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A Hamas official said on Sunday that the Palestinian militants were ready to release 34 hostages as part of the “first phase” of a potential deal with Israel, following Israel’s confirmation that indirect talks on a truce and hostage release agreement had resumed in Qatar.

Mediators Qatar, Egypt, and the United States have been working for months to broker a deal to end the conflict. The latest effort comes just days before Donald Trump assumes office as President of the United States on 20 January.

The talks coincided with continued Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip on Sunday, which, according to rescuers, killed at least 23 people nearly 15 months into the conflict.

During this period, there has been only one truce — a one-week pause in November 2023, during which 80 Israeli hostages were freed alongside 240 Palestinians from Israeli prisons.

“Hamas has agreed to release 34 Israeli prisoners from a list presented by Israel as part of the first phase of a prisoner exchange deal,” the Hamas official said.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, stated that Hamas has yet to provide a list of hostages to be released under the agreement.

The Hamas official, speaking anonymously as he was not authorised to discuss the ongoing negotiations publicly, said the initial swap would involve all women, children, elderly, and sick captives still held in Gaza.

He added that some hostages may already be deceased and that Hamas requires time to verify their condition.

“Hamas has agreed to release the 34 prisoners, whether alive or dead. However, the group needs a week of calm to communicate with the captors and identify those who are alive and those who are dead,” the official said.

The conflict began on 7 October 2023, when militants seized 251 hostages during an attack that sparked the Gaza war. The Israeli military has reported that 96 hostages remain in Gaza, of whom 34 are believed to be dead.

Until the Hamas official’s statement, there had been no updates on the resumed negotiations in Qatar.

“Efforts are underway to free the hostages,” Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz told the family of a hostage on Saturday, according to his office.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot told RTL radio: “We continue to exert the necessary pressure” to achieve a deal, adding, “Unfortunately, it does not depend solely on us.”

Rescuers using ‘bare hands’

In December, Qatar expressed optimism that “momentum” was returning to the negotiations following Trump’s election victory. However, both Hamas and Israel have since accused each other of imposing new conditions.

In northern Gaza on Sunday, the Civil Defence agency reported that an airstrike on a house in Sheikh Radwan killed at least 11 people.

Agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal stated that the victims included women and children, and rescuers were using their “bare hands” to search for five people still trapped beneath the rubble.

The Israeli military reported that it had struck over 100 “terror targets” in Gaza over the past two days, indicating an escalation in its assault.

The Hamas-run territory’s health ministry reported that 88 people were killed in the previous 24 hours.

In one airstrike, five members of the Abu Jarbou family were killed in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, according to rescuers.

AFP footage from another strike in the Bureij camp showed rescuers transporting bodies and injured individuals to a hospital. In one scene, a medic attempted to resuscitate a wounded man in an ambulance, while another carried an injured child into the hospital.

Relatives were seen grieving over the bodies of two men wrapped in white shrouds.

Strikes against rocket fire

Several Israeli strikes targeted sites from which militants had launched rockets into Israel in recent days, according to the military.

Separately, the military announced that its forces had killed a militant commander in close combat in northern Gaza last week. The individual was a member of Islamic Jihad’s rocket unit and had participated in the 7 October 2023 attack.

Last week, Defence Minister Katz warned that intensified strikes should rocket fire persist.

While the frequency of rocket launches had decreased during the conflict, they have recently increased as Israel has pressed its land and air offensive in northern Gaza since early October.

Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel resulted in 1,208 deaths, mostly civilians, according to official Israeli data.

In response, Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has claimed 45,805 lives in Gaza, the majority of them civilians, according to figures from the territory’s health ministry, which the United Nations deems reliable.

AFP