Mossad head, Egyptian spy chief said to meet in Cairo ahead of Doha hostage talks
Meeting described as productive, counterparts stress importance of security cooperation; documents allegedly written by Sinwar with instructions for hostage captors come to light
Mossad chief David Barnea returned to Israel from Cairo on Friday, Hebrew media reported, following a meeting with newly appointed Egyptian intelligence chief Hassan Rashad ahead of the resumption of hostage deal negotiations in Qatar next week.
US, Qatari and Israeli negotiators will gather in Doha on Sunday to prepare for new talks on a possible deal that would see the release of the 101 Israeli hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza and an end to the fighting between Israel and the Palestinian terror group that has reduced much of the enclave to rubble.
Barnea will be joined in Doha by CIA Director William Burns and Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani.
Although Egypt will not send a delegation to the talks, it has been closely involved in efforts to get the negotiating process up and running again. In addition to meeting with Barnea, it hosted a Hamas delegation on Thursday to discuss the group’s expectations for a potential deal.
Barnea’s meeting with Rashad was productive, Ynet reported, and the two discussed a new proposal for a hostage release and ceasefire deal, as well as the importance of maintaining and strengthening security cooperation.
Rashad’s meeting with Barnea followed talks earlier in the week with Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar.
The Hamas delegation to Cairo was headed by the terror group’s deputy chief, Khalil al-Hayya. A senior Hamas official told AFP that the delegation discussed “ideas and proposals” related to a truce with Egyptian officials.
“Hamas has expressed readiness to stop the fighting, but Israel must commit to a ceasefire, withdraw from the Gaza Strip, allow the return of displaced people, agree to a serious prisoner exchange deal and allow the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza,” the official claimed, referring to the hostages captured by the terror group on October 7 and years prior in the same manner as Palestinian security prisoners serving time in Israel.
Meanwhile, the Egyptian Al-Qahera News outlet cited a senior Egyptian official who confirmed that negotiators had met with Hamas officials “to examine the situation in Gaza and ways to overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of quiet in the Strip.
Despite cautious optimism that a deal could be within reach, close to a year after the first and only truce of the war, Hamas senior official Osama Hamdan told the Iran-backed Al-Mayadeen news outlet that there was no change in the terror group’s position.
“The hostages held by the resistance will only return with a stop to the aggression and complete withdrawal,” he warned.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday night that he “welcomes Egypt’s readiness to advance a deal to free the hostages,” after negotiations ground to almost a complete halt over the last two months due to insurmountable differences between Israel’s stance and that of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who was killed in Gaza earlier this month.
Israel and the US hope that Sinwar’s death could be an opportunity to restart negotiations, as the terror chief had been described by officials from both countries as the main obstacle to progress in talks.
“He blocks everything or doesn’t respond,” an Israeli official told The Times of Israel before Sinwar was killed on October 16.
In addition to having the final say on Hamas’s position during the hostage talks and having been the architect of the October 7 terror onslaught, in which the 251 hostages were abducted, Sinwar also appeared to have been heavily involved in their captivity inside of the Strip.
Sinwar’s instructions
The Palestinian Al-Quds newspaper published on Friday three documents allegedly handwritten by Sinwar, in which he laid out instructions for the captors of hostages.
The first document stresses the obligation to “take care of the lives of the enemy’s prisoners and keep them safe, since they are an important bargaining chip” to free Palestinian prisoners. The document also included Quranic verses on the matter of hostage-taking, Al-Quds reported.
♦️ سري للغاية وخاص بـ #القدس #القدس تنشر وصايا الشهيد #يحيى_السنوار للمقاتلين وتفاصيل بخط يده حول المحتجزين:
• «فإما مَنّاً بعدُ وإما فداءً» الآية رقم ٤ من «سورة محمد»
• «وعودوا المريض وأطعموا الجائع وفكّوا العاني» حديث شريف.
• «ما لا يتم الواجب إلا به فهو واجب» قاعدة… pic.twitter.com/5GAl3h74q6— جريدة القدس (@alqudsnewspaper) October 24, 2024
The second document includes data on 112 unnamed hostages held in three areas: Gaza City (14 hostages), central Gaza (25 hostages), and southern Gaza’s Rafah (51 hostages). A fourth group of 22 hostages is listed without a location.
The hostages in each location are broken down into different categories according to their gender, age — above or below 60, or young — and whether they are civilians or soldiers.
The document also notes that one Bedouin hostage was held in Gaza City, and four in Rafah, among them a 55-year-old man. The four are presumed to be Youssef Ziyadne and his three children, two of whom were released in a weeklong ceasefire last November.
The third document includes a list of 11 female hostages who were released early on in the war, most of them during the weeklong November truce. The 11 hostages are listed with their name, age and whether they held foreign citizenship.
It is believed that 97 of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 34 confirmed dead by the IDF.
Hamas released 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November, and four hostages were released before that. Eight hostages have been rescued by troops alive, and the bodies of 37 hostages have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the military as they tried to escape their captors.
Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the bodies of two IDF soldiers who were killed in 2014.
Lazar Berman contributed to this report.
