Middle East Crisis: Hamas Says It Will Not Take Part in New Round of Cease-Fire Talks

Mr. Netanyahu has said Israel will send a delegation to the talks, but documents reviewed by The New York Times show he has also quietly made new demands in recent weeks, additions his own negotiators fear have created extra obstacles to a deal.

Mr. Netanyahu’s office has denied that he added new conditions and said that the prime minister had instead sought to clarify ambiguities in Israel’s previous proposal.

The talks come at a critical time as the conflict in Gaza is threatening to spill into an all-out regional war. They are widely seen by diplomats as key to defusing tensions in the region, as Iran and Hezbollah say they plan to retaliate against Israel for the recent assassinations of a Hezbollah commander near Beirut and a senior Hamas leader in Tehran.

Two officials briefed on the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy, said Hamas would still be willing to engage with mediators after the meeting, if Israel puts forward a “serious response” to its latest offer from early July. The officials said the group asserted that Israel had not offered such a response to its July proposal, which included compromise wordings requested by the mediators.

President Biden acknowledged on Tuesday that reaching a cease-fire agreement was “getting harder,” though he said he was “not giving up.” He said it was his expectation that Iran would hold off a retaliatory strike on Israel if a cease-fire deal could be hammered out this week.

At the United Nations, the American ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, made it clear in remarks to the Security Council that the White House sees a cease-fire agreement as critical to averting a wider regional conflict. “We need to get this over the finish line,” she said.

Hamas’s decision may not mean the talks will produce no results. In practice, Hamas leaders have not had face-to-face meetings with Israeli officials throughout the war and have instead relied on Qatar and Egypt to carry proposals back and forth. Many of Hamas’s most senior political leaders are based in Qatar, a short drive from the offices of Qatari mediators in Doha.

Vedant Patel, the deputy spokesman at the State Department, said Qatari officials had assured the United States they would work to have Hamas represented at the talks, though he did not say if they would attend in person or would be represented only by intermediaries. “We fully expect these talks to move forward,” he said on Tuesday.

The meeting was slated to take place either in Doha or Cairo, and was likely to include the C.I.A. director, William J. Burns; the chief of the Mossad, David Barnea; the Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani; and the head of Egypt’s intelligence service, Abbas Kamel, according to the officials.

In a joint statement on Thursday, President Biden, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt and Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani of Qatar declared that “the time has come” to achieve an agreement for a cease-fire and the release of hostages abducted to Gaza.

“There is no further time to waste nor excuses from any party for further delay,” they said, noting they would be willing to present a “final bridging proposal" to close gaps between Israel and Hamas.

Minutes after the statement was released, Israel announced its readiness to participate in the talks. Hamas refrained from making public comments about the meeting until Sunday when it called on the mediators to present a plan to implement what it had agreed to in July instead of holding more talks.

While Hamas has consistently said any cease-fire agreement should include an end to the war and a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, Mr. Netanyahu has suggested he would only be open to a temporary pause in the war of several weeks.

Ephrat Livni contributed reporting from Washington, Zach Montague from New Orleans and Farnaz Fassihi from the United Nations.

Mr. Ben-Gvir and a crowd estimated at about 2,000 inflamed tensions with leaders across the world and in Israel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel assailed Mr. Ben-Gvir on Tuesday, in the latest sign of friction between members of the country’s fragile governing coalition.

“It is the government and the prime minister who determine policy on the Temple Mount,” Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in a statement, noting that there was no “individual policy” for any minister and that Mr. Ben-Gvir’s decision represented “a deviation from the status quo.”

The actions were taken around the world as a provocation, particularly given that diplomats have been scrambling to calm tensions in the Middle East and hoping that a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas would prevent a further escalation of the conflict following the assassinations last month of a Hezbollah commander in Lebanon and a Hamas leader in Iran. Israel has claimed responsibility for the death in Lebanon and is widely believed to have been behind the one in Iran. Both Iran and Hezbollah have vowed to retaliate.

In a briefing with reporters on Tuesday, Vedant Patel, a deputy spokesman for the State Department, called Mr. Ben-Gvir’s actions “unacceptable” and noted that the move “detracts” from efforts to reach a cease-fire agreement “at a vital time.”

Qatar, which has been among the nations mediating the negotiations between Israel and Hamas, condemned the prayers at the holy site as an attack “on millions of Muslims around the world.” It warned in a statement from its Foreign Ministry on Tuesday that the move could negatively effect the cease-fire talks.

Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry also issued a statement condemning Mr. Ben-Gvir’s decision. It called the move “a provocation to the feelings of Muslims around the world, especially in light of the continuing war and acts of violence against defenseless Palestinians.”

Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s high commissioner for foreign affairs, also issued a statement “strongly” criticizing “the provocations” by Mr. Ben-Gvir. And France’s Foreign Ministry decried Mr. Ben-Gvir’s defiance of a “longstanding ban on Jewish prayer at the Al-Aqsa mosque,” urging Israel to respect the status quo. “This new provocation is unacceptable,” the French ministry said.

For years, the Israeli government has quietly allowed Jews to pray at the site, but in the videos from the scene on Tuesday, dozens of Jewish visitors are seen fully prostrating themselves in prayer. Some religious officials inside Israel expressed alarm at the flagrant violation.

Moshe Gafni, chair of the religious party United Torah Judaism, said Mr. Ben-Gvir was damaging the Jewish people and defying the dictates of generations of Israel’s chief rabbis. Michael Malchieli, Israel’s religious affairs minister and a member of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, said Mr. Ben-Gvir’s actions were an “unnecessary and irresponsible provocation against the nations of the world.”

Mr. Ben-Gvir, a settler whose government responsibilities include oversight of the police, has not been circumspect about his expansionist aims or his opposition to a Palestinian state. He strongly opposes a cease-fire with Hamas, and his decision to lead a group to the sensitive site for prayers just as negotiations were set to resume underscored disagreements within Israel over the wisdom of striking a deal and halting the war in Gaza.

There are about 115 hostages — dead and living — believed to still be held in Gaza. Relatives of the hostages on Tuesday accused Mr. Ben-Gvir of repeatedly trying to thwart a cease-fire deal, saying the minister was endangering the chances of bringing their captive family members home.

“A tent that used to accommodate four to seven people now houses 15 to 17 people from two or more families,” he said.

Mr. Mohammed listed the privations people in Al-Mawasi face: “no drinkable water, no healthy food,” and only “primitive bathrooms.” The heat is scorching under the sun, with no trees to provide shade, and, because the area is on the shore, it becomes windy and chilly at night. “We do not have the means for a decent life,” Mr. Mohammed said.

The Israeli military has issued a string of evacuation orders in recent weeks, uprooting tens of thousands of people in various parts of the Gaza Strip, and at Israel’s urging, many of them have moved into the Mawasi humanitarian zone. The Israeli military has characterized it as safer than other parts of the Gaza Strip, but has made clear that it will go after Hamas anywhere it believes it has a presence.

Israel has adjusted the borders of the humanitarian zone several times, shrinking the area by more than a fifth last month. Maps and analysis of satellite imagery show that the zone is crammed with people and often hit by airstrikes.

On Sunday, the Israeli military ordered another section of the zone to be evacuated because it was planning to fight in the area, where it said Hamas had “embedded terrorist infrastructure.”

Israel has previously mounted attacks inside the zone, including one strike on the outskirts of the southern city of Khan Younis last month that was meant to kill the commander of Hamas’s military wing, Muhammad Deif. Gazan health authorities say that strike killed at least 90 people.

“It is no longer a safe area,” said Nisreen Joudeh, a 37-year-old mother of four who has been sheltering in the humanitarian zone for the last few months. “We really feel that we could die any minute,” she added.

Palestinians from other parts of Khan Younis, where the Israeli military said that it was operating over the weekend, have also been fleeing to the humanitarian zone in recent days, Ms. Joudeh said.

She added that a few families who had been sheltering in Al-Mawasi for a long time have been leaving the area.

Israel first designated the Mawasi area a “humanitarian zone” in October, after it began asking residents of Gaza City to move southward ahead of its ground invasion into northern Gaza.

The zone started out as an area roughly a half-mile wide and around three miles long, according to a military map, but it was expanded several times as Israeli forces invaded southern Gaza. By May, the area was roughly four miles wide and about nine miles long, a military map shows.

On Friday, the United Nations humanitarian affairs office said the humanitarian zone covered about 18 square miles, or nearly 13 percent of the Gaza Strip.

Many of the roughly 1.4 million people who left Rafah as Israel pressed farther into the town squeezed into the humanitarian zone.

Mona al-Farra, who is sheltering in Al-Mawasi with nine other family members, said the severe overcrowding — along with shortages of water, medicine and food — is causing disease to spread, especially skin rashes among children, who are also hungry.

Ms. al-Farra said the sound of airstrikes coupled with Israeli evacuation orders were making her and her family “feel constantly threatened and in danger.” She said the people in the zone have nowhere else to flee.

“We live in an area that is considered humanitarian and is supposed to be safe, but it is not,” she said. “There is no safe place for us or our children.”

Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting from London, and Patrick Kingsley from Jerusalem.

Why has Iran vowed revenge?

Iran and Hamas officials have promised to avenge the death of Ismail Haniyeh, a senior Hamas leader, who was killed in Tehran on July 31 after he attended the inauguration of Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian. Iran, which backs Hamas, blamed Israel for the assassination. Israeli leaders have not said their forces were responsible.

A day earlier, Fuad Shukr, a senior commander in Hezbollah, which is also supported by Iran, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in a suburb of the Lebanese capital, Beirut. The Israeli government said that strike was in retaliation for a rocket fired from Lebanon that struck a soccer field in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, killing at least 12 people, mostly teenagers and children. Hezbollah has denied carrying out that attack.

But Mr. Haniyeh’s killing was seen as the greater blow to Tehran because it took place on Iranian soil. In response, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued an order for Iran to strike Israel directly, according to three Iranian officials briefed on the matter. Failing to follow through on that threat would suggest that Iran’s system of deterrence, built up over years and at great cost, was in fact hollow, analysts said.

Why hasn’t Iran responded yet?

A spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, Nasser Kanaani, said that “it is necessary to punish Israel,” echoing comments from other senior Iranian officials. But he also said that “Tehran is not interested in escalating the regional conflicts.”

Furthermore, the new president’s cabinet, including the foreign minister, is yet to be approved, which is likely to have slowed internal deliberations, said Sanam Vakil, a Middle East analyst at Chatham House, a research group in London.

At the same time, Mr. Pezeshkian, who is seen as a reformist, may try to balance a perceived need to project strength with his government’s broader interest in alleviating the effects of Western economic sanctions and in preventing Iran from becoming further isolated internationally, Ms. Vakil said.

“The response has to be carefully calibrated so as not to slam shut the door of negotiations with the West that could lead to potential sanctions relief,” Ms. Vakil said.

A military response that is viewed as largely symbolic is also risky from Tehran’s perspective, but it would be unlikely to deter Israel from conducting further attacks, said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director of Crisis Group, a think tank.

That leaves the option of a substantive response, but that would, in turn, likely provoke a bigger Israeli response — and Tehran would not be able to control the cycle of escalation that could follow, Mr. Vaez said.

“Israel has checkmated Iran in this situation because Iran is left with no good options,” said Mr. Vaez. He and Ms. Vakil both said that it is difficult to discern Iran’s intentions.

What could an Iranian response look like?

Iran could strike Israel from multiple directions and in different forms. Tehran maintains a network of proxy forces including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi militia in Yemen, giving it the ability to attack targets from northern Israel to the Red Sea.

Two Israeli officials and a senior Western intelligence official said last week that, based on the latest information, Hezbollah will likely strike first in a separate attack before Iran conducts its own retaliation.

In April, Tehran attacked Israel with around 300 missiles and drones, a response to an apparent Israeli strike on an Iranian embassy complex. Almost all were shot down by Israel’s air defenses assisted by the United States and other allies. It was the first direct attack by Iran after a clandestine war with Israel that had been conducted for years by land, sea, air and cyberspace and, as such, represented a significant escalation.

The attack in April caused light damage to an Israeli air base in the Negev desert and seriously wounded a 7-year-old girl. Now Israel is bracing for what could be a bigger attack.

How is Israel preparing?

The Israeli authorities have told people to stock food and water in fortified safe rooms, and hospitals have made plans to move patients to underground wards. At the same time, rescue teams have been positioned in cities.

U.S. and Israeli diplomats and security officials had some advanced knowledge of its scope and intensity of Iran’s attack in April, which facilitated defensive preparations. By the same token, the nearly two weeks that have passed since Mr. Haniyeh’s killing have allowed time for heightened readiness in Israel.

Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel was “prepared for defense, as well as offense.”

That said, military analysts say that Iran and Hezbollah could potentially overwhelm Israel’s defenses by firing enough missiles simultaneously. They could also launch swarms of drones that fly at low altitude, making them difficult to detect and destroy.

How are the United States and others responding?

Diplomats have feared for months that back-and-forth strikes between Israel and Iran could escalate into a regional conflict that would compound both the war in Gaza and the conflict on Israel’s border with Lebanon. As a result, they have worked to forestall or minimize Iran’s reaction. In the latest example, the leaders of United States, Britain, France, Germany and Italy called on Iran on Monday to “stand down” its threat of military action and said they supported Israel’s defense against Iranian aggression. Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain also telephoned the Iranian president with a similar message.

Mr. Kanaani, a spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, on Tuesday criticized a separate call for restraint by Britain, France and Germany, saying Tehran reserved the right to defend its sovereignty. The three European leaders had ignored Israeli “crimes and terrorism” against Palestinians and in the Middle East, he said.

The foreign minister of Jordan, an ally of the United States, has traveled to Tehran in recent days for meetings. Saudi Arabia last week convened an emergency meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a forum of Muslim countries, at which it called the assassination of Mr. Haniyeh a violation of Iran’s sovereignty while urging de-escalation by all sides.

The United States has stepped up its military readiness. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III has ordered additional combat aircraft, warships and a guided-missile submarine to the Middle East in response to threats, both to bolster Israel’s capacity to thwart any potential attack and to reinforce the message that it would support the country militarily.

At the same time, the Biden administration has sought to jump-start cease-fire talks for Gaza. The Biden administration and Arab mediators are planning a meeting in the region on Thursday to try to advance a deal. Israel has said it will send its negotiators, but Hamas has not said if it will participate.