Region

PARIS — Boasting good relations with both Western governments and Hamas, the emirate of Qatar has emerged as the key power in efforts to release the hostages seized by the Palestinian militant group from Israel even as other states show readiness to help.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday lauded the key role played by Qatar in the release by Hamas of two American hostages held since its surprise attack against Israel on October 7, adding he was confident of further releases.

The West is increasingly using the influence of the small but gas-rich Gulf Arab state, a key global investor, in such situations, with the role of Qatar also crucial to the release last month of five Americans held by Iran.

While Egypt has traditionally in recent years served as the main mediator between Israel and Palestinian groups and Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also makes no secret of its desire to be involved, the focus is on Qatar helping to return the hostages safely.

"The most accommodating mediator is Qatar," said Hasni Abidi, director of the Geneva-based Centre for Studies and Research on the Arab and Mediterranean World (CERMAM).

Qatar, which has hosted Hamas’s political office for more than 10 years, is also respected by the United States, Israel’s chief ally. It is home to the largest US military base in the region.

 ‘Right channels’ 

Israel says 203 people, Israelis, dual nationals and foreigners, were abducted by Hamas fighters, according to the government.

Israel has responded with a relentless bombing campaign against the Gaza Strip that has left at least 4,385 people dead, mostly civilians, according to the Hamas administration.

US hostages Judith Tai Raanan and her daughter Natalie Shoshana Raanan were back in Israel late Friday, the Israeli government said.

“This is a very good outcome obtained by the negotiators, in which Qatar played a very important role,” Macron told a group of reporters on Friday.

Macron said France wanted similar operations to go on in the next “hours and days” to continue “allowing hostages, in particular our hostages, to get out”.

“We are confident: The channels we have are the right ones and are useful,” he added. In a later message on X, formerly Twitter, Macron said Qatar played a “decisive role” in securing the release of the two American hostages.

Qatar is a “specialist in the release of hostages”, said Etienne Dignat of Sciences Po university in Paris and an expert on hostage situations.

It was with Qatar that $6 billion of frozen Iranian funds from South Korean banks was parked pending the release in a hugely complex and sensitive swap deal of the five American citizens held by Iran.

‘No collective negotiation’ 

It appears to have been no coincidence that Macron’s envoy for Lebanon, the former foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, a trusted confidant of the president on security issues, was in Qatar this week, according to diplomatic sources.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also paid a visit to Qatar on his marathon trip to the region this week.

The emirate had invited the Taliban to open an office in Doha with the approval of the United States, making it possible to negotiate the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan in 2021, although this was then followed by the return of the Taliban to power.

Other heavyweights in the region are simultaneously trying to intervene.

Turkey has received “requests from several countries” to help, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, his country’s ex-spy chief, said on Tuesday in Beirut.

Erdogan has in recent months sought to warm relations with Israel which have suffered in the last years after a string of bitter disputes. But this risks having the consequence that Ankara is trusted by neither side.

And it was Egypt which helped secure the release in 2011 of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been held by Hamas for over five years.

Potential actors are “only those who have established long-standing relationships with Hamas and therefore the only ones authorised to make contact with its leaders”, said Abidi.

But in this case, the unprecedented number of hostages held and the number of nationalities represented among them means that there will be no single solution and the diplomacy is likely to be painstaking.

“There will be no collective negotiation,” said Abidi. “Each state will be called upon to negotiate the release of its own hostages.”

ISMAILIA, Egypt — Egypt has removed concrete blocks near the border with Gaza, an Egyptian security source told AFP on Friday, raising hopes that desperately needed aid could soon begin flowing to Palestinians trapped inside.

The UN has described the situation inside Gaza as "beyond catastrophic" as Israel pounds the enclave from the air in reprisal for a Hamas attack that was the bloodiest in its 75-year history.

More than 3,700 Palestinians, mainly civilians, have been killed across the Gaza Strip in relentless Israeli bombardments, according to the latest toll from the Hamas health ministry in Gaza.

The United Nations says more than 1 million of Gaza's 2.4 million people have been displaced and that the humanitarian situation is worsening by the day, with no green light yet to send in the trucks lined up at the border.

Israel has refused to open its borders with Gaza but US President Joe Biden brokered a deal to allow aid in via the Rafah crossing with Egypt, the only path into the territory not controlled by the Israelis.

Aid is piling up, but nothing has yet crossed into Gaza.


Egyptian state-linked broadcaster Al Qahera News had said the Rafah crossing would open on Friday, but Cairo said it needed more time to repair roads.

Egypt is still repairing these roads and on Friday "vehicles and Egyptian equipment went in to repair the road on the Palestinian side", witnesses told AFP.

Biden clinched a deal to allow in 20 aid trucks, but WHO's emergencies director Michael Ryan described Biden's deal as "a drop in the ocean of need", saying 2,000 trucks were needed.

David Satterfield, a veteran former US ambassador who started a new job on Monday coordinating humanitarian aid, has met Israeli and Egyptian officials to get the deal moving, according to US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.

BEIRUT — The Israeli government struck a Syrian military position in the war-torn country's south, a war monitoring NGO said on Wednesday.

"Sounds of explosions rang out in the province of Quneitra after an Israeli strike against a Syrian army position," said the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has a vast network of sources in the country.

The sound of explosions also rang out in the Golan Heights, the NGO said, without specifying their source.

The strike in Quneitra caused material damage, the organisation said, and has not yet been mentioned by official Syrian media.

Since the start of the war, triggered by an unprecedented attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7, exchanges of fire between Hizbollah and the Israeli army have likewise increased around the Israel-Lebanon border area.

Clashes there have left at least 18 people dead on the Lebanese side.

Most of the dead have been combatants, including 10 Hizbollah fighters, but they also include a Reuters journalist and two civilians.

On the Israeli side, at least three people have been killed.

On October 10 the Israeli army announced that it had fired shells into Syria from the Golan Heights, in response, it claimed, to projectiles being fired on the territory, occupied by Israel since 1967.

An Israeli air strike on Saturday targeted the Aleppo airport, injuring five people and putting the airport out of service.

Previous Israeli raids on October 12 targeted the airports of both Aleppo and the capital Damascus, both controlled by the Syrian government, rendering them inoperable, according to state media.

Israel rarely comments on individual strikes it carries out on Syria, but it has repeatedly said it would not allow its arch-foe Iran, which supports Damascus, to expand its footprint there.

RAMALLAH, occupied Palestine — Israeli troops killed nine Palestinians in multiple clashes across the occupied West Bank on Thursday, the Palestinian health ministry said, as the death toll mounts in the territory while war rages in Gaza.

At least 75 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops or settlers in the West Bank since the Gaza conflict erupted on October 7, according to ministry figures.

The latest deaths were seven people killed during an Israeli "attack on Nur Shams" refugee camp in the northern West Bank, the ministry said.

Health officials identified one of those killed as a 16-year-old boy.

The ministry said it had been informed of "other martyrs who could not be transferred by ambulance to the hospital".

“Exchanges of fire with armed gunmen, which included explosive devices being thrown at Israeli security forces, took place,” an army statement said.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said its medics treated 25 people in Nur Shams, the majority for gunshot wounds.

“Ambulances are being detained by occupying forces with injured people inside,” the organisation said in a statement.

The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the accusation when contacted by AFP.

In separate clashes earlier Thursday, the Palestinian health ministry said Israeli forces shot dead a 17-year-old in Dheisheh refugee camp, near Bethlehem, and a 32-year-old in Budrus to the west of Ramallah.

In Budrus, the Israeli military said people “hurled Molotov cocktails and other objects” and burned tyres and rubbish bins, prompting soldiers to open fire.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since the June War of 1967 and its forces regularly carry out incursions into Palestinian towns and cities.

Palestinians across the West Bank have held rallies in solidarity with Gaza’s 2.4 million people.

TEL AVIV, occupied Palestine — US President Joe Biden on a visit to Israel on Wednesday backed his ally’s stance blaming Islamist Palestinian fighters for a rocket strike on a hospital that killed hundreds in war-torn Gaza and has inflamed anger across the Middle East.

Arab countries have blamed Israel, which has rained bombs on Gaza since the bloody October 7 attack by Hamas, but Biden voiced support for Israel’s position that a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket had hit the Ahli Arab Hospital.

“I was deeply saddened and outraged by the explosion at the hospital in Gaza yesterday,” Biden said at a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the morning after the blast that killed 200 to 300 people according to Gaza authorities.

“And, based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you,” said the US president, referring to the armed movements Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

“But there’s a lot of people out there not sure, so we have to overcome a lot of things,” Biden added after the first protests erupted against Israel and the United States, with more expected across the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Biden has expressed “iron-clad” US support for top regional ally Israel and its military campaign.

Israel’s military campaign had already left at least 3,000 dead inside Gaza before the hospital was destroyed.

GAZA CITY, occupied Palestine — Gazans combed through the debris of the devastated hospital, collecting the bodies of the dead in the battered enclave on on Wednesday, hours after a strike killed hundreds sheltering at the facility.

Alongside rows of charred vehicles, volunteers recovered corpses and human limbs that were placed in body bags, while the remains of others were covered in white shrouds and blankets.

“This is a massacre,” Ahmed Tafesh, who assisted in the recovery effort, told AFP, saying he had collected the eyes, arms, legs and heads of the deceased. “I have never seen anything like this in my life.”

Health authorities in Hamas-ruled Gaza said the explosion killed between 200 and 300 people at the the Ahli Arab Hospital.

At the nearby Shifa hospital in Gaza City, residents gathered to identify the dead at the hospital’s mortuary and take other bodies for burial.

Yahya Karim, 70, was among those searching for clues about the fate of their relatives.

“I don’t know how many of them died and how many are still alive,” said Karim, admitting that he had planned to shelter in the hospital before the strike.

Outside the Ahli hospital, others who survived the attack who spoke to AFP recounted the terrifying moment when the strike occurred.

“We felt there was fire and things were falling on us. We started looking for each other. The electricity cut suddenly, and we couldn’t see,” said Fatima Saed through tears.

“I don’t know how we came out of it.”

Gaza resident Adnan Al Naqa told AFP that around 2,000 people were taking refuge at the hospital on Tuesday night at the time of the strike.

“As I entered the hospital, I heard the explosion, I saw a massive fire,” said Naqa.

“The entire square was on fire, there were bodies everywhere, children, women and elderly people.”

With water and food supplies running low, the United Nations estimates that around one million of Gaza’s 2.4 million residents are currently displaced, with thousands sheltering in hospitals dotted throughout the densely populated enclave.

As residents surveyed the damage, Israel and Palestinian fighters traded blame for the strike.

COPENHAGEN — The World Health Organisation (WHO) on Wednesday urged against any attacks on healthcare centres, a day after a Gaza hospital strike that killed at least 200 people.

"We call... at a minimum to stop any attacks on healthcare facilities," the head of the WHO's European branch, Hans Kluge, told AFP in an interview, listing it as a top priority.

"Number two [is] to protect civilians and children, and number three [is] to get humanitarian access from Rafah inside Gaza, because all our supplies are based there already but there is no border opening yet," he said.

Kluge said the WHO was "very, very worried" about the situation.

At least 200 people were killed Tuesday in a strike on the Al Ahli Arab Hospital in central Gaza, the health ministry in the Hamas-run Palestinian territory said.

Israel and Palestinian fighters have traded blame for the strike.

Some 3,000 people have been killed in Gaza and more than 1,400 in Israel since October 7.

Kluge said "the only solution is to stop the fighting".