Netanyahu to send negotiating team to Qatar for ceasefire talks, but calls Hamas proposals "unacceptable"
Netanyahu's office said that it would send its negotiating team to Qatar on Sunday, this after Hamas on Friday said it had issued a "positive response" to a U.S.-mediated ceasefire proposal in the Israel-Hamas war.
However, in the statement, Netanyahu's office said that the "changes" Hamas requested to the ceasefire proposal "are unacceptable to Israel."
In a post to Telegram Friday, Hamas said it "submitted a positive response to the mediators' latest proposal." It added that it was "fully prepared to immediately enter into a round of negotiations on the mechanism for implementing this framework," according to a translation of the post.
On Tuesday, President Trump announced that Israel had agreed to a proposal for a two-month ceasefire. At the time, neither Israel nor Hamas confirmed Mr. Trump's statement.
"I think it's been very positive, a good response," Mr. Trump told reporters late Friday night aboard Air Force One regarding the Hamas statement.
"There could be a Gaza deal next week," the president later added. "...I'm very optimistic, but you know, it changes from day to day. It's been changing for years."
Israeli sources told CBS News on Wednesday that while there was support for the terms of the proposal by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet, Israel was not committing to it yet.
Netanyahu is expected to visit Washington, D.C., on Monday to meet with Mr. Trump at the White House.
A Palestinian official told The Associated Press on Friday that Hamas was still working on its response to the proposal presented to it by Egyptian and Qatari mediators. He said Hamas is insisting on guarantees regarding an Israeli withdrawal to positions it held on March 2, during a previous ceasefire, and an end to the war following a 60-day truce, as well as ending the U.S. and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) system for distributing aid. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry says the number of Palestinians killed in the territory has passed 57,000 since the war began about 21 months ago. The ministry does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its count, but says more than half of the dead are women and children.
The war began when Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking roughly 250 hostages.
Meanwhile, the Gaza Health Ministry says at least 640 civilians have been shot to death in recent weeks trying to access desperately needed humanitarian supplies, including more than 400 at distribution sites run by GHF.
Since it began operating in Gaza on May 26, GHF has faced near-daily claims of aid-seekers being killed by Israeli forces as they try to reach its four hubs in Gaza.
"I do not want to diminish these reports, but we can't control what happens outside our distribution sites," GHF's director, American evangelical reverend Johnnie Moore, told CBS News in an interview Tuesday in response to a question about reports from doctors and eyewitnesses that Israeli soldiers have repeatedly opened fire on unarmed civilians trying to reach its aid hubs.
Earlier this week, more than 170 humanitarian groups called for the opaquely run organization — which has never revealed its funding or management structure — to be disbanded and all aid efforts in Gaza to be reorganized under the long-established United Nations-led system. Those international humanitarian efforts have been largely blocked by Israel since March.
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Associated Press
23 minutes ago
- Associated Press
UN rapporteur calls for global action to stop 'genocide' in Gaza
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Associated Press
24 minutes ago
- Associated Press
America's only rare earth producer gets a boost from Apple and Pentagon agreements
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Yahoo
28 minutes ago
- Yahoo
‘American death zones': Trump admin announces $30m for Gaza aid program where dozens have been killed trying to get food
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And none of this would be happening if Hamas would lay down their arms.' 'Hamas will stop at nothing to stay in power and disseminated false propaganda in order to do so,' they added. But testimony collected by The Independent from Palestinians whose family members have been killed at the sites paints a picture of chaos and death. Some have described them as 'American death zones' because of the contractors who patrol them. Salwa Al-Daghma, 50, told The Independent that her brother Khaled, a 36-year-old father of five, was killed earlier this month while trying to get food for his family. 'Hunger is the reason. There is no food. He went to feed his wife and children. He went to provide them with food, but he left and never returned,' she said. 'When relatives came to tell me something, I assumed it was my son. They told me it was my brother, so I started screaming and crying.' 'This aid is a morsel of food soaked in blood. They don't want to help us; they are actually killing us,' she added. Iyad Abu Darabi, a 48-year-old father of six, said his son was killed when he went to get rice from a GHF distribution point. 'My son went to get some flour for his family, but came back in a coffin and a death shroud,' he said. 'This aid is a trap. It's in a barren land surrounded by fences, and the gates are opened for tens of thousands to fight over without any order. They leave people fighting each other over food,' he added. Almost all aid that has entered Gaza since Israel lifted a total blockade now runs through the GHF, which operates four food distribution sites that are overseen by American private security contractors and situated alongside Israeli army positions, which provide security at the perimeter. Israeli soldiers have described the sites as 'killing fields' and said they were ordered to shoot at unarmed civilians in shocking testimony released this week. "Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They're treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire," one soldier told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. "We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there's no danger to the forces," the soldier added. The soldier quoted by Haaretz said he was 'not aware of a single instance of return fire. There's no enemy, no weapons," at the sites. The story includes testimony from an Israeli army officer who said his unit fired machine guns, mortars and threw grenades at civilians approaching the aid distribution centers because 'a combat brigade doesn't have the tools to handle a civilian population in a war zone.' Despite the dozens of deaths, the U.S. State Department has continued to back the GHF politically, and on Thursday said it would fund the group to deliver aid in Gaza. 'This support is simply the latest iteration of President Trump's and Secretary Rubio's pursuit of peace in the region," State Department deputy spokesperson Tommy Pigott told reporters at a regular news briefing. It is unclear why the Trump administration has decided to deliver aid to Gaza exclusively through the GHF, but former officials from the U.S. state department and USAID who have worked on emergency aid delivery described the new system as 'grotesque', 'dangerous' and part of a larger plan to use aid to control the movement of Palestinians. 'What is so infuriatingly tragic about this is that it's playing out exactly as any experienced humanitarian could have predicted,' said Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw famine relief at USAID for three years during the Obama administration and is now president of Refugees International. 'When you have an aid distribution model that is premised on forcing huge crowds of desperately hungry people to cluster directly adjacent to IDF military installations, you're going to get massacres,' he added. Mr Konyndyk said it was 'not a coincidence' that most of the distribution sites were in the south of Gaza, at a time when the Israeli army was trying to force Palestinians out of the north of the territory. 'A basic principle of humanitarian response is you move the aid as close to you can to where the people are. They're doing the opposite of that, the diametric opposite of that, which suggests that they want to draw people to the south,' he said. 'I think that is highly suggestive of the longer-term agenda here,' he added. Stacey Gilbert, who resigned from the state department in 2024 over the Biden administration's failure to hold Israel accountable for blocking aid to Gaza, also believes the sites are located primarily in the south to draw Palestinians away from the north. 'This is trying to draw them all to one area, to get them away from the area that Israel doesn't want them in,' she said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz hit out at the Haaretz story in a joint statement, describing the testimonies as 'contemptible blood libels.' 'These are malicious falsehoods designed to defame the IDF, the most moral military in the world,' the statement said. The IDF said it is 'operating to allow and facilitate the distribution of humanitarian aid by the American 'Gaza Humanitarian Foundation' (GHF), and to secure the routes leading to the distribution centers, in order to allow the aid to reach the civilians rather than Hamas.' It added that it 'strongly' rejected the accusations raised in the Haaretz article. 'The IDF did not instruct the forces to deliberately shoot at civilians, including those approaching the distribution centers. To be clear, IDF directives prohibit deliberate attacks on civilians,' it said in a statement. The GHF's Interim Executive Director John Acree said in a statement provided to The Independent that 'there have been no incidents or fatalities at or in the immediate vicinity of any of our distribution sites.' 'However, IDF is tasked with providing safe passage for aid-seekers to all humanitarian organizations operating in Gaza, including GHF. GHF is not aware of any of these incidents but these allegations are too grave to ignore and we therefore call on Israel to investigate them and transparently publish the results in a timely manner,' he added. Acree said the GHF was 'grateful for the support from President Trump and his administration in getting life-saving aid directly into the hands of the Palestinian people in Gaza'. The GHF's current leader, Johnnie Moore, an evangelical preacher who was a White House adviser in the first Trump administration, said in a post on X on Thursday that the group has delivered more than 46 million meals to Gazans since it began its operations in May. Israel imposed a full blockade on aid into Gaza when a ceasefire collapsed in March, pushing the population to the edge of famine. When aid is finally permitted to enter, many convoys are overwhelmed by hungry families and civilians in desperation, and armed gangs have reportedly exploited the chaos on occasion to steal the aid.
