The National Times - Hamas official says ready to free 34 Gaza hostages under mooted deal

Mediators Qatar, Egypt and the United States 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 United States 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.

"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," the Hamas official said.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Hamas has yet to provide a list of hostages to be released 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.

He said some may be dead and that Hamas requires time to determine their condition.

"Hamas has agreed to release the 34 prisoners, whether alive or dead. However, the group needs a week of calm to communicate with the captors and identify those who are alive and those who are dead," the official said.

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 says 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 yesterday (Friday) for negotiations in Qatar" Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz told relatives of a hostage on Saturday, according to his office.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot, in an interview with RTL radio, said that "we continue to exert the necessary pressure" to reach a deal.

"Unfortunately, it doesn't depend only on us."

- Rescuers using 'bare hands' -

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 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 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 were 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.

In one scene, a medic attempted 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.

- Strikes against rocket fire -

Several of the strikes targeted sites from which militants had been firing projectiles into Israel in recent days, the military said.

The military separately announced that its forced had killed a militant commander in close combat in northern Gaza last week.

It said the slain man was a member of militant group Islamic Jihad's rocket array, and had participated in the October 7, 2023 attack.

Last week, Katz warned of intensified strikes if the incoming rocket fire continued.

Rocket fire had become less frequent as the war dragged on but has recently intensified, as Israel pressed a major land and air offensive in the territory's north since early October.

Hamas's October 2023 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people, mostly civilians, according to official Israeli data.

Israel's retaliatory military offensive has killed 45,805 people in Gaza, a majority of them civilians, according to figures from the territory's health ministry which the United Nations considers reliable.

C.Stevenson--TNT