By Arafat Barbakh, Emily Rose and Jeff Mason
GAZA/JERUSALEM/WASHINGTON (Portal) – Intensive international mediation efforts are working to exchange Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners during a planned month-long ceasefire in Gaza, Portal reported on Tuesday, as the White House said its envoy was in active discussions about the issue.
Qatar, the United States and Egypt have been conducting shuttle diplomacy since December 28, and Israel and Hamas have broadly agreed in principle to the framework, sources said. According to sources, this is being held up by the two sides' disagreements over how to permanently end the Gaza war.
The U.S. State Department and White House, Qatar's foreign ministry and Egypt's State Information Service did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the Portal report.
On Monday, Israel suffered its worst soldier loss in more than three months of conflict: 24 dead in two separate incidents. Israeli officials reiterated that the goals of its war against the Palestinian Hamas movement, which rules Gaza, remained unchanged and that efforts were being made to secure the release of more than 100 hostages.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “In the name of our heroes and for the sake of our lives, we will not stop fighting until we achieve absolute victory.”
Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy said there would be no ceasefire that would leave Hamas in power and hostages in Gaza after the militant group carried out a cross-border rampage on October 7 that killed around 1,200 Israelis .
Palestinian health authorities said at least 195 Palestinians were killed in the past 24 hours, raising the documented death toll from Israeli airstrikes and shelling to 25,490. Thousands more are feared in the rubble.
“The entire population of the Gaza Strip is suffering destruction on a scale and at a speed unparalleled in recent history,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the Security Council.
“Nothing can justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people,” he said, condemning Israel’s opposition to the creation of a Palestinian state that would exist alongside Israel.
The soldiers' deaths came on the day the Israeli military launched its biggest operation in a month to capture remaining parts of Khan Younis, which surrounds the main southern Gaza city where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians are seeking refuge.
Israeli forces have killed more than 100 militants in western Khan Younis in the last 24 hours, military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said on Tuesday evening. Israel says it has killed around 9,000 militants in total. Portal cannot verify the figure.
US EMBASSY IN CAIRO
Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed Al-Ansari said earlier in the day that they had “presented ideas to both sides, we are receiving a constant stream of responses from both sides, and that alone is a reason for optimism.”
Later, White House spokesman John Kirby said that U.S. envoy to the Middle East Brett McGurk was in Cairo and would travel to the region to hold “active” talks on releasing hostages and securing a humanitarian pause respectively.
“The conversations are very sober and serious about trying to put together another hostage deal,” Kirby told reporters.
Each of the warring sides accused the other of causing the collapse of a seven-day ceasefire in November by rejecting terms to extend the daily release of hostages held by militants in exchange for Palestinian detainees.
Women, children and foreign hostages were released, but mediators failed at the last minute to find a formula for releasing others, including Israeli soldiers and civilians.
Tanks closed the Khan-Younis road
Hamas' armed wing said it was responsible for a rocket attack that killed 21 Israeli soldiers on Monday.
Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters in Tel Aviv that the militants' rockets hit a building where Israeli forces had planted explosives to destroy it. The strike caused that building and one next to it to collapse, he said.
Three soldiers were killed in a separate attack. In total, 220 Israeli soldiers have been killed since the ground offensive began at the end of October.
On Tuesday, advancing Israeli tanks blocked the road from Khan Younis toward the Mediterranean coast, blocking the escape route for civilians trying to reach Rafah, the last town on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip on the border with Egypt – now home to more than half of the enclave's 2.3 million people.
The Israelis have blockaded hospitals, making it impossible to rescue the wounded, according to Palestinian officials. At the European Hospital reached by Portal in southern Khan Younis, Ahed Masmah brought in five bodies piled on a mattress on his donkey cart.
“I found them face down on the street,” he said.
At Khan Younis' main Nasser Hospital, the largest functioning hospital in the Gaza Strip, bodies were buried on the premises because it was unsafe to go to the cemetery.
Gaza Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf Al-Qidra said medical teams were unable to transfer critical cases from the Nasser Medical Complex to the nearby Jordanian field hospital due to ongoing shelling.
Israel says Hamas militants operate in and around hospitals, something hospital staff and Hamas deny.
Martin Griffiths, U.N. emergency relief coordinator, said on Tuesday that 24 people were killed in attacks on an aid camp, a U.N. center and a humanitarian zone in the Khan Younis area. A distribution center where families receive aid was heavily bombed, he said on the social media platform X.
(Additional reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Doha, Bassam Masoud in Gaza, Emily Rose, Ari Rabinovitch, Maayan Lubell and Kate Holton in Jerusalem; Writing by Peter Graff, Alison Williams and Cynthia Osterman; Editing by Angus MacSwan, Kevin Liffey, Mark Heinrich and David Gregorio)