GAZA STRIP (AFP) – A Hamas official said on Sunday the group was ready to free 34 hostages in the “first phase” of a potential deal with Israel, after Israel said indirect talks on a truce and hostage release agreement had resumed in Qatar.
Mediators Qatar, Egypt and the United States (US) have tried for months to strike a deal to end the war. The latest effort comes just days before Donald Trump takes office as president of the US on January 20.
The talks took place as Israel pounded the Gaza Strip on Sunday, killing at least 23 people according to rescuers, nearly 15 months into the war.
During that time there has been only one truce, a one-week pause in November 2023 that saw 80 Israeli hostages freed along with 240 Palestinians from Israeli jails.
Now, “Hamas has agreed to release 34 Israeli prisoners from a list presented by Israel as part of the first phase of a prisoner exchange deal,” said an official of the Palestinian group.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Hamas had yet to provide a list of hostages for potential release under an agreement.
The Hamas official, requesting anonymity as he was not authorised to discuss the ongoing negotiations with the media, said the initial swap would include all the women, children, elderly people and sick captives still held in Gaza.
But Hamas needed time to determine their condition, he added.
“Hamas has agreed to release the 34 prisoners, whether alive or dead,” the official said.
“However, the group needs a week of calm to communicate with the captors and identify those who are alive and those who are dead.”
During their attack on October 7, 2023 which began the Gaza war, militants seized 251 hostages, of whom 96 remain in Gaza. The Israeli military said 34 of those are dead.
Until the Hamas official’s comment there had been no update on the talks, which both warring sides were to resume in Qatar over the weekend. “Efforts are under way to free the hostages, notably the Israeli delegation which left on Friday for negotiations in Qatar,” Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz told relatives of a hostage on Saturday, according to his office.
In December, Qatar expressed optimism that “momentum” was returning to the talks following Trump’s election victory.
But Hamas and Israel then traded accusations of imposing new conditions and obstacles.
In northern Gaza on Sunday, the Civil Defence agency said an air strike on a house in the Sheikh Radwan area had killed at least 11 people.
Agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said the victims included women and children, and rescuers were using their “bare hands” to search for five people still trapped under rubble.
The Israeli military said on Sunday it had struck more than 100 “terror targets” in Gaza over the past two days, marking an apparent escalation in its assault.
The Hamas-run territory’s Health Ministry said a total of 88 people had been killed over the previous 24 hours.
In one strike, five people died when the house of the Abu Jarbou family was struck in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, rescuers said.
AFP footage from another strike, on Bureij camp near Nuseirat, showed rescuers transporting bodies and injured people to a hospital.
It showed a medic attempting to resuscitate a wounded man inside an ambulance, while another carried an injured child to the hospital.
Relatives cried over the bodies of two men wrapped in white shrouds, the images showed.
Several of the strikes targeted sites from which Hamas had been firing projectiles into Israel in recent days, the military said.
The military also announced that its forces had killed a militant commander in close combat in northern Gaza last week.
