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Israel and Hamas were set for a fifth consecutive exchange of hostages and prisoners on Tuesday after they agreed to prolong a pause in fighting in Gaza for an additional 48 hours, while mediators began talks in the hope of further extending the fragile truce.
After the extension to what was originally a four-day ceasefire involving hostage and prisoner swaps was agreed on Monday, Israel’s government said it had identified 50 female Palestinian prisoners as “eligible to be released in the event that a release of additional Israeli hostages is carried out”.
Hamas has not yet said how many women and children it would free as part of the deal, but negotiators have put the number at 20 to be released in batches over the two day extension. In return, negotiators said 60 Palestinian women and children would be released from Israeli prisons.
CIA director Bill Burns and the head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency David Barnea were in Doha on Tuesday to hold talks with Qatari prime minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani and Egyptian officials on how to build on the agreement, extend the pause in hostilities and secure the release of more hostages.
The mediators were hopeful that Hamas would be able to locate another 20 women and children being held in Gaza in order to extend the current agreement by a further two days, an official briefed on the talks said.
“They [Hamas] are looking for them now,” the official said.
Qatar, the US and Egypt brokered the original deal under which Hamas agreed to release 50 women and children held in Gaza. In return, Israel agreed to pause its offensive against the militant group in Gaza for four days, allow more aid into the besieged strip and release 150 Palestinian women and children held in Israeli prisons.
The talks in Doha on Tuesday between the US and Israeli spy chiefs, the Qataris and Egyptians were focusing on the next category of hostages that could be released and what the parameters of a new agreement could look like, the official briefed on the talks said.
Hamas and other Palestinian militants seized about 240 hostages during the devastating October 7 attack on southern Israel that triggered the war.
The captives include women, children and Israeli soldiers and reservists. The most likely category of hostages to be released after the women and children would be a small group of elderly people.
“We are working against the clock. We have a maximum of four days, because Israel has made it clear it will resume the war if no hostages are coming out,” the official said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been under pressure to continue the temporary truce in order to free more hostages. He has vowed to crush Hamas and eradicate it from Gaza after the militant group’s October 7 attack killed about 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials.
To facilitate extensions of the temporary ceasefire, Sheikh Mohammed, the Qatari prime minister, said in a Financial Times interview on Sunday that Hamas would need to locate about 40 women and children being held in Gaza by other armed groups and gangs in the strip.
Hamas official Izzat al-Rishq told Al-Araby television on Monday that the group was “working to search for the remaining missing [hostages]”.
Families of the remaining hostages have vowed to keep up the pressure for their release. Ofri Bibas, whose brother Yarden is among the hostages along with Yarden’s wife Shiri and their two sons, on Tuesday appealed to the truce negotiators to secure the family’s freedom.
Although 10-month-old Kfir, Bibas’s nephew, is the youngest hostage remaining in captivity, she said her family had been informed that the children were not on the list of hostages to be freed on Tuesday.
“We call upon the Israeli government and Qatar and Egypt . . . to do whatever they can, to include our family [ . . . ] in this deal and to release them as soon as possible,” Bibas told a press conference.
The truce involves Hamas releasing groups of Israeli women and children held hostage in Gaza every day, in exchange for Israeli prisons freeing Palestinian women and children who have been sentenced or are in detention.
Foreigners, including people from Thailand and the Philippines, have also been released by Hamas during the truce under separate agreements.
The deal also involves stepping up desperately needed aid deliveries through Rafah, the single functioning border crossing with the besieged Gaza Strip.
Home to 2.3mn people, Gaza has largely been cut off from supplies since the fighting started, creating a mounting humanitarian crisis. The UN says that 1.8mn people have been forced to flee their homes and more than 1mn are sheltering in under-equipped UN facilities, including schools.
The ferocity of Israel’s retaliatory air campaign and ground invasion, which has levelled swaths of the densely populated area and hit schools and hospitals, had sparked international calls for a ceasefire. Palestinian officials say 14,800 people have been killed in the Israeli offensive.
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