Qatar’s PM says ending Israel-Hamas war shouldn’t be conditioned on release of hostages

Qatar’s prime minister says that a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas “should not be conditioned” by an agreement on hostage release.

“This is the dilemma that we’ve been in and unfortunately that’s been misused by a lot of countries, that in order to get a ceasefire, it’s conditional to have the hostage deal. It shouldn’t be conditioned,” Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani tells the Munich Security Conference.

Sheikh Mohammed, who is also foreign minister, says he cannot get into the details of negotiations, but as with past deals, there were two elements, the humanitarian conditions in Gaza and the number of Palestinian prisoners 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 says.

He adds that he thinks that if negotiations on the humanitarian element of any deal progress, then the obstacle over the numbers of those released would be ultimately tackled.

Talks involving officials from Qatar, Egypt, Israel and the United States have so far not yielded a deal for a pause in the fighting.