ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with outgoing US President Joe Biden today, updating him on progress in negotiations to reach a hostage release deal in Gaza.
A readout from Biden’s office confirmed the call and said that the president “stressed the immediate need for a ceasefire in Gaza and return of the hostages with a surge in humanitarian aid enabled by a stoppage in the fighting under the deal”.
Netanyahu’s office said the prime minister informed Biden about how the talks were progressing.
“The prime minister discussed with the American president the progress in the negotiations for the release of our hostages and updated him on the mandate he has given to the negotiating team in Doha, aimed at advancing the release of the hostages,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.
The two leaders spoke a day after Netanyahu’s office announced that Israel was sending a delegation of senior officials to Qatar for the negotiations.
The announcement followed a meeting in Jerusalem with US President-elect Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, a representative of Biden and senior Israeli officials.
Netanyahu’s office confirmed to AFP today that the delegation, which includes the heads of the Mossad and Shin Bet internal security agency, had arrived in Doha.
For more than a year, the United States has been mediating talks alongside Qatar and Egypt for a deal to end the war in Gaza and release the remaining hostages.
Israeli campaign group the Hostages and Missing Families Forum called the latest developments “a historic opportunity to secure the release of all our loved ones”.
“Leave no stone unturned and return with an agreement that ensures the return of all hostages, down to the last one,” it said in a statement on Saturday.
Indirect negotiations between Israel and the Islamist militant group Hamas resumed last weekend in Qatar.
Trump previously warned Hamas that there would be “hell to pay” if the hostages were not released by his inauguration on 20 January.
The war in Gaza was sparked by Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023, which resulted in the deaths of 1,210 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive in Gaza has killed 46,660 people, a majority of them civilians, according to the territory’s health ministry – figures the United Nations says are reliable.
Meanwhile, Sky News analysis of CCTV footage has revealed what appears to be Israeli military personnel using a vehicle marked as an ambulance in an operation during which an 80-year-old Palestinian woman was shot in the West Bank in December.
In a statement to Sky News regarding Halima’s Abu killing, the United Nations Office of Human Rights in occupied Palestinian territory (OHCHR) said the incident may be a war crime.
“Any deliberate killing by Israeli security forces of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank who do not pose an imminent threat to life is unlawful under international human rights law and a war crime in the context of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territory,” the statement noted.
- © AFP 2025, with additional reporting by Órla Ryan
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