CAIRO: Hamas is open to an agreement to end the war in Gaza that would see all hostages released and secure a five-year truce, an official said Saturday as the group’s negotiators held talks with mediators.
A Hamas delegation was in Cairo discussing with Egyptian mediators ways out of the 18-month war, while, on the ground, rescuers said Israeli strikes killed at least 35 people.
Nearly eight weeks into an Israeli aid blockade, the United Nations says food and medical supplies are running out.
The Hamas official, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, said the Palestinian militant group “is ready for an exchange of prisoners in a single batch and a truce for five years.”
The latest bid to seal a ceasefire follows an Israeli proposal which Hamas had rejected earlier this month as “partial,” calling instead for a “comprehensive” agreement to halt the war ignited by the group’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
The rejected Israeli offer, according to a senior Hamas official, included a 45-day ceasefire in exchange for the return of 10 living hostages.
Hamas has consistently demanded that a truce deal must lead to the war’s end, a full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and a surge in humanitarian aid.
An Israeli pullout and a “permanent end to the war” would also have occurred — as outlined by then-US president Joe Biden — under a second phase of a ceasefire that had begun on January 19 but collapsed two months later.
Hamas had sought talks on the second phase but Israel wanted the first phase extended.
Israel demands the return of all hostages seized in the 2023 attack, and Hamas’s disarmament, which the group has rejected as a “red line.”
“This time we will insist on guarantees regarding the end of the war,” Mahmud Mardawi, a senior Hamas official, said in a statement.
“The occupation can return to war after any partial deal, but it cannot do so with a comprehensive deal and international guarantees.”
Later on Saturday, senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan reiterated that “any proposal that does not include a comprehensive and permanent cessation of the war will not be considered.”
“We will not abandon the resistance’s weapons as long as the occupation persists,” he said in a statement.

Israel pounded Gaza again on Saturday.
Mohammed Al-Mughayyir, an official with the territory’s civil defense rescue agency, told AFP that the death toll had risen to at least 35.
In Gaza City, in the territory’s north, civil defense said a strike on the Khour family home killed 10 people and left an estimated 20 more trapped in the debris.
Umm Walid Al-Khour, who survived the attack, said “everyone was sleeping with their children” when the strike hit and “the house collapsed on top of us.”
Elsewhere across Gaza, 25 more people were killed, rescuers said.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military on the latest strikes but it said that “1,800 terror targets” had been hit across Gaza since the military campaign resumed on March 18.
The military added that “hundreds of terrorists” were also killed.
Qatar, the United States and Egypt brokered the truce which began on January 19 and enabled a surge in aid, alongside exchanges of hostages and Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
With Israel and Hamas disagreeing over the ceasefire’s next phase, Israel cut all aid to Gaza before resuming bombardment, followed by a ground offensive.

Since then, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, at least 2,111 Palestinians have been killed, taking the overall war death toll in Gaza to 51,495 people, mostly civilians.
The Hamas attack that triggered the war resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people on the Israeli side, also mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Militants also abducted 251 people, 58 of whom are still held in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel says the military campaign aims to force Hamas to free the remaining captives.
On Friday, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) said the hot meal kitchens it was supplying with food in Gaza “are expected to fully run out of food in the coming days.”
On Saturday, AFP footage showed queues of people waiting for food in front of a community kitchen.
“There is no food in the free kitchen, there is no food in the markets... There is no flour or bread,” said north Gaza resident Wael Odeh.
A senior UN official, Jonathan Whittall, said Gazans were “slowly dying.”
“This is not only about humanitarian needs but also about dignity,” Whittall, head of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian affairs in the Palestinian territories, told journalists.

AL-DAMAR, Sudan: At least 11 people were killed after a drone strike by the Rapid Support Forces hit a displacement camp in Sudan’s River Nile state, the governor said in a statement, in an attack that also took out the regional power station for the fourth time.
The RSF, which denies carrying out drone attacks and did not respond to a request for comment, has targeted power stations in army-controlled locations in central and northern Sudan for the past several months, but the strikes had not previously left significant death tolls.
“We heard a large explosion and we found two families that had been burnt completely inside their tents, while they were sleeping,” said teacher Mashair Hemeidan as she shed tears.
“We had left Khartoum, fearful of the war, and now the war has followed us here. I don’t know where I will go with my family and children. We have no shelter or place to go to,” she added.

I don’t know where I will go with my family and children. We have no shelter or place to go to.

Mashair Hemeidan, Teacher

The escalation of such strikes, which have hampered the country’s electrical grid and plunged millions into weeks-long blackouts, comes two years into a damaging war as the army has been pushing the paramilitary force out of central Sudan.
Ground fighting in the war is now focused on the Darfur region, where the RSF is fighting to seize the army’s remaining foothold, driving hundreds of thousands from their homes.
There has also been fighting in western Omdurman, part of the capital, where the RSF remains.
The Friday morning attack by multiple missiles, which set some of the tents on fire, injured 23 other people, a medical official said.
Reuters witnesses saw at least nine children among the wounded.
“My nine-year-old son, Ahmed, was killed, and now my nine-year-old Fadi and my seven-year-old Omnia are in the hospital,” said Fadwa Adlan, a resident of the camp.
Some 179 families displaced by the fighting in the capital had been living in difficult conditions in an abandoned building and surrounding tents outside the town of Al-Damer, receiving little in the way of humanitarian assistance. The camp was located about 3 km from the Atbara power station, which was also struck.
On Friday, authorities could be seen hosing down the residents’ belongings destroyed in the fire and breaking down the camp. Residents were seen boarding buses to an unknown location.