Israel has said it has informed the families of 31 people held in the territory since 7 October that their relatives are dead. The news came as the Qatari prime minister said Hamas had given a “generally positive” response to proposals for a deal trading a break in the fighting and release of Palestinian prisoners for the return of more hostages,
The Guardian reports.
The number of the dead equates to more than a fifth of the remaining 136 hostages being held by in Gaza, according to available intelligence collated by the Israeli military, and comes amid pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu’s government over its handling of the hostage crisis.
Qatar’s Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, whose country is acting as a mediator between the two sides, said on Tuesday that Hamas’s response to proposals drawn up by the US and Israel and tabled more than a week ago “inspires optimism”, but he said he would not go into details.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, speaking with the Qatari PM on his fifth tour of the region since the 7 October attacks, said he would discuss Hamas’s response with Israel on Wednesday.
“There’s still a lot of work to do be done, but we continue to believe that an agreement is possible, and indeed essential,” Blinken said.
A statement from Hamas referred to “a comprehensive and complete ceasefire, ending the aggression against our people”. Israel has previously ruled out a permanent ceasefire and it is believed it was proposing a pause in the fighting of 40 days.
The kernel of the negotiations turns on whether there are guarantees, implicit or explicit, that an extended ceasefire will become permanent, and whether the number of Palestinian prisoners likely to be released meets the demands of Hamas for a near emptying of jails. The future status and presence of Israeli forces inside Gaza during the ceasefire has also been contentious.
The news that 31 hostages have died first emerged from a confidential internal Israeli review leaked to the New York Times. The fate of a further 20 people is also in question amid unconfirmed intelligence that they may also have died during their captivity, the report said.
The figure of 31 was later confirmed by the Hostage and Missing Families Forum, which represents families of the captives. “According to the official data we have, there are 31 victims,” it said in a statement.
The disclosure that so many of the remaining hostages are dead – a higher number than previously disclosed – seems certain to intensify scrutiny of the Netanyahu government’s handling of the crisis, which has provoked fury among many hostage families.
While about half of those taken captive during the attack were released last year after a hostages-for-ceasefire deal under which Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli jails were also freed, negotiations for a second deal have dragged on for weeks.
The circumstances of the hostages’ deaths remain unclear, with the Israeli authorities suggesting that many occurred on 7 October during Hamas’s incursion into southern Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed.
