Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday that there is no point continuing the Gaza truce talks calling Hamas' demands "delusional," and adding that a diplomatic deal could only be reached through direct negotiations without any preconditions.
Speaking with reporters, Netanyahu said he had sent negotiators for truce talks in Cairo, as requested by U.S. President Joe Biden, but stated the talks are at an impasse.
Hamas released a statement Saturday, saying chief Ismail Haniyeh has blamed Israel for a lack of progress in achieving a cease-fire deal in Gaza.
Hamas will not accept anything less than a complete cessation of hostilities, Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and a "lifting of the unjust siege," Haniyeh said, as well as a release of Palestinian prisoners serving long sentences in Israeli jails.
Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani expressed caution on the progress of the negotiations.
"The pattern in the last few days is not really very promising, but as I always repeat, we will always remain optimistic and will always remain pushing," he said at the Munich Security Conference.
Sheik Mohammed, who is also foreign minister, said the two main sticking points are the humanitarian conditions in Gaza and the number of Palestinians who would be released in exchange for hostages held by Hamas.
"I believe in this agreement we are talking at a bigger scale, and we still see some difficulties on the humanitarian part of these negotiations," he said.
Talks involving officials from Qatar, Egypt, Israel and the United States so far have not yielded a deal for a pause in the fighting.
Khan Younis hospital arrests
The Israeli military said Saturday that its forces have arrested more than 100 people suspected of "terrorist activity," during a raid at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, the largest functioning hospital in Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces said that's where they found weapons and "medications with the names of Israeli hostages," and they killed gunmen near the hospital.
The Israeli army said its troops entered the hospital after receiving what it said was "credible intelligence" that hostages abducted in the October 7 terror attack had been held there and that the bodies of some may still be inside the medical facility.
The IDF has denied allegations that its soldiers targeted the hospital's generators and insisted it made every effort to keep the hospital supplied with power, including bringing an alternative generator.
Tarik Jasarevic, a World Health Organization spokesperson, decried the Israeli operation Friday, saying, "Patients, health workers and civilians who are seeking refuge in hospitals deserve safety and not a burial in those places of healing."
Doctors Without Borders also said its medics had been forced to flee and leave patients behind, with one employee unaccounted for and another detained by Israeli forces.
Israel posted a video online allegedly showing a U.N. relief worker loading the limp body of a shot Israeli man into the back of an SUV and driving away from a southern Israeli village during Hamas' October 7 cross-border attack.
A man appearing in the video is purportedly identified as Faisal Ali Mussalem Al Naami, a social worker in the Gaza Strip with the United Nations Relief Works Agency, or UNRWA. The video also was reported by The Washington Post.
UNRWA denies wrongdoing, describing its role as relief only.
Jonathan Fowler, an UNRWA spokesperson, said in response to the video: "It is not possible for UNRWA to verify the footage or photographs and ascertain who the person is. We were not presented with any evidence from the Israeli authorities."
Israel says some UNRWA staff took part in abductions and killings during the October 7 rampage that sparked the Gaza war, prompting a number of countries to halt funds for the Palestinian aid agency.
Airstrikes, Humanitarian aid
New airstrikes in central Gaza on Saturday killed more than 40 people, including children, and wounded at least 50, according to Associated Press journalists and hospital officials.
David Satterfield, the Biden administration's special Middle East envoy for humanitarian issues, said delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza has been disrupted because of Israeli strikes and increasing lawlessness at entry points for the urgently needed aid.
Satterfield said Israeli officials have not presented "specific evidence of diversion or theft" of U.N. assistance but noted the militants have their own interests in using "other channels of assistance ... to shape where and to whom assistance goes."
In Rafah, bad weather has compounded the dire living conditions for more than half of Gaza's 2.3 million population sheltering in the southern Gaza city.
An estimated 1.4 million Palestinians, more than half of Gaza's population, have crammed into Rafah, most of them displaced by fighting elsewhere in the territory. Hundreds of thousands are living in sprawling tent camps.
Gaza's Health Ministry says nearly 29,000 people — most of them women and children — have died since Israel declared war on Hamas, following the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel in which approximately 250 people were taken hostage and 1,200 were killed. Since then, 100 hostages were released during a weeklong cease-fire in November.
Some information for this story came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
