Hamas says new Gaza talks have begun, hours after Israel launched major offensive

[Twiglets1]

BBC: Hamas says its negotiators have opened a new round of talks aimed at ending the war in Gaza, hours after Israel launched a major offensive.

Taher al-Nounou, an adviser to the head of Hamas, told the BBC a new round of negotiations had officially begun in Doha on Saturday. There were no preconditions from either side, and all issues were on the table for discussion.

Israel Katz, the Israeli defence minister, said Hamas negotiators were returning to indirect talks in Qatar to seek a deal on the hostages.
Katz called the move a "departure from the recalcitrant position they had taken up until that moment".

It came after Israel's military said on its Hebrew X account that troops had been mobilised for "Operation Gideon's Chariots" to seize "strategic areas" of Gaza and free hostages.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd7geg3lvz1o

From the same article:

In similar posts on its English-language X account, it said it would not stop operating "until Hamas is no longer a threat and all our hostages are home", and that it had "struck over 150 terror targets throughout the Gaza Strip" in 24 hours.

The Times of Israel said that "Gideon's Chariots" - a reference to a biblical warrior - would see the IDF take and control territory, move civilians to the south of the Strip, attack Hamas, and prevent it from taking control of aid supplies.

Thousands of Israeli troops, including soldiers and reservists, are expected to enter Gaza as the operation ramps up in the coming days.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd7geg3lvz1o

Hamas has offered to release half of the remaining living hostages and a number of bodies in exchange for a two-month ceasefire, Palestinian sources told Sky News Arabia.

In addition to demanding a temporary ceasefire, Hamas also conditioned the release on the immediate resumption of aid deliveries.

Hamas also wants strong American guarantees that negotiations to end the war will begin during the temporary ceasefire and that Israel will stop placing conditions and obstacles to the delivery of aid.

https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-854350

Hamas makes additional requests

Hamas also requested that family members of Hamas leadership be allowed to leave the Gaza Strip and that Israel promise not to pursue them.

The source also said that Hamas expressed willingness to give up its weapons after relinquishing control of Gaza.

This comes hours after Netanyahu instructed the negotiating team to "exhaust all efforts" to release the hostages.

https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-854350

Bargaining to save their own skins while citizens they should be acting on behalf of starve and die in bomb strikes. Hamas, ladies and gentlemen.

Yes, isn't it interesting that they don't want their own family to be martyred, only other people's.

Should Israel allow them to leave safely? I don't think Israel can. Hamas have placed the Gazans in an absolutely impossible position.

I think they should allow the children of Hamas leadership to be allowed to leave safely but other family members, no.

Then again, I'm not a professional negotiator. I suppose they have to keep emotion out of it and squash feelings about what is "fair" to just secure the best deal they can.

The request absolutely reveals the hypocrisy of Hamas, though. They have shown scant concern for human life up until this point, on either side.

Leave to where though, which country is wanting to take Hamas families? Because I imagine that Israel want actual hamas members out of the strip completely as well (alongside all the Gazans protesting against Hamas, I’m sure they would be relived if Hamas were evicted from Gaza). I think Israel will object to any neighbouring country given what happened with Lebanese based PLO.

I don’t know - it is hard to imagine who would take them I agree.

Some on here seem to think the bloodshed is literally all Israel’s fault because “history” - so maybe they wouldn’t mind them as neighbours I don’t know?

Bomb strikes are Israel - stop victim blaming. Is total destruction of Gaza not enough - destruction of 55,000 lives mostly women and children and 100s of thousands maimed and permanently broken - Pontious Pilate levels of hand washing here. But Hamas....

https://archive.ph/V07sz#selection-1551.0-1555.574

To many in the Israeli coalition this has always been the bigger picture and Gaza only a sideshow. The moral stain seeps almost imperceptibly through civil and military policy until, one day, Israelis may wake up to find themselves counted alongside a dozen other nasty Middle Eastern countries: like their neighbours, just another vaguely unsavoury regime. “Never glad confident morning again!” wrote the poet Robert Browning, but I shall be more prosaic: there is a price tag to lost innocence — a price that should worry a people who may one day need again to call on goodwill from abroad.

Have I presented too stark a picture of moral certainty where the realities are more blurred? Probably. I’ve talked about “the government” of Israel as though the coalition were not an uneasy assortment of different parties and people with often sharply contrasting aims. I haven’t suggested how the horror of October 7 could have been answered otherwise than by counterattack — or where the line of proportionality was crossed. But blur the picture though we can, if through the blur we lose sight of a monstrous and counterproductive blunder then we are blinded by nuance.

I don’t think Jordan would want them after what happened with the PLO previously, or Tunisia. Personally I think Iran or Qatar should take them but thats unlikely to happen (Qatar especially isn’t going to want unstable elements).

it’s very simple, for peace hamas have to go. Israel will not tolerate Hamas being in position to do another 7th October again. gazans are protesting against Hamas, is it fair to leave them with these monsters again who invite death and destruction?

Or is it better to have someone like the UAE intervene to take over governance given that they are slightly less likely to be stealing food from gazans and selling it back to them or shooting people in the legs?

So many pro Palestinians seem to actually really not give a shit about Palestinians as people at all, they are just some sort of totem for people to hang their own virtue on. They deserve to live, they deserve reconstruction, schooling, healthcare and food. Hamas could have at the beginning just handed back the hostages, they are now bargaining for themselves and their families, not for all the other Gazans. Do you really need Gazans to continue living ruled by terrorists to feel better? Is that what you really want?

The war must end, Hamas must go.

The trouble is no one wants unstable elements in their country do they?

Trump won’t take the families of Hamas leaders. Hopefully Starmer won’t either.

They are called Palestinians — labeling them all as "Hamas families" is a tactic used to dehumanize them and justify collective punishment. First, they were forcibly removed from Majdal (now Ashkelon) and pushed into Gaza to make way for settlers from Brooklyn, Warsaw, and everywhere in between. It's ethnic cleansing in its clearest form.

Majdal was occupied by the Egyptian army in the early stages of the 1948 war, along with the rest of the Gaza region that had been allocated to the Arab State in the United Nations plan. Over the next few months, the town was subjected to Israeli air-raids and shelling.[4] All but about 1,000 of the town's residents were forced to leave by the time it was captured by Israeli forces as a sequel to Operation Yoav on 4 November 1948.[4] General Yigal Allon ordered the expulsion of the remaining Palestinians but the local commanders did not do so and the Arab population soon recovered to more than 2,500 due mostly to refugees slipping back and also due to the transfer of Palestinians from nearby villages.[4][8] Most of them were elderly, women, or children.[8] During the next year or so, the Palestinians were held in a confined area surrounded by barbed wire, which became commonly known as the "ghetto".[6][8][23] Moshe Dayan and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion were in favor of expulsion, while Mapam and the Israeli labor union Histadrut objected.[4] The government offered the Palestinians positive inducements to leave, including a favorable currency exchange, but also caused panic through night-time raids.[4] The first group was deported to the Gaza Strip by truck on 17 August 1950 after an expulsion order had been served.[24] The deportation was approved by Ben-Gurion and Dayan over the objections of Pinhas Lavon, secretary-general of the Histadrut, who envisioned the town as a productive example of equal opportunity.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkelon

@sualipa we are specifically discussing the families of Hamas at the moment as Hamas have made it a stipulation of a ceasefire that their family members should be allowed to leave the Gaza Strip.

The victims are the innocent civilians on both sides of this centuries long conflict.

Both sides have people under increasingly extreme leadership.

It's not as simple as one side good / other side bad. Not being able to see the bigger picture and taking one side uncritically is exactly how everyone involved got here.

Anytime someone says ' but Hamas ' so flippantly they're just exposing their own prejudices and lack of background knowledge.

Exactly - a rational person can see it’s not as simple as one side good/one side evil.

And is willing to acknowledge fault on both sides even if they overall support one side over the other.

It’s what remains of their land, their culture, their lives and if you can’t understand that, there will never be peace. Hatred doesn’t arise in a vacuum; it burns in the heart for a reason.

Israel’s current strategy appears to follow a grim historical logic: the more you kill, the smaller the problem becomes. We've seen this before in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand — where Indigenous peoples were subjected to ruthless and near-total genocide, leaving little resistance for settlers. If that’s the model, then what we are witnessing now may only be the beginning.

Israel has, over time, strengthened Hamas as a convenient foil and undermined any credible Palestinian leadership, including compromising Mahmoud Abbas and his circle. Netanyahu and his allies have deliberately cultivated this toxic environment — stoking religious extremism, deepening internal division, and hardening control.

If there is no serious call for accountability including justice for those responsible for decades of entrenchment and violence — then the path forward leads not to peace, but to the near-total destruction of the Palestinian people, and the transformation of Israel into a pariah state, abandoned even by some of its traditional allies.

Well, let them go to Qatar then, and Qatar will no doubt guarantee both their safety and compliance with any necessary terms to bring this to an end. Hopefully, Arab nations can then rebuild Gaza and bring peace to the region. I do believe Trump, with some serious reservations, sees this as a possible way forward. Israel will need to back off, stand down, and stop the relentless bombing. The whole world is crying out for that — and with good reason. Enough is enough.

Hopefully Qatar will agree to take them if that is one of the things it takes to bring about a ceasefire, even a 2 month one better than nothing.

The families of Hamas then, is that better? It is not collective punishment, countries have to consider whether people who have been in and around terrorism are security threats, nit just in terms of whether they personally pose a risk of violence but whether they are happy to indoctrinate.

There is a reason why the muslim brotherhood is banned in most arab countries.

Hamas have undermined their own credibility as a leadership. They are shooting people in the damn legs for protesting against them, they have literally executed people. Journalists in Gaza are putting out statements about threats from Hamas. All they do is make things worse and worse for Palestinians. Not better.

These people are godawful. They keep attacking hoping to trigger some sort of regional earthquake that will wipe out Israel. How many dead arabs will satisfy you?

You are also completely wrong about the view of Saudi and the emirates here. The emirates is calling for hamas to leave and has been clear they need to go for any peace, the saudis most likely think so too. Syria has just handed it’s port in Tarturus over to the UAE most likely precisely as an overture to Israel as they have normalised relations. People want stability in the middle east not more militancy.

The racism of low expectations is astounding. Also Jews are also indigenous to the region. These are real people, they need peace and Hamas stand in the way of that.

100% this.

Great post.

Qatar do have history of harbouring hamas leaders, they'd be the 5* choice.