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 – wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in Gaza – 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 captives, in return for Palestinian detainees in Israel being freed.
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 Palestinian group Hamas resumed last weekend in Qatar.
The discussions are currently focused on the immediate freeing of captives taken by Hamas during its October 7, 2023 attack in southern Israel, which Hamas said came in response to decades of Israeli occupation and aggression against the Palestinians.
Hamas-led gunmen took 251 people, of whom 94 remain in the Gaza Strip, including 34 the Israeli military has declared dead, some of them in Israeli strikes.
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 has killed over 46,500 people, the majority civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in the territory considered reliable by the United Nations. It has reduced much of the enclave to rubble and displaced practically its entire population.