Arab mediators rush to salvage Gaza ceasefire as Israel restarts war

DUBAI – The shattering of a hard-won ceasefire in the Gaza Strip this week sent regional officials scrambling to get Israel and Hamas back to the negotiating table, in a last-ditch effort to salvage months of painstaking diplomacy as the Palestinian death toll from renewed Israeli strikes soared past 500.

Egypt and Qatar, in particular, are pushing the two sides to agree to an emergency truce and Egyptian mediators have already presented a new proposal to Hamas, according to a former Egyptian official briefed on the diplomacy who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations.

The details of the proposal were unclear, but efforts to get the Trump administration – which helped broker the original agreement – to break the deadlock have so far yielded little, the official said, adding that Egypt contacted Washington as soon as Israel resumed strikes in Gaza on Tuesday but had not heard back as of Thursday afternoon.

In the meantime, Trump officials have expressed ironclad support for Israel’s decision to restart the conflict, a move Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he made in part to pressure Hamas to release more Israeli hostages. “We will always stand with Israel as it defends itself,” Dorothy Shea, acting U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said Thursday.

Netanyahu this week said that negotiations with Hamas would take place “only under fire,” and Israeli troops on Thursday were already operating on the ground in northern, southern and central Gaza, the military said. “This is just the beginning,” Netanyahu added.

Israel and Hamas, which ruled Gaza for 16 years before the war, reached a ceasefire agreement in January to halt 15 months of fighting, after Hamas-led militants attacked Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023. During that assault, Palestinian fighters killed around 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities, and dragged about 250 others back to Gaza as hostages.

Israel responded to the attacks with a punishing military campaign that destroyed much of the territory and displaced the majority of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents. So far, more than 49,600 people have been killed and 112,500 injured, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children.

The ceasefire deal that took effect Jan. 19 called for three phases, including an initial period of 42 days, when Hamas would release Israeli hostages in batches in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, and Israel would withdraw troops to Gaza’s perimeter while also allowing for a surge of aid into the enclave.

In early February, both sides were supposed to begin hashing out the details of a second phase, which mediators said would have included the release of all Israeli hostages and a full withdrawal of Israeli troops. But Israel refused to take part in any meaningful discussions. After the first phase of the deal expired March 1, Netanyahu said he was reimposing a siege on Gaza, cutting off all aid and commercial supplies, including food and fuel.

President Donald Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, paid an emergency visit to the region last week in hopes of striking a deal – or at least negotiating an extension of the first phase of the agreement. He presented a “bridge” proposal to temporarily extend the ceasefire and facilitate the release of five living hostages, including Edan Alexander, a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen who was serving in the Israel Defense Forces when he was abducted on Oct. 7, 2023.

The proposal also called for the release of “a substantial number of Palestinians held in Israeli jails,” the State Department said Thursday in a statement.

Hamas rejected the extension at the time, saying the parties should stick to the original deal. Instead, the group offered to free Alexander in exchange for Israel returning to Phase 2 talks and went public with the offer, hoping to increase pressure on Netanyahu to accept, according to a Western diplomat who was briefed on the talks.

“It was always going to be difficult” to reach the second phase, the diplomat said. “The likelihood of success was always low.”

The move ended up being a strategic mistake on Hamas’s part, according to the former Egyptian official, who said the proposal wasn’t substantial enough for the Trump administration. The Western diplomat, who confirmed the former Egyptian official’s account, said Witkoff was also irked by Hamas’s public statement.

“At least they should have said, ‘Yes, let’s discuss [Witkoff’s plan], we can add one or two hostages,’” the former Egyptian official said.

The State Department said Thursday, however, that “the opportunity is still there” for Hamas to accept the bridge proposal. “But it’s closing fast,” the statement said.

In an interview Wednesday, senior Hamas official Basem Naim said the group was discussing a similar proposal with mediators when Israel launched a wave of strikes early Tuesday. Those strikes killed more than 400 people, including multiple Hamas officials, and may have hurt the group’s ability to carry out timely negotiations.

Some of the people killed in the strikes Tuesday were responsible for maintaining communications with both Hamas political officials abroad and the fighters inside Gaza holding the hostages, said a person familiar with the ceasefire negotiations.

The problem was that, by taking out people in the airstrikes, “they were also taking out the people who were doing the negotiating,” the person said.

A Hamas official inside Gaza said that some of the people killed were involved in earlier releases of Israeli hostages. However Naim, who is based outside Gaza, denied this.

The Israeli strikes also targeted “the core of Hamas governance,” including police officers, government officials and people in charge of aid delivery, according to Tamer Qarmout, a professor of public policy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.

Israel has long said that its goal is to eliminate Hamas, which was founded in 1987 to oppose Israeli military occupation, as both a governing and fighting force in Gaza. It’s an aim many observers – including members of Israel’s military and security agencies – have described as unrealistic.

But if Israel continues the strikes targeting Hamas officials, the result will be a “fragmented” movement, Qarmout said. “Then you are dealing with isolated military groups who might have captives, and the risk is they will not listen to the leadership outside,” he said.

Qarmout said the strikes could also be interpreted as Israel signaling that it is no longer interested in negotiations. “I think that’s a very dangerous scenario,” he said.

A former Egyptian diplomat said that Cairo and Doha are continuing efforts to persuade Israel to stop the war. But the efforts are “useless,” he said, adding that unless the United States is willing to pressure Israel to cease its attacks, the conflict would probably continue.

“It’s a very gloomy picture,” he said.

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Parker reported from Jerusalem; Berger from Jaffa, Israel; and Balousha from Toronto.