Erdoğan makes rare Egypt visit as talks continue over Gaza ceasefire deal

Negotiations involving multiple countries and high-level delegations on a Gaza ceasefire deal have entered a second day in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, as mediators struggle to make progress in the face of a threatened Israeli offensive on Rafah, the Palestinian territory’s last place of relative safety.

Representatives for the Palestinian militant group Hamas were expected in Cairo on Wednesday, and Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, arrived on his first visit to Egypt after more than a decade of tensions between the regional powers over support for the Muslim Brotherhood. Erdoğan said discussions with the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, who came to power in a 2013 coup, would focus on Israel’s offensive in Gaza.

On Tuesday Israel made a last-minute decision to send a delegation led by its heads of intelligence, David Barnea of the Mossad and Ronen Bar of the Shin Bet, which met US, Egyptian and Qatari mediators.

The CIA director, William Burns, joined Egypt’s intelligence director, Abbas Kamel, and the Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, for a day of talks that the US national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, said had been “constructive”, though Egypt’s state information service said it had concluded without any significant breakthrough.

This round of negotiations, aimed at a lengthy ceasefire and a further exchange of hostages and prisoners after a successful week-long truce at the end of November, is expected to last until Friday.

The number of Palestinian prisoners that Hamas aims to have released in exchange for the Israelis it holds in Gaza was the main sticking point in the talks, the Israeli media site Walla reported on Tuesday, citing unnamed US and Israeli officials. It said Egypt and Qatar were attempting to get Hamas to reconsider its position.

On Wednesday a rocket attack on northern Israel from Lebanon reportedly killed one person and injured seven, leading Israel to carry out retaliatory airstrikes that killed four people including two children.

The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Israel have traded fire across their disputed border almost daily since the war in Gaza broke out. The Iran-backed militia did not immediately claim responsibility for Wednesday’s rocket attack.

Across the region there is a palpable fear that time is running out to broker a truce that would bring much-needed relief to the besieged territory’s 2.3 million people, return the estimated 130 Israeli hostages still in Hamas captivity to their loved ones, and prevent the war from escalating into a wider conflict.

In an unusual intervention, the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, on Wednesday urged Hamas to agree to a deal quickly to avoid “dire consequences”.

“We call on the Hamas movement to quickly complete a prisoner deal, to spare our Palestinian people from the calamity of another catastrophic event with dire consequences, no less dangerous than the Nakba of 1948,” the 88-year-old autocratic leader said, referring to the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes after the creation of Israel in 1948.

Conditions in Gaza are already catastrophic. Israel’s war on the small coastal territory, now in its fifth month, was sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented offensive of 7 October last year, in which about 1,140 people were killed and another 250 were abducted as bargaining chips.

The Israeli offensive has killed more than 28,000 people, displaced more than 85% of the population and reduced more than half of Gaza’s infrastructure to rubble. According to the UN, 10% of children under five are now showing signs of acute malnutrition. Food deliveries and other aid that reaches the strip are regularly mobbed by desperate people or seized by Hamas or organised crime groups, residents say.

Israel’s threatened offensive on the area’s southernmost town, Rafah, on the Egyptian border, has led to widespread panic across the makeshift tent camps in the area that are now home to more than half of Gaza’s population.

With two-thirds of the strip already under evacuation orders and amid continuing fighting, it is unclear where so many people could go. Cairo has expressed alarm that an Israeli push into Rafah could force Palestinians to flee into the Sinai, and behind closed doors it has threatened to suspend its participation in the historic 1978 peace treaty with Israel if it goes ahead with the offensive.

The health ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza said about 100 people had been killed in Israeli airstrikes and shelling in the areas of Rafah and Khan Younis, just to the north, over the past 24 hours. In Khan Younis, fierce street fighting has continued, leading Palestinians sheltering on the premises of the main hospital to begin leaving. Residents said sniper fire at Nasser hospital had killed and wounded many people in recent days.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement: “The IDF will continue to operate in accordance with international law against Hamas – which cynically embeds itself within hospitals and civilian infrastructure – and will continue to operate to distinguish between the civilian population and Hamas terrorists.”

In a post on Instagram showing a steady stream of people leaving the medical complex on Wednesday, Dr Khaled al-Serr, a surgeon at Nasser, said: “I am writing this with tears and disappointment … My heart is broken, I did not feel [this] sadness when the Israeli army bombed my house. You can read one question in these faces … Where should we go?”

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has insisted on “total victory” in the war against Hamas and the hunt for Yahya Sinwar and other top Hamas officials believed to have masterminded the 7 October attack. It is widely believed that the Israeli leader is slow-walking the ceasefire talks and talking up a Rafah offensive because he is likely to be ousted from office in new elections when the war ends. The longtime leader faces several ongoing corruption trials.

Israel’s flat rejection of last week’s counterproposal for a ceasefire from Hamas appears to have further soured relations between Netanyahu and Israel’s most important allies in Washington. The US has provided crucial military supplies and diplomatic cover for Israel’s war. While initially supportive, Joe Biden appears to have lost patience over the colossal death toll in Gaza.

The relatives of the Israeli hostages in Gaza also appear to be losing patience with their government’s efforts to free their loved ones. On Wednesday dozens of freed former captives and family members visited the international criminal court in The Hague, where they urged prosecutors to charge and seek the arrest of leaders of the militant group.

Last month the court’s sister institution, the international court of justice, stopped short of ordering Israel to end its military offensive but called on the Jewish state to “take all measures within its power” to avoid acts of genocide in Gaza.