U.S. envoy meets Israeli hostage families in Tel Aviv
Witkoff was greeted with some applause and pleas for assistance from hundreds of protesters gathered in Tel Aviv, before going into a closed meeting with the families.
Videos shared online showed him arriving to meet the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, as families chanted "Bring them home!" and "We need your help."
The meeting came one day after Witkoff visited a U.S.-backed aid station in Gaza to inspect efforts to get food into the devastated Palestinian territory.
"The war needs to end," said Yotam Cohen, brother of 21-year-old hostage Nimrod Cohen.
"The Israeli government will not end it willingly. It has refused to do so," he added.
"The Israeli government must be stopped. For our sakes, for our soldiers' sakes, for our hostages' sakes, for our sons and for the future generations of everybody in the Middle East."
Of the 251 hostages taken during the Hamas attack, 49 are still being held in Gaza, including 27 the Israeli military says are dead.
After the meeting, the Forum released a statement saying Witkoff had given them a personal commitment that he and U.S. President Donald Trump would work to return the remaining hostages.
Hamas attempted to maintain pressure on the families, on Friday releasing a video of one of the hostages — 24-year-old Evyatar David — for the second time in two days, showing him looking emaciated in a tunnel.
The video called for a ceasefire and warned that time was running out for the hostages. David's family said their son was the victim of a "vile" propaganda campaign and accused Hamas of deliberately starving their son.
"The deliberate starvation of our son as part of a propaganda campaign is one of the most horrifying acts the world has seen. He is being starved purely to serve Hamas' propaganda," the family said.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot on Saturday also denounced the video, and one released a day earlier by another Palestinian Islamist group, as "despicable."
"They must be freed, without conditions," he posted on X. "Hamas must be disarmed and excluded from ruling Gaza."
The United States, along with Egypt and Qatar, had been mediating ceasefire talks between Hamas and Israel that would allow the hostages to be released and humanitarian aid to flow more freely.
But talks broke down last month and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government is under domestic pressure to come up with another way to secure the missing hostages, alive and dead.
He is also facing international calls to open Gaza's borders to more food aid, after U.N. and humanitarian agencies warned that more than 2 million Palestinian civilians are facing starvation.
Israel's top general warned that there would be no respite in fighting if the hostages were not released.
"I estimate that in the coming days we will know whether we can reach an agreement for the release of our hostages," armed forces chief of staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir said in a statement.
"If not, the combat will continue without rest."
Zamir denied that there was widespread starvation in Gaza.
"The current campaign of false accusations of intentional starvation is a deliberate, timed, and deceitful attempt to accuse the IDF (Israeli military), a moral army, of war crimes," he said.
Alongside reports from U.N.-mandated experts warning a "famine is unfolding" in Gaza, more and more evidence is emerging of serious malnutrition and deaths among the most vulnerable Palestinian civilians.
Modallala Dawwas, 33, living in a displacement camp in Gaza City said her daughter Mariam had no known illnesses before the war but had now dropped from 25 to 10 kilograms and was seriously malnourished.
Hamas' 2023 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, mostly civilians, according to a tally based on official figures.
Israel's campaign in Gaza has killed at least 60,332 people, mostly civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory's health ministry, deemed reliable by the U.N.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society said in a post on X early Sunday that one of its staff members was killed and three others wounded in an Israeli attack on its Khan Younis headquarters in Gaza.
Gaza's civil defense agency said Israeli fire killed 34 people in the territory on Saturday.
Five people were killed in an Israeli strike on an area of central Gaza, where Palestinians were awaiting food distribution by the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), civil defense spokesman Mahmud Bassal said.
The GHF has largely sidelined the longstanding U.N.-led aid distribution system in Gaza, just as Israel in late May began easing a more than two-month aid blockade that exacerbated existing shortages.
The U.N. human rights office in the Palestinian territories said at least 1,373 Palestinians seeking aid in Gaza were killed since May 27, adding that most of them were killed near GHF sites, and by the Israeli military.
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