With negotiations seemingly once again stuck after the sides had appeared close to an elusive agreement earlier this week, Egypt said both Israel and Hamas would need to show “flexibility.”
Izzat El-Risheq, a member of Hamas’s political office in Qatar, said Thursday that the Hamas delegation had left Cairo for Doha, Qatar, where its leadership is based, after affirming it was sticking with the terms it had agreed to Monday.
A senior Israeli official said the Israeli team had also left after handing mediators a list of its reservations about the Hamas proposal.
On Monday, Hamas claimed to have accepted a truce agreement with Israel, though it later emerged that the proposal it said had come from Egyptian and Qatari mediators included several elements fundamentally different from what Israel had agreed to. Jerusalem swiftly rejected the proposal for falling short of its “vital demands,” but okayed dispatching a working-level delegation to the indirect talks in Cairo. READ MORE