A hostage is handed over by Hamas militants to members of the International Committee of the Red Cross, as part of a hostages-prisoners swap deal.
Credit: Reuters Photo
Israel and Hamas agreed Thursday to extend their cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, keeping alive tenuous hopes for a lasting halt to the fighting.
Minutes before the truce was set to expire on Thursday morning at 7 a.m. local time, Hamas said in a statement that it would last another day. Israel's military announced the deal on social media around the same time, but did not immediately provide details on a timeline.
Qatar, the chief mediator, said the two sides had agreed to extend the pause for an additional day with the same conditions in effect.
But officials with knowledge of the talks said they also hoped that the succession of short-term pauses would pave the way toward a larger goal: negotiations over a longer-term cease-fire to bring the war to a close.
Achieving that is no easy task. Israeli officials have vowed not to stop their military campaign until Hamas' leadership has been eliminated and the group's military and governance infrastructure is uprooted from the Gaza Strip, objectives that remain far off.
The arrangement that has underpinned the cease-fire so far -- the release of hostages from Gaza, nearly all of them women and children, in exchange for the discharge of Palestinian women and minors from Israeli prisons and the entry of more aid into Gaza -- is likely to become much trickier when the parties begin negotiating to exchange captured combatants.
Hamas is believed to have seized a few dozen Israeli soldiers during the rampage it led through southern Israel on Oct. 7 that killed about 1,200 people and saw some 240 dragged into Gaza as hostages, according to Israeli officials. And Israel holds many high-profile Palestinian prisoners, including prominent members of Hamas convicted of grave crimes whose release the group has promised to pursue.
Top officials from Qatar, the United States, Egypt and Israel were meeting in Qatar in talks that were focused on extending it to allow for further exchanges. That formula has succeeded in mostly pausing the war since Friday. Each day, Israelis have watched groups of their hostages return home while Palestinians have seen their detainees released from jail, intense emotional events for each side.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who traveled to Israel for meetings with Israeli officials Thursday, said the Biden administration wants the truce to continue because it "means that more hostages will be coming home, more assistance will be getting in."
"Clearly, that's something we want," Blinken told reporters in Brussels Wednesday. "I believe it's also something that Israel wants. They're also intensely focused on bringing their people home."
A senior Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive talks, said there were currently no negotiations aimed at a long-term cease-fire. And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed that the war would continue.
But two people with knowledge of the talks in Qatar said that beyond yet another short-term extension, the mediators hoped to keep the war on pause for as long as possible to create conditions they hoped would allow for negotiations over a longer-term cease-fire.
One of those people said the mediators expect that the longer the quiet lasts, the harder it will be for Israel to restart its offensive and extend it to southern Gaza, where senior Hamas leaders are believed to be hiding.
The talks have gained even more urgency because of the death toll and spiraling humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. Israel's bombardment of the territory and subsequent ground invasion have leveled entire neighborhoods and killed more than 13,000 people, according to Gaza heath authorities. Most of the territory's 2.2 million Palestinians have been displaced, and the destruction means that many will have no homes to return to after the war ends.
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden appeared to couch his otherwise strong embrace of Israel by suggesting that more fighting would benefit Hamas.
"Hamas unleashed a terrorist attack because they fear nothing more than Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in peace," Biden said in a post on X. "To continue down the path of terror, violence, killing and war is to give Hamas what they seek. We can't do that."