Members of the Forum for Families of Hostages and Missing Persons on Friday called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to send a negotiating delegation to Qatar with a “clear mandate to complete the agreement and return all hostages home,” four days after negotiations on the second phase of the ceasefire were due to begin, as stipulated in the agreement.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu, we support you and stand by you; do not miss this opportunity: send the negotiating delegation to Qatar with a clear mandate to complete the deal and bring all the hostages home,” the group, made up mostly of relatives of the 76 still held captive, said in a statement.
“Behind the words ‘Phase 2’ are faces, families and an entire nation. We have no future and no hope without their return,” he added.
Although Netanyahu announced three days ago, after meeting with several US officials, that a negotiating team would travel to Doha later this week to “discuss technical details related to the continued implementation of the agreement,” that trip has not yet taken place.
A senior Israeli official said he had “no news” on the matter, while Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, confirmed that negotiations “have not yet begun.”
This impasse puts the fragile ceasefire that came into effect in the Gaza Strip on January 19 in a more difficult situation. According to this agreement, indirect talks with the mediators (the US, Qatar and Egypt) on the second phase of the agreement - in which Israeli men under 50 years of age and soldiers will be released in exchange for Palestinian terrorists - were supposed to have started on the sixteenth, February 3.
Upon his return from the US, Netanyahu is expected to convene the Security Cabinet to discuss the second phase of the ceasefire, which is expected to begin on March 1 and usher in a “sustained calm” in the Palestinian enclave, although the Israeli leader continues to insist on the “need” to eliminate Hamas from the Strip and seems ready to return to fighting.