FALCON POWERS – A Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) official denied today, Saturday, the reports published by the Israeli media about the resumption of ceasefire talks in Cairo on Tuesday.
The official said in response to the reports to Reuters, “There is no date.”
Earlier on Saturday, Israeli reports indicated that the negotiations with Hamas will be resumed next week.
The official Israeli broadcaster reported that the head of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, David Barnea, returned on Saturday morning from Paris, where he met on Friday with the director of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), William Burns, and the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Qatar, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani.
It added: “Following the meeting, Israel officially announced that the negotiations on the prisoner exchange deal will be resumed next week,” without mentioning a specific day.
For months, Hamas and Israel, mediated by Qatar, Egypt, and the United States, have been engaged in stalled indirect negotiations to reach an agreement on a prisoner exchange and a ceasefire in Gaza that erupted on October 7, 2023.
Over two days, Cairo hosted the last round of negotiations, before the Hamas and Israeli delegations left the Egyptian capital on May 9 without announcing the reaching of an agreement, despite the movement’s acceptance at the time of a Qatari-Egyptian proposal regarding the prisoner exchange and a ceasefire with Israel, which the latter rejected.
The broadcaster quoted an Israeli source familiar with the details of Barnea’s meeting with Burns and Mohammed bin Abdulrahman, without naming them, that the Mossad chief presented to the CIA director and the Qatari prime minister “a new proposal for a prisoner exchange deal formulated by the Israeli negotiation team.”
The source added: “At the same time, Burns presented the possible solutions to the issues that were in dispute during the previous round of negotiations,” without revealing any details about the terms of the new proposal or those controversial issues in the negotiations.
At the end of the meeting, “it was decided that the negotiations would be resumed on the basis of new proposals led by the mediators – Egypt and Qatar, with active participation from the United States,” according to the same source.
The efforts to reach the latest deal regarding Gaza were obstructed after Israel rejected it, claiming that it “does not meet its conditions,” and it began a military operation on the city of Rafah on May 6th, then took control of the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing the next day.
Additionally, Tel Aviv recently questioned the “neutrality” of the Egyptian and Qatari mediators in these talks, which prompted Qatar to call for “not paying attention to it,” while Egypt warned that questioning its mediation “may push it to withdraw” from it.
