Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday progress was being made on the release of hostages held by Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip.
“We are making progress. I don’t think it’s worth saying too much, not at even this moment, but I hope there will be good news soon,” he told reservists, according to a statement from his office.
Netanyahu did not provide further details.
His office said that “in light of developments in the matter of the release of our hostages,” Netanyahu would later Tuesday convene his war cabinet, and then, the full cabinet.
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Netanyahu’s comments came hours after the chief of Hamas told Reuters on Tuesday that the militant group was “close to reaching a truce agreement” with Israel. Hamas has delivered its response to Qatari mediators, Ismail Haniyeh said in a statement sent to Reuters by his aide.
Another Hamas official earlier told Al Jazeera TV that negotiations were centred on how long the truce would last, arrangements for delivery of aid into Gaza and the exchange of Israeli hostages held by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners in Israel.
Featured VideoA Canadian delegation that includes two Liberal MPs and three Conservative MPs landed in Jerusalem Monday and met with Israeli officials and families of victims of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack.
Hamas took about 240 hostages during its Oct. 7 rampage into Israel that killed 1,200 people, including several Canadians.
Mirjana Spoljaric, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), met Haniyeh in Qatar on Monday to “advance humanitarian issues” related to the conflict, the Geneva-based ICRC said in a statement. She also met separately with Qatari authorities.
The ICRC said it was not part of negotiations aimed at releasing the hostages, but as a neutral intermediary it was ready “to facilitate any future release that the parties agree to.”
Deadly rocket strike reported
Talk of an imminent hostage deal has swirled for days. Reuters reported last week that Qatari mediators were seeking a deal for Hamas and Israel to exchange 50 hostages in return for a three-day ceasefire that would boost emergency aid shipments to Gaza civilians, citing an official briefed on the talks.
U.S. President Joe Biden said Tuesday that a deal was “very close,” after weeks of intensive negotiations, but that, “nothing is done until everything is done.”
Hamas’s raid on Oct. 7, the deadliest day in Israel’s 75-year history, prompted Israel to invade the Palestinian territory.
The Hamas-run government has said at least 14,100 Palestinians have been killed since, as Israel has relentlessly bombarded Gaza.
Hamas said on its Telegram account on Monday that it had launched a barrage of missiles toward Tel Aviv. Witnesses also reported rockets being fired at central Israel.
Meanwhile, a rocket strike killed two journalists working for a Lebanon-based TV and a third person near the border with Israel on Tuesday, the Lebanese state news agency reported.
The agency said the incident took place near the town of Tir Harfa, about a kilometre-and-a-half from the Israeli frontier.
Evacuated areas along Lebanon border:
Israel’s military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Border violence has escalated since Oct. 7, killing dozens of Hezbollah fighters, seven Israeli troops and several Israeli and Lebanese civilians.
The deaths add to a toll of more than 50 journalists killed in the region since Oct. 7, mostly in Gaza, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
A second Israeli strike on a car about 11 kilometres from the border and near the southern Lebanese city of Tyre killed four people later in the day, the state news agency reported. It did not give details.
Deadly refugee camp bombing
Gaza health authorities said on Tuesday at least 20 Palestinians were killed in Israeli bombing of the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza at midnight. There was no immediate comment from Israel.
The already crowded Nuseirat district, which grew out of a camp for Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Israeli-Arab war, is just south of the wetlands that bisect the strip and has been the arrival point for huge numbers escaping the fighting further north.
Tens of thousands of civilians are believed to remain in the north despite an Israeli order to flee. All hospitals there have ceased functioning normally, though many are still housing patients and displaced Gazans. Israel says Hamas uses hospitals as shields for its fighters, which Hamas and the hospitals deny.
Israeli forces seized Al-Shifa last week to search for a tunnel network they said was built by Hamas beneath the hospital. Hundreds of patients, medical staff and displaced people left Al-Shifa on the weekend, with doctors saying they were ejected by troops and Israel saying the departures were voluntary.
WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier said on Tuesday that three in Gaza had requested help with evacuating patients and that planning had started.
Featured VideoWarning: Video contains graphic footage | Israel shows video of an underground tunnel inside the Al-Shifa Hospital complex, saying it supports claims of a Hamas hub underneath the facility — something denied by Hamas and medical staff. And as the World Health Organization calls the hospital a ‘death zone,’ the conditions facing Palestinians become more dire by the day.
The three hospitals were Al-Shifa, Indonesian Hospital and Al Ahli Hospital, he said.
“So far it’s only in planning stages with no further details,” he added.
Lindmeier said evacuations were a last resort.
In Khan Younis, the town in southern Gaza where hundreds of thousands of residents of the north have gathered to escape Israeli bombardment, neighbours said an overnight strike on an apartment had killed seven people, mostly children.
Egypt, which shares a border with southern Gaza, condemned bombing that targets people subjected to “enforced displacement,” its foreign ministry said on Tuesday on social media.