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

Rebel forces backed by Rwanda have captured the town of Masisi in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to various reports.

This is the second town seized by the M23 group in as many days in the mineral-rich North Kivu province.

The group has taken control of vast swathes of eastern DR Congo since 2021, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes.

Angola has been attempting to mediate talks between President Félix Tshisekedi and his Rwandan counterpart, Paul Kagame. But these broke down last month.

“It is with dismay that we learn of the capture of Masisi centre by the M23,” Alexis Bahunga, a member of North Kivu provincial assembly, told the AFP news agency.

He said this “plunges the territory into a serious humanitarian crisis” and urged the government to strengthen the capacity of the army in the region.

One resident told AFP that the M23 had held a meeting of the town’s inhabitants, saying they had “come to liberate the country”.

The Congolese authorities have not yet commented on the loss of the town.

Masisi, which has a population of about 40,000, is the capital of the territory of the same name.

It is about 80km (50 miles) north of the North Kivu provincial capital Goma, which the M23 briefly occupied in 2012.

On Friday, the M23 captured the nearby town of Katale.

Last year, there were fears that the M23 would once again march on Goma, a city of about two million people.

However, there was then a lull in fighting until early December when fighting resumed.

In July, Rwanda did not deny a UN report saying it had about 4,000 soldiers fighting alongside the M23 in DR Congo.

It accused the Congolese government of not doing enough to tackle decades of conflict in the east of the country. Rwanda has previously said the authorities in DR Congo were working with some of those responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide against ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

The M23, formed as an offshoot of another rebel group, began operating in 2012 ostensibly to protect the Tutsi population in the east of DR Congo which had long complained of persecution and discrimination.

However, Rwanda’s critics accuse it of using the M23 to loot eastern DR Congo’s minerals such as gold, cobalt and tantalum, which are used to make mobile phones and batteries for electric cars.

Last month, DR Congo said it was suing Apple over the use of such “blood minerals”, prompting the tech giant to say it had stopped getting supplies from both countries.

Three crew members, including two pilots, died on Sunday after a Coast Guard helicopter crashed at Porbandar airport in Gujarat. The incident occurred at 12.10 pm, Porbandar Superintendent of Police Bhagirathsinh Jadeja said.

A Coast Guard Advanced Light Helicopter (ALH) crashed during landing at Porbandar Airport at 12:10 pm, police said. The crash occurred during a routine training sortie.

The helicopter, carrying three crew members, went down at the Porbandar airport. All three were rescued from the wreckage and rushed to a hospital in Porbandar with severe burns, officials said.

Despite medical efforts, all three crew members succumbed to their injuries at the hospital, confirmed Inspector Rajesh Kanmiya of Kamala Baug police station.

Indian Coast Guard officials confirmed the deaths and said that an investigation into the cause of the crash is ongoing.

“The reasons leading to the incident are being investigated by a Board of Inquiry,” the Coast Guard said in a statement.

“We salute the three brave souls of the Indian Coast Guard who laid down their lives in the line of service to the Nation,” it added.

The crash comes just two months after another Coast Guard helicopter went down in the sea.