JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent a delegation of senior officials to Qatar for negotiations on a hostage release and Gaza ceasefire deal, his office said Saturday.
Netanyahu held a meeting in Jerusalem with US president-elect Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, a representative of current US President Joe Biden and senior Israeli officials, the prime minister’s office said in a statement.
Following the meeting, Netanyahu instructed the heads of the Mossad spy agency and Shin Bet security agency as well as General Nitzan Alon and foreign policy adviser Ophir Falk “to depart for Doha in order to continue advancing a deal to release our hostages“, the statement said.
The United States has for more than a year been mediating talks alongside Qatar and Egypt for an end to the war in Gaza alongside the release of hostages.
The announcement was welcomed by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a campaign group for those held in Gaza, which called it “a historic opportunity to secure the release of all our loved ones”.
“Leave no stone unturned and return with an agreement that ensures the return of all hostages, down to the last one,“ it said in a statement.
Indirect negotiations between Israel and the Islamist militant group Hamas resumed last weekend in Qatar.
The discussions are currently focused on the immediate freeing of hostages taken by the Islamist group during its October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Biden, who will leave office on January 20, said on Thursday there had been “real progress” in the talks.
Trump, who will replace Biden, promised “hell to pay” if the hostages were not released by his inauguration.
The war in Gaza was sparked by Hamas’s attack, which resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
During the attack, Palestinian militants took 251 people hostage, of whom 94 remain in the Gaza Strip, including 34 the Israeli military has declared dead.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive in Gaza has killed 46,537 people, the majority civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory considered reliable by the United Nations.
