Israel boycotts Cairo ceasefire talks after Hamas rejected demand for list of hostages alive: report

Following Hamas’ rejection of Israel’s demand for a comprehensive list of the hostages who are still alive, the Israeli publication reported that Israel boycotted the Gaza ceasefire talks in Cairo on Sunday.

Arriving in Cairo for the negotiations, which were supposed to be the last step before a six-week ceasefire, was a Hamas delegation. However, the Israelis had vanished from sight by early nightfall.

“There is no Israeli delegation in Cairo,” Ynet, the online version of Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, quoted unidentified Israeli officials as saying. “Hamas refuses to provide clear answers and therefore there is no reason to dispatch the Israeli delegation.”

According to Washington, a cease-fire agreement is near and should be in place in time for the fighting to end one week from now, on Ramadan. However, there has been no public indication from the opposing parties that they will abandon their earlier demands.

More from World

This Week in Explainers: How recovering from Gen-Z protests is a Himalayan task for Nepal Zohran Mamdani says he would arrest Netanyahu if he is elected as NYC mayor, calls Israeli PM 'war criminal'

A Palestinian official told Reuters the accord was “not yet there” after the Hamas group arrived. Israel did not provide a formal statement.

Speaking on Saturday, a person knowledgeable on the negotiations stated that Israel may avoid Cairo unless Hamas first provided a complete list of its remaining hostages. Hamas has thus far denied the request, a Palestinian official told the media.

Prior to announcing the conditions of each hostage’s release, Hamas has tried in previous discussions to keep the conversation about their welfare private.

A U.S. official told reporters on Saturday: “The path to a ceasefire right now literally at this hour is straightforward. And there’s a deal on the table. There’s a framework deal.”

Impact Shorts

More Shorts

‘The cries of this widow will echo’: In first public remarks, Erika Kirk warns Charlie’s killers they’ve ‘unleashed a fire’

Trump urges Nato to back sanctions on Russia, calls for 50–100% tariffs on China

According to the U.S. official, Israel had accepted the framework and now it was up to Hamas to react.

With only a week-long break in November, the battle has raged for five months and an agreement would offer the first prolonged truce. In exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, the extremists would release dozens of hostages they had taken.

More aid would be sent to Gazans who were on the point of starvation. The conflict would end in time to prevent a catastrophic Israeli attack on Rafah, where over half of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are trapped behind the fence that borders Egypt on the southern side of the territory. In certain instances, Israeli forces would retreat, allowing Gazans to revert to their abandoned houses.

However, the proposal doesn’t seem to go far enough in satisfying Hamas’s primary demand for an end to the war, and it doesn’t address what would happen to over half of the more than 100 hostages who are still held captive, including Israeli men who aren’t protected by agreements to release women, children, the elderly, or those who are injured.

Egyptian negotiators have proposed that those concerns be put on hold for the time being with promises to address them later. According to a Hamas source cited by news agency Reuters, the terrorists continued to hope for a “package deal”.

On Sunday morning, ladies sobbed and mourned next to rows of the Abu Anza family’s dead at a morgue outside a Rafah hospital. Overnight, an airstrike murdered 14 members of the family at their home. In a ripped sweatshirt and pink unicorn pajamas, a dead student was found with her face kissed by relatives who had unzipped a black plastic corpse bag.

Later, the bodies were brought to a graveyard and buried, including two infant twins, a boy and a girl, passed down in white bundles and placed in the ground.

“My heart is gone,” wailed their mother, Rania Abu Anza, who also lost her husband in the attack. “I haven’t had enough time with them.”

Gaza authorities said at least eight people were killed on Sunday when a truck carrying food aid from a Kuwaiti charity was hit by an air strike. There was no immediate Israeli comment.

The war was unleashed in October after Hamas fighters stormed through Israeli towns killing 1,200 people and capturing 253 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. Since then, Israeli forces have killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities, with thousands more dead feared unrecovered under rubble.

Swathes of the Gaza Strip have been laid to waste, nearly the entire population has been made homeless, and the United Nations estimates a quarter of Gazans are on the verge of famine.

Residents described heavy bombardment overnight of Khan Younis, the main southern Gaza city, just to the north of Rafah. Further north, where aid no longer reaches, Gaza health authorities said 15 children had now died of malnutrition or dehydration inside the Kamal Adwan hospital where there was no power for the intensive care unit. Staff fear for the lives of six more children there.

Washington dropped 38,000 meals from military aircraft into Gaza on Saturday, though aid agencies say this was only enough to have a marginal impact given the scale of the need.

The final days leading up to the anticipated truce have been exceptionally bloody, with talks overshadowed last week by the deaths of 118 people and wounding of hundreds more near a food convoy.

Israel said on Sunday its initial review of the incident had found that most of those killed or wounded had died in a stampede. Military spokesman Daniel Hagari said Israeli troops at the scene initially fired only warning shots, though they later shot at some “looters” who “approached our forces and posed an immediate threat”.

Muatasem Salah, a member of the Emergency Committee at the Ministry of Health in Gaza, told Reuters the Israeli account was contradicted by machine gun wounds.

“The wounded and martyrs are the result of being shot with heavy-calibre bullets,” he said. “Any attempt to claim that people were martyred due to overcrowding or being run over is incorrect.”

(With agency inputs)