Gaza talks mediator Qatar said on Tuesday it hoped Israel and Hamas could be brought to a new phase of negotiations for a peace deal in the Palestinian territory following their October ceasefire agreement.
‘We think that we should be pushing the parties to stage two very, very soon,’ Qatar foreign ministry spokesman Majed al-Ansari said.
‘That includes, of course, the issues that are complicating the situation, like the fighters in the tunnels behind the Yellow Line, like the incidents that take place every couple of days,’ he added.
The so-called Yellow Line marks the point to which Israeli troops have withdrawn inside the Gaza Strip. Dozens of Hamas fighters remain holed up in tunnels beyond the line, though Israel says it has been targeting and killing them.
Qatar, alongside the United States and Egypt secured a long-elusive truce in Gaza, which came into effect on October 10 and has mostly halted two years of fighting between Israel and Hamas.
During the first phase of the Gaza peace plan, initially outlined by US president Donald Trump, Hamas and its allies were due to return all 48 hostages they held captive, 20 of whom were still alive.
All but the bodies of two hostages remain in Gaza, Ran Gvili and Sudthisak Rinthalak, but Israel has accused the Palestinian militants of dragging their feet on handing over remains.
Hamas has said the process of retrieving the bodies has been slow because the bodies have been under the vast piles of rubble left by two years of war.
‘As we have always said, the logistical situation in Gaza would certainly make it difficult to reach this result,’ Ansari said, referring to the return of the bodies.
The spokesman added that the return of the remains should not be a hindrance to reaching stage two.
Under the second phase of the deal, which gained UN backing in November, Israel is to withdraw from its positions in the territory, an interim authority is to govern Gaza and an international stabilisation force is to be deployed.
Hamas is also supposed to disarm under Trump’s 20-point plan, with members who decommission their weapons allowed to leave Gaza. The militant group has repeatedly rejected the proposition.
Meanwhile, the Israeli military said Tuesday it had killed two assailants it said attacked soldiers in separate incidents in the occupied West Bank, with the Palestinian Authority identifying the deceased as a 17 and 18-year-old.
The army said the first attack took place Monday evening near Hebron, in the south of the Palestinian territory, where a female soldier was slightly injured in a car ramming attack.
In a statement, it said that after pursuing the attacker, Israeli forces attempted to apprehend the suspect, during which they shot him dead.
The attacker ‘attempted to flee while endangering the forces, who responded with live fire,’ the military statement said.
As the army did not return his body, the Palestinian Authority said it had been informed by Israel of the death of 17-year-old Muhannad Tariq Mohammed al-Zaghir, who was killed by Israeli soldiers ‘in the city of Hebron,’ without elaborating further.
The Israeli military said the second attack took place near Ramallah, in the centre of the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967.
Soldiers were dispatched to the area near the Israeli settlement of Ateret following a report of a suspect, the army said in a brief statement.
‘While confronting the suspect, he began to stab the soldiers, who responded with fire and eliminated him,’ the statement added.
Israel’s Magen David Adom emergency services reported two lightly wounded men around 20 years old.
The Palestinian Authority said it had been informed by Israel of the death of 18-year-old Mohammed Raslan Mahmoud Asmar, who was shot by Israeli forces north of Ramallah.
In a statement, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement praised the attacks as ‘heroic operations against the occupation soldiers’.
Violence in the West Bank has soared since Palestinian militant group Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel triggered the Gaza war.
It has not ceased despite the fragile truce between Israel and Hamas coming into effect in October.
