Hamas says new Gaza talks have begun, hours after Israel launched main offensive

Hamas says its negotiators have opened a brand new spherical of talks geared toward ending the conflict in Gaza, hours after Israel launched a significant offensive.

Taher al-Nounou, an adviser to the top of Hamas, informed the BBC a brand new spherical of negotiations had formally begun in Doha on Saturday. There have been no preconditions from both facet, and all points had been on the desk for dialogue.

Israel Katz, the Israeli defence minister, stated Hamas negotiators had been returning to oblique talks in Qatar to hunt a deal on the hostages.

Katz referred to as the transfer a “departure from the recalcitrant place that they had taken up till that second”.

It got here after Israel’s navy stated on its Hebrew X account that troops had been mobilised for “Operation Gideon’s Chariots” to grab “strategic areas” of Gaza and free hostages.

In comparable posts on its English-language X account, it stated it might not cease working “till Hamas is now not a risk and all our hostages are dwelling”, and that it had “struck over 150 terror targets all through the Gaza Strip” in 24 hours.

The Occasions of Israel stated that “Gideon’s Chariots” – a reference to a biblical warrior – would see the IDF take and management territory, transfer civilians to the south of the Strip, assault Hamas, and forestall it from taking management of help provides.

Hundreds of Israeli troops, together with troopers and reservists, are anticipated to enter Gaza because the operation ramps up within the coming days.

Israel imposed an help blockade on the Strip in March after the breakdown of a two-month ceasefire. US President Donald Trump stated on Friday that “lots of people had been ravenous” in Gaza.

Rescuers from the Hamas-run civil defence, Gaza’s predominant emergency service, stated Israeli assaults have killed over 300 individuals since Thursday.

Reuters information company reported not less than 146 Palestinians had been killed over the previous 24 hours and lots of extra injured, citing native well being authorities.

Residents in lots of components of northern and central Gaza have been informed to go away their properties or locations of shelter – an order help staff say is nearly unimaginable as a result of many have already been repeatedly made homeless through the conflict.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this month stated that Israel was making ready an “intense entry into Gaza” to seize and maintain territory.

His authorities stated it might not begin till Trump had accomplished a tour of the Center East. The US president left the area on Friday.

UN Secretary Normal António Guterres stated he was “alarmed” by Israel’s newest offensive in Gaza.

“I reject the repeated displacement of the inhabitants – together with any query of pressured displacement outdoors of Gaza,” he stated on X.

UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk echoed the condemnation, including that Israel’s operation is “tantamount to ethnic cleaning.”

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Italian International Minister Antonio Tajani each referred to as for a everlasting ceasefire to cease the killing in Gaza on Saturday.

Victoria Rose, a British reconstructive surgeon working at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, informed BBC Radio 4’s At the moment programme that her group had been “exhausted” and employees had misplaced a “appreciable quantity of weight”.

“The kids are actually skinny,” she stated. “We have got a whole lot of children whose tooth have fallen out.

“A number of them have fairly important burn accidents and with this stage of malnutrition they’re a lot extra liable to an infection and so they’ve acquired a lot much less capability to heal.”

A UN-backed evaluation printed on Monday discovered Gaza’s inhabitants to be at “vital threat” of famine.

The Israeli authorities has repeatedly rejected claims there’s a meals scarcity in Gaza.

Israel launched a navy marketing campaign to destroy Hamas in response to the group’s cross-border assault on 7 October 2023, during which about 1,200 individuals had been killed and 251 others had been taken hostage. Hamas nonetheless holds 58 hostages.

No less than 53,000 individuals have been killed in Gaza since then, in response to the territory’s Hamas-run well being ministry.