and the third provides for a multiyear reconstruction plan for Gaza.

U.S. officials said this week that the administration was open to fresh proposals, potentially including a shorter pause in Israel’s offensive in exchange for the release of just some of the hostages.

Mr. Blinken, who previously visited Israel and Saudi Arabia this week, emphasized that ending the war in Gaza requires that “we continue to develop a plan for what follows, so that Israel can withdraw, so that Hamas cannot reconstitute and so that the Palestinian people can rebuild their lives, rebuild their futures under Palestinian leadership.”

Reporting was contributed by Liam Stack, Johnatan Reiss, Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Nader Ibrahim and Catherine Porter.

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