Gaza ceasefire talks appear to stall days before Ramadan

Negotiations aimed at brokering a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war appear to have stalled, days before an unofficial deadline of the beginning of Ramadan.

Two days of talks between Hamas and international mediators broke up in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, without any significant breakthroughs, Palestinian officials said, after Israel declined to send a delegation to the latest round of negotiations.

“[Benjamin] Netanyahu doesn’t want to reach an agreement” and “the ball now is in the Americans’ court” to press the Israeli prime minister to come back to the table, Basem Naim, the head of Hamas’s political division in Gaza, told reporters in text messages.

Israeli authorities did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A US official had said on Saturday that Israel had “more or less accepted” the deal presented by mediators to the Israeli delegation in Qatar.

Egyptian and Qatari mediators have over the last two days put pressure on Hamas to produce a list of hostages to be released as the first step in a phased ceasefire agreement with Israel, according to officials familiar with the talks.

Israel, however, did not send a delegation to the second day of talks in Cairo as hoped, demanding that Hamas present a list of 40 elderly, sick and female hostages who would be the first to be released as part of a truce that would initially last six weeks, beginning with the month of Ramadan.

Hamas has demanded that large-scale humanitarian aid should be allowed into Gaza, and that Palestinians displaced from their homes in the north of the coastal territory be allowed to return.

Diplomatic sources in Washington said on Monday it was unclear what was stopping the Palestinian militant group from producing a list identifying the first batch of hostages, noting that similar uncertainties ended up collapsing the last successful truce in November after a week.

They suggested it could reflect communications issues between Hamas units inside and outside Gaza, that some hostages could be held by other groups, including the more hardline Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or that elements of Hamas were withholding the information as a way of obstructing a deal.

While Washington’s rhetoric on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has strengthened over the last few days, critics say the US president, Joe Biden, has opted not to use Washington’s leverage as Israel’s principal arms supplier and most important international ally to bring Israel to the negotiating table, or get the country to increase the flow of aid to Gaza’s desperate civilians.

The US air force on Saturday began airdrops of aid in a joint operation with Jordanian planes, delivering a total of 38,000 meals, after an announcement from Biden the previous day.

Israel’s offensive has killed more than 30,000 people, displaced 85% of the 2.3 million population from their homes, and left more than half of the Gaza Strip’s infrastructure in ruins, according to data from Gaza’s health ministry and the UN.

The war, now five months old, was sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented surprise attack on communities across Israel in which, according to Israeli figures, about 1,200 people were killed and another 250 abducted.

About 100 hostages were exchanged for 240 Palestinian women and children held in Israel jails in November, but progress on a second deal has proved evasive.

While the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan on around 10 March is not a hard deadline for a new ceasefire, the UN says a quarter of Gaza’s population are facing starvation, making a comprehensive ceasefire in which sufficient aid can reach all areas of the besieged territory crucial.

Child malnutrition is soaring in the besieged territory, with UN officials reporting on Monday that one in six children under the age of two in the northern half of Gaza are acutely malnourished.

The longer the fighting lasts, the greater the risk of conflagration: Iran-backed groups in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen have already been drawn into the conflict. Ramadan is often accompanied by an uptick in violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even in quieter years.