JERUSALEM/CAIRO: The United States has made a “bridging proposal” for the number of jailed Palestinians to be released by Israel in exchange for every hostage freed by Hamas in any new Gaza truce, an Israeli official briefed on the Qatar-hosted talks said on Saturday.
An Israeli delegation led by Mossad chief David Barnea has been in Doha for indirect negotiations with the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which CIA director William Burns is helping Qatari and Egyptian officials to mediate.
Hamas wants to parlay any deal into a permanent end to the fighting — short of a formal peace, as the Islamist group is sworn to Israel’s destruction. Israel plans to pursue the war until Hamas’s governing and military capacities are dismantled.
“During the negotiations, significant gaps came to light on the question of the ratio” of prisoners to be released for each of the 40 hostages whose potential recovery is under discussion, said an Israeli official, who requested anonymity.
“The United States put a bridging proposal on the table, to which Israel responded positively. Hamas’ response is pending.”
The official provided no details on the US proposal.
The US embassy in Israel did not immediately comment.
Asked about the hostage-to-prisoner ratio, senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri referred Reuters to a proposal made by the group this month under which Israel would free between 700 and 1,000 jailed Palestinians in return for female, minor, elderly and infirm captives. Israel called that “unrealistic.”
Abu Zuhri noted Israel’s refusal to agree to call off its offensive, withdraw forces and allow displaced Palestinians to return to homes in the northern Gaza Strip: scenes of some of the most intense fighting in the almost six-month-old conflict.
“What America and the Occupation (Israel) want is to regain the captives without a commitment to end the aggression, which means the resumption of war, killing and destruction, and we can’t accept that,” Abu Zuhri said.
US President Joe Biden, echoing Israel, has said Hamas must be eliminated.
Israel has expressed openness to suspending its offensive for six weeks and allowing more humanitarian aid into Gaza in return for the 40 hostages. That would leave behind 90 hostages, out of 253 seized by Hamas in its Oct. 7 cross-border rampage that sparked the war.
Under a previous truce, in late November, Israel released three jailed Palestinians, most of them young and accused of relatively light offenses, for every hostage freed by Hamas, totalling 300 Palestinian prisoners for around 100 hostages.
Israeli officials have said they will likely have to agree to the release of a larger number of more senior Palestinian militants this time around.
Barnea flew back with other senior members of Israel’s delegation on Saturday evening, the Israeli official said, adding that their teams remain in Doha. The principals were prepared to shuttle back if the negotiations gain momentum, the official added.
The Hamas armed wing said on Saturday that an Israeli hostage had died due to “lack of medicine and food.”
Israeli officials have generally declined to respond to such announcements, accusing Hamas of psychological warfare. But Israel has itself declared 35 of the hostages dead in captivity.
US proposes hostage-to-prisoner ratio in Gaza truce talks, Israeli official says
https://arab.news/z4stx
US proposes hostage-to-prisoner ratio in Gaza truce talks, Israeli official says
- Israel has expressed openness to suspending its offensive for six weeks and allowing more humanitarian aid into Gaza in return for the 40 hostages
- Hamas earlier proposed that Israel frees 1,000 jailed Palestinians in return for female, minor, elderly and infirm captives and to totally stop its offensive
Israel’s ‘deliberate intention of preventing births among Palestinians’ meets ‘legal criteria of Genocide Convention’: Reports
- Births in Gaza fell by 41% during conflict as maternal deaths, miscarriages surged
- ‘The destruction of maternal care in Gaza reflects the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinian people, in whole or in part’
LONDON: Births in Gaza fell by 41 percent due to Israel’s war on the territory, with the conflict resulting in catastrophic numbers of maternal deaths, miscarriages and birth complications, two reports have found.
The data on pregnant women, babies and maternity care in the war-torn Palestinian enclave also revealed a surge in newborn mortality and premature births, The Guardian reported on Wednesday.
Dangerous wartime conditions and Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s health systems were blamed for the alarming statistics.
The two reports were conducted by Physicians for Human Rights, in collaboration with the University of Chicago Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic and Physicians for Human Rights — Israel.
Researchers highlighted Israel’s “deliberate intention of preventing births among Palestinians, meeting the legal criteria of the Genocide Convention.”
The reports build on earlier findings by PHR’s Israel branch. They place the testimonies of pregnant women and new mothers within the context of health data and field reports, which recorded “2,600 miscarriages, 220 pregnancy-related deaths, 1,460 premature births, over 1,700 underweight newborns, and over 2,500 infants requiring neonatal intensive care” between January and June 2025.
PHRI’s Lama Bakri, a psychologist and project manager, said: “These figures represent a shocking deterioration from pre-war ‘normalcy,’ and are the direct result of war trauma, starvation, displacement and the collapse of maternal healthcare.
“These conditions endanger both mothers and their unborn babies, newborns, and breastfed infants, and will have consequences for generations, permanently altering families.”
She added: “Beyond the numbers, what emerges in this report are the women themselves, their voices, choices and lived realities, confronting impossible dilemmas that statistics alone cannot fully capture.”
Maternal and newborn care in Gaza has been damaged by Israel’s destruction of health infrastructure, as well as fuel shortages, blocked medical supplies, mass displacement and relentless bombardment.
As a result, survival in Gaza’s overcrowded tent encampments has become the sole option for pregnant women and new mothers.
During the first six months of Israel’s war on the territory, more than 6,000 mothers were killed, at an average of two every hour, according to UN Women estimates.
It is also believed that about 150,000 pregnant women and new mothers have been forcibly displaced by the conflict.
In the first months of last year, just 17,000 births were recorded in Gaza, a 41 percent fall compared to the same period in 2022.
The researchers examined Israel’s apparent strategy to undermine Palestinian births, highlighting a targeted strike in December 2023 on the Al-Basma IVF clinic.
The attack on Gaza’s largest fertility center destroyed about 5,000 reproductive specimens and ended a pattern of 70-100 IVF procedures each month.
The strike was deliberately designed to target the reproductive potential of Palestinians, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry later found.
“Reproductive violence constitutes a violation under international law; when carried out systematically and with them intent to destroy, it falls within the definition of genocide of the Genocide Convention,” the reports said.
“The destruction of maternal care in Gaza reflects the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinian people, in whole or in part.”
