Ramadan begins with no breakthrough on hostage deal
As Ramadan begins, there is still no breakthrough in US-Qatari-brokered negotiations regarding a hostage release/cease fire in Gaza.
It was revealed on Sunday that Mossad Director Barnea met on Friday in Jordan with CIA Director Burns, who is holding a series of meetings in the region to try to prevent the negotiations over a hostage deal from collapsing.
The Prime Minister’s Office released a statement, saying of their meeting that “At this stage, Hamas is holding to its position as if it was uninterested in a deal and is striving to ignite the region during Ramadan at the expense of the Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip. It should be emphasised that the contacts and cooperation with the mediators are ongoing in an effort to narrow the gaps and advance agreements.”
There are growing suggestions that Qatar could place more leverage on Hamas’s leadership. Among the threats could be threatening to expel top Hamas political bureau officials from Doha should they fail to persuade the movement’s leadership in Gaza to come to an agreement, or cutting off access to finances.
In a bid to help ensure calm in Israel and the West Bank over Ramadan, Shin Bet Director Bar visited Bahrain and Jordan last week, for talks with officials there.
On Saturday night, President Biden offered his harshest criticism of Prime Minister Netanyahu since the beginning of the war. Netanyahu was “hurting Israel more than helping Israel. He has a right to defend Israel, but he must, he must, he must pay more attention to the innocent lives being lost as a consequence of the actions taken.”
In response, Netanyahu said he didn’t “know exactly what the president meant… if he meant by that that I was pursuing private policy against the wish of the majority of Israelis and that this was hurting the interests of Israel, then he is wrong on both counts."
Lord Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary, welcomed the US plan to improve the distribution of humanitarian aid in Gaza by building a pier off the Gazan coast to allow for maritime delivery of aid, rather than relying on overland truck convoys and airdrops. Cameron confirmed that the British government had been involved in with it “from the start” and would be “helping with the pre-screening of aid".
He also called on Israel to allow the port of Ashdod to be used to transfer more aid to the Gaza Strip while the US was completing this pier.
From BICOM