The Trump administration has been conducting secret talks with the militant Palestinian group Hamas on the possibility of releasing US hostages being held in Gaza, two sources briefed on the conversations told Reuters.
Israel must meet international obligations regarding the provision of humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza, said the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany in a joint statement on Wednesday.
Israel swore in a new commander of its military on Wednesday as a standoff over the fragile ceasefire in Gaza increased the risk of a resumption of fighting without an agreement to bring home the rest of the hostages still held by Hamas.
US holds secret talks with Hamas on Gaza hostages
The Trump administration has been conducting secret talks with the militant Palestinian group Hamas on the possibility of releasing US hostages being held in Gaza, two sources briefed on the conversations told Reuters.
US special envoy for hostage affairs Adam Boehler held the direct negotiations with Hamas in Doha, Qatar in recent weeks, said the sources.
Until recently, the US had avoided direct engagement with the Islamist group, which carried out a cross-border raid into southern Israel on 7 October 2023, that triggered a devastating Gaza war.
Such talks run counter to long-standing US policy against direct contacts with groups that Washington lists as foreign terrorist organisations. The US State Department designated Hamas as such in 1997.
The previous US role in helping to secure a ceasefire and hostage release deal in the Gaza conflict has been dealing with Israel and Qatari and Egyptian mediators, but without any known direct communications between Washington and Hamas.
Axios was first to report on the Doha discussions.
The Israeli government and its embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Boehler’s office declined to comment.
It was unclear when or how the Israeli government was informed of the talks.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did representatives for Hamas.
The sources said the talks had focused on gaining the release of American hostages still held in Gaza, but one said they also had included discussions about a broader deal to release all remaining hostages and how to reach a long-term truce.
One of the sources said the effort includes an attempt to gain the release of Edan Alexander, of Tenafly, New Jersey, believed to be the last living American hostage held by Hamas. He appeared in a video published by Hamas in November 2024.
Four other US hostages have been declared dead in absentia by Israeli authorities.
Jonathan Panikoff, a former US deputy national intelligence officer on the Middle East, said President Donald Trump’s unconventional diplomatic approach carried both risks and opportunities.
“On one hand, engaging Hamas directly could make it easier to get US hostages out and help reach a long-term agreement,” said Panikoff, now at the Atlantic Council think-tank. “On the other, there’s a reason the US doesn’t usually negotiate with terrorist groups, knowing Washington will do so incentivises them to repeat the behavior in the future.”
Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff plans to return to the region in coming days to work out a way to either extend the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal or advance to the second phase, said a State Department spokesperson on Monday.
Fighting in the Gaza Strip has been halted since 19 January and Hamas has exchanged 33 Israeli hostages and five Thais for some 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.
Britain, France and Germany urge Israel to ensure Gaza aid
Israel must meet international obligations regarding the provision of humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza, said the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany in a joint statement on Wednesday.
“We call on the government of Israel to abide by its international obligations to ensure full, rapid, safe and unhindered provision of humanitarian assistance to the population in Gaza,” read the statement.
“Humanitarian aid should never be contingent on a ceasefire or used as a political tool,” it added, calling on all parties to uphold the ceasefire.
New Israeli military chief assumes command
Israel swore in a new commander of its military on Wednesday as a standoff over the fragile ceasefire in Gaza increased the risk of a resumption of fighting without an agreement to bring home the rest of the hostages still held by Hamas.
Eyal Zamir, a former tank commander who had retired after 28 years with the rank of major general before being called back into service, was promoted to lieutenant general, before formally assuming command from General Herzi Halevi, who stepped down over the security disaster of 7 October 2023.
“The mission is not yet complete,” he said in an address as he assumed command, saying that Hamas had not yet been defeated.
“We will not forgive, we will not forget. This is an existential war. We will persist in our campaign to bring our hostages home and to defeat our enemies,” he said. Fighting in Gaza has been halted since January under a truce brokered by Qatar and Egypt and supported by the US that has allowed the exchange of 33 Israeli hostages and five Thais for around 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.
A related war in southern Lebanon, which broke out after Iranian-backed Hezbollah forces launched missile strikes against Israel after the 7 October attack, has also been silenced by a separate ceasefire agreement.
But Israeli ministers and officials have warned that their forces could resume fighting if there is no agreement on bringing back the 59 hostages that remain.
Israeli troops have pulled back from some of their positions in Gaza but talks that were intended to agree the release of the hostages and the full withdrawal of Israeli forces before an end to the war have not begun.
Israel has called for an extension of the truce until after the Jewish Passover holiday in April to allow the release of the remaining hostages, while Hamas has insisted on proceeding to talks on a permanent end to the war before agreeing to any further releases.
Zamir’s appointment comes as a series of official inquiries have begun to examine the failures that allowed thousands of Hamas-led gunmen to storm Israeli communities around the Gaza Strip, killing 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages in one of the biggest military and security disasters in Israel’s history.
Halevi led the military during the Israeli campaign in Gaza that killed more than 48,000 Palestinians and destroyed much of the enclave, leaving most of the population sheltering in tents or bombed-out buildings.
But he announced in January, soon after the Gaza ceasefire deal was agreed, that he would step down from his command, accepting responsibility for the military’s patchy and uncoordinated response to the 7 October attack.
On Wednesday, as he handed over his command, he called for a wider examination of the failures on 7 October.
“The establishment of a state commission of inquiry is necessary and essential — not to place blame, but first and foremost, to understand the root of the problems and allow for correction,” he said.
Both the Israel Defense Forces and the Shin Bet security agency have acknowledged that their failures allowed the attack to take place, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has so far resisted a more general inquiry that would look at the responsibility of his government.
The new commander will also have to respond to accusations from international bodies including the United Nations that Israeli troops committed war crimes during the campaign in Gaza.
Israel rejects those charges, which it says are motivated by political hostility towards the state of Israel, but it has indicted some individual reservist soldiers for severe abuse of detainees.
Israel says Hamas, which has also been accused of war crimes by United Nations bodies, committed multiple atrocities during the 7 October attack and severely abused Israeli hostages in Gaza. Hamas denies the accusations.
US issues new Houthi-related sanctions
The US imposed sanctions on Wednesday on seven senior members of Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi movement, said the Treasury Department.
The individuals smuggled military-grade items and weapon systems into Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen and negotiated buying weapons from Russia, said the Treasury.
The Treasury also designated Abdulwali Abdoh Hasan Al-Jabri and his company Al-Jabri General Trading and Investment Co for recruiting Yemenis to fight in Ukraine on behalf of Russia and raising money to support Houthi military operations, it said.
“The US government is committed to holding the Houthis accountable for acquiring weapons and weapons components from suppliers in Russia, China, and Iran to threaten Red Sea security,” said State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce.
On Tuesday, the State Department said it was implementing the designation of the Houthi movement as a “foreign terrorist organisation” after President Donald Trump called for the move earlier this year.
The move, however, triggered concerns it could impact regional security and worsen Yemen’s humanitarian crisis because importers fear being hit with US sanctions if supplies fall into Houthi hands.
Israel’s settler outposts stir annexation fears in West Bank
Just metres from the last houses in Bardala, a Palestinian village at the northern end of the occupied West Bank, Israel’s army has been bulldozing a dirt road and ditch between the community and open grazing land on the hills behind it.
Israel’s military told Reuters the works were for security and to allow it to patrol the area following the killing of an Israeli civilian in August near the village by a man from another town. It did not detail what it was building there.
Farmers from the fertile Jordan Valley village fear the army patrols and Israeli settlers moving in will exclude them from pastures that feed around 10,000 sheep and goats, as has happened in other parts of the West Bank, undercutting their livelihoods and eventually driving them from the village.
Israeli settler outposts have appeared around the village since last year, with clusters of blue and white Israeli flags newly fluttering from nearby hilltops. The settlers intimidated semi-nomadic Bedouin shepherds to abandon their camps in the area last year, four Bedouin families and Israeli human rights NGOs told Reuters.
Over recent weeks, caravans and shelters have begun appearing on the scrub-covered hills a few hundred metres west of Bardala, on land behind the new track, Reuters reporters saw. Such temporary shelters have been the first signs of new outposts being built.
Reuters was unable to contact any of the new arrivals in the outposts around the village.
The tighter military control in the Jordan Valley and arrival of settler outposts in the area over the past months are new developments in a part of the West Bank that had mostly avoided the buildup of Israel’s presence on the ground in central areas of the Palestinian territory.
With each advance of Israeli settlements and roads, the territory becomes more fractured, further undermining prospects for a contiguous land on which Palestinians could build a sovereign state. Most countries consider Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank to be illegal.
Israel’s pro-settler politicians have been emboldened by the return to the White House of Trump, who has proposed Palestinians leave Gaza, a suggestion widely condemned across the Middle East and beyond as an attempt to ethnically cleanse Palestinian territories.
Ibrahim Sawafta, a member of the Bardala village council, said two dozen farmers would be prevented from reaching grazing land if soldiers and settler outposts obstruct their free movement. Unable to keep their large flocks in pens within the village itself, they would be forced to sell.
“Bardala would be a small prison,” he said, sitting on a bench outside his house in the village.
He said the overall goal was “to restrict people, to force them to leave the Jordan Valley”.
In response to Reuters questions, the army said the area behind the dirt road outside Bardala was designated as a live fire zone but included “a passage” manned by Israeli soldiers, suggesting limitations on free movement in the area.
It said the passage would allow for “the continuation of daily life and the fulfilment of residents’ needs”, without giving further details.
The activity around Bardala is part of a wider Israeli effort to reshape the West Bank. Over the year and a half since war broke out in Gaza, settlement activity has accelerated in areas seen as the core of a future Palestinian state.
In recent weeks, army raids in refugee camps near volatile West Bank cities, including Jenin, Tulkarm and Tubas, near Bardala, have sent tens of thousands of people fleeing their homes, fuelling fears of permanent displacement.
The raids come amid a renewed push to formally absorb the West Bank as part of Israel, a proposal supported by some of Trump’s aides. Israel’s military has occupied the West Bank since the 1967 Middle East war.
Bardala, with a population of about 3,000, lies a few metres from the pre-1967 line separating the West Bank from Israel. It prospered quietly over the past 30 years as Israel’s settlement movement swallowed up thousands of hectares of land in other parts of the West Bank.
The cornfields and clusters of plastic-sheeted greenhouses where its farmers grow aubergines, peppers and zucchini for the markets of the West Bank and Israel underscore how fertile the land is in the narrow strip of valley alongside the Jordan River, running from the Dead Sea north towards the Sea of Galilee.
But the new Israeli-controlled path will squeeze the village against Highway 90, a road that runs north-south along the riverine border with Jordan from the Dead Sea. Highway 90 ends at the separating line between the West Bank and Israel, just outside the village. The separating line is marked by a high fence.
Citing the experience of other villages, Dror Etkes, founder of Israeli rights group Kerem Navot, said the new track and settlement activity would block access for Palestinians to the area north of Bardala, “all the way up to the separation barrier”. Kerem Navot tracks Israeli settlement and land management policy in the West Bank.
The authorities “will take a few thousand dunhams, mainly of agricultural land and prevent the Palestinians from cultivating this land”, he said. A dunham is a tenth of a hectare.
The West Bank, so named because of its relation to the river that separates it from Jordan, has long been seen by religious nationalist hardliners in Israel as part of a Greater Israel through historical and Biblical connections to the Jewish people.
Jewish settlement building has roared ahead under Netanyahu and allies in government such as hardline Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, himself a settler, who said last year he would push to gain Washington’s support for annexation in 2025.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said at the time that the government’s position on annexation had not yet been settled. Israel’s opposition to ceding control of the West Bank has been deepened by its fears of a repeat of the 7 October 2023 attack near Gaza.
Since the start of the war in Gaza, 43 new outposts, the seeds of future settlements, have been built in the West Bank, according to Peace Now, an Israeli organisation that tracks settlement building.
Most are farm outposts that exclude Palestinians from agricultural land. At least seven were built in the Jordan Valley, according to Palestinian Authority figures.
As in other areas of the West Bank, Palestinians and rights groups say the arrival of outposts coincided with more violence from bands of settlers, now free of the fear of US sanctions since Trump cancelled penalties imposed under former President Joe Biden for previous violence.
For months, Bedouins living in semi-permanent stockades in the hills grazing sheep and goats around the Jordan Valley have been subjected to harassment by violent groups of settlers. In late January, the local school in Bardala itself was attacked, after the settlers said stones had been thrown at them.
“The settlers would attack us every Saturday, not allowing us to leave the house at all,” said Mahmoud Kaabneh, who left his home in Um Aljmal, an area in the hills some 20km south of Bardala for Tubas, along with a dozen other families after repeated incursions by threatening bands of settlers.
The creation in 2023 of the Settlements Administration, a civil department for the West Bank answerable to Smotrich, has fuelled Palestinian concern that the move from military occupation to annexation is already happening by stealth. DM
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