A Hamas delegation headed by its senior official Khalil al-Hayya will arrive in Cairo on Saturday to hear from mediators on the latest round of Gaza cease-fire talks that took place in the Egyptian capital, the Palestinian group said in a statement.
Two Egyptian security sources said that U.S. and Israeli delegations started a new round of meetings Thursday in Cairo that lasted for two days. The talks aimed at resolving differences over a truce proposal.
Hamas affirmed its “commitment to what it had approved on July 2, which was based on the U.S. President Joe Biden’s proposal and readiness to implement it,” senior Hamas official Izzat al-Rishq said on Saturday.
In July, Hamas accepted a U.S. proposal to begin talks on releasing Israeli hostages, including soldiers and men, 16 days after the first phase of an agreement aimed at ending the Gaza war, a senior Hamas source has told Reuters.
Another senior official for the group, Mahmoud Mardawi, told Hamas-linked media that the delegation going to Cairo “does not mean Hamas will participate in the next round of talks.”
Egypt, along with the United States and Qatar, has been a mediator in months of stop-start negotiations to secure a cease-fire in Gaza, as well as the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners.
The war began on October 7 when Hamas gunmen led a terror attack into Israel, killing about 1,200 people and abducting about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
More than 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza by Israel’s response, according to Palestinian health authorities. Israel says most of the dead are combatants. The Hamas-run Health Ministry says most of them are women and children, but it does not estimate how many of the dead were combatants.
Nearly three-quarters of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is displaced, and nearly the entire population is at risk of famine, according to the United Nations.
