This article is republished from the Council on Foreign Relations. Read the original article here.

Hunger is reportedly surging in Gaza as the enclave of nearly two million people remains cut off from aid. U.N. and local health officials attribute hundreds of deaths in recent weeks either to malnutrition or people dying in desperate attempts to procure food from aid distribution points. Locals and humanitarian officials have said the situation is the worst they’ve witnessed since the start of the conflict in October 2023.

International calls are growing for Israel to end the limits on aid distribution, which some experts allege is a violation of international humanitarian law. Israeli, Palestinian, and international actors — including the United States and U.N. organizations — have all been major players in the aid delivery system at various points, though the current aid operation is now limited to one U.S. group with close oversight by Israel.

WATCH: Palestinians describe choice between starvation and risking death to get food aid in Gaza

Misinformation and the lack of outside reporting due to Israel’s media restrictions have made it difficult to develop a clear picture of the situation, experts say. Meanwhile, Israeli officials have defended the controversial, for-profit, U.S.- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Israeli authorities have said they want an alternative means of delivering aid to Gaza, alleging that Hamas is seizing the aid and using it in part to earn money used to pay its fighters at the expense of the Palestinian population.

U.N. officials have said that staff on the ground and other aid workers, doctors, and journalists are now fainting from hunger and exhaustion due to limited food access — all as the reported death toll from food scarcity incidents continues to grow.

What is going on in Gaza?

Local groups and international aid organizations have highlighted the growing risk to the population in Gaza.

On July 23, the Palestinian Health Ministry recorded ten more people who have died from starvation over the previous twenty-four hours, bringing the five-day death toll due to hunger to forty-three.

The U.N. Palestinian agency, UNRWA, has said that one million children in Gaza — half the population — are now at risk of starvation.

More than fifty children have died of malnutrition since March, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The worsening hunger situation has sent even more people to already overwhelmed hospitals, which the WHO has said are at their “breaking point” — 94% are damaged or completely destroyed due to the conflict.

The United Nations reported that more than 1,000 Palestinians have died in recent weeks trying to access food. It warned on Tuesday that Gaza’s “last lifelines keeping people alive are collapsing.”

David J. Scheffer, a CFR expert on international law, said the situation could put Israel at risk of war crimes charges, especially if the international community finds that it is obstructing aid or harming civilians seeking it.

READ MORE: Israeli forces have killed over 1,000 aid-seekers in Gaza since May with hunger worsening, UN body says

“If any strategy of aid obstruction unfolds that leads to starvation among civilians, including willfully impeding relief supplies, then that could risk charges of war crimes,” he said.

Israeli officials have repeatedly rejected allegations that its military actions violate the laws of armed conflict, saying charges have relied on faulty figures provided by Hamas-run health facilities.

The food scarcity has made distribution sites increasingly dangerous. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said that the Israeli military has “targeted civilians,” accusing them of firing on Palestinians trying to reach aid at a distribution site in northern Gaza. Israel denied the allegation. The Israel Defense Forces said it had “fired warning shots in order to remove an immediate threat” and contested the casualty totals reported.

On July 20, nearly 100 civilians were fatally shot as they tried to get food aid from U.N. convoys handing out flour for bread. The week before that, there was a stampede of thousands swarming the GHF aid site, which killed at least twenty people.

How have aid groups in Gaza responded and how are they affected?

More than 100 aid groups operating in Gaza have cautioned that Israel’s aid restrictions are causing a hunger crisis, with Doctors Without Borders stating that “humanitarian organizations are witnessing their own colleagues and partners waste away before their eyes.”

CARE International, a global nonprofit working on hunger and poverty in more than 100 countries, has been operating in Gaza and the West Bank since 1948 and was one of the first organizations to respond to the recent Gaza crisis. What they’re seeing in Gaza now, its Chief Humanitarian Officer Deepmala Mahla told CFR, is “worsening by the minute.” Her team in Gaza has not received an aid shipment in 140 days.

The World Food Program, which also has staff in Gaza, has raised alarm about the situation, saying “nearly one person in three is not eating for days.” Journalists working in Gaza are also affected by the food shortages. French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) has reported that its employees in Gaza are starving.

“Since AFP was founded in 1944, we have lost journalists in conflicts, some have been injured, others taken prisoner. But none of us can ever remember seeing colleagues die of hunger,” the outlet’s union said.

What led to this crisis?

Humanitarian aid has long been a contentious aspect of the war between Israel and Hamas since it broke out in 2023. It has frequently been cited as a sticking point in the last few weeks’ ceasefire negotiations.

Steven A. Cook, CFR senior fellow for Middle East Studies, said it has been challenging to track aid over time, as information coming out of the region is difficult to parse and often misleading. The situation is also much more complex than most reports capture, he said.

Aid levels over the war’s twenty-one months have fluctuated, CARE’s Mahla said. But generally, “it has continuously deteriorated,” she told CFR. “Our ability to deliver it has gone down drastically this year.”

In March, Israel halted shipments of aid into Gaza, citing Hamas’s siphoning off the aid for itself, an allegation the group has denied. That ban lasted eleven weeks, until Israel began to allow aid back in by May via GHF. Cook said that Israel pursued this model to keep Hamas from using stolen aid to generate revenue to pay its fighters. But the aid brought in by GHF so far has been a trickle of what was previously provided, both earlier in the war and before the war.

“They were unable to scale it in a way that would actually deliver it in an effective and safe way,” Cook explained. “It clearly has not worked and has cost many people’s lives.”

What have the Israeli, Hamas and international roles been?

The United States has supported the GHF with at least $30 million in June — though tranches of the money won’t be released until the GHF completes certain tasks, including pre-vetting partners. With the Donald Trump administration’s distrust of the United Nations, Cook said, the alternative aid channel was more appealing since it was not affiliated with the international body, but instead with its ally, Israel.

Hamas and Israel are both provocateurs in the melee of aid chaos, Cook said. Hamas has incited violence at aid sites to create chaos, he said, knowing that the Israelis will be blamed for the chaos in Gaza. Israel’s motivations for constricting aid are both to keep it out of the hands of Hamas and as a means of wielding political control to “demoralize the population,” said Cook.

Hamas has insisted that aid is funneled solely through the United Nations, which raises concerns among some experts that Hamas has been able to take advantage of the U.N. system.

“The malnutrition that’s happening is clearly a function of the fact that the Israelis withheld aid for eleven weeks and then moved into this mode of the GHF,” Cook said. But “the distribution of aid was hardly easy when it was being run by U.N. aid agencies.”

What’s next for Gaza?

Humanitarian watchdogs are calling for the immediate reduction of bureaucratic barriers to bringing aid in and stopping the targeting of aid workers.

A group of twenty-eight foreign ministers including Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom condemned the recent deaths at food aid sites in a statement on Tuesday and said that the war “must end now.” U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff on Thursday announced his team was cutting short its latest efforts to broker a ceasefire and hostage deal, saying Hamas “shows a lack of desire.” He said in a statement, “We will now consider alternative options to bring the hostages home and try to create a more stable environment for the people of Gaza.”

In the absence of a ceasefire, “The rules of engagement for military troops should prioritize the lives of innocent civilians seeking humanitarian relief under desperate wartime conditions threatening their very survival,” Scheffer said.

But Cook adds that “there’s been no indication to me that the White House, the State Department, anybody, has really leaned on the Israelis to allow the United Nations to distribute aid. We’ve been hobbled by our own politics over the United Nations.”

Will Merrow created the graphic for this article.

A Palestinian medic works in the intensive care unit of the Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis on July 11. AFP/Getty Images

Medical staff in Gaza are now rationing themselves to one meal every two or three days as they treat patients during a severe aid shortage, according to a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) doctor who recently returned to the US from the enclave.

“The situation is dystopian at best,” Dr. Aqsa Durrani, a pediatrician and epidemiologist, told CNN when asked what she was hearing from her colleagues working at the moment in Gaza.

She said that when she left the enclave three months ago, staff were eating only one meal per day and that she had thought at the time that things couldn’t get worse — but staff were now having to make a single meal last twice or three times as long.

“It’s impossible what we are asking from them,” she said of medical staff who she said are hungry and exhausted. Children have been “crying for food,” she added.

“The things that they are crying about is that they’re hungry, rather than their third degree burns or their amputation,” she said, stressing the need for food to be allowed in at scale.

More than 100 aid groups this week sounded the alarm in a joint statement, and said their own colleagues are suffering from the lack of food aid in Gaza amid Israel’s blockade. Israel has said it will allow aid air drops, something the UN has warned will be expensive and dangerous.

Durrani said one in four young children and pregnant women coming into MSF clinics in Gaza are malnourished and that the “tiny amount of food that air drops will provide in this dangerous and ineffective manner is not going to work.”

When mass starvation grips a community, something rare and terrible occurs. Starvation is not only the biological phenomenon of the body wasting away. It’s also the death rattle of society. Famine is the sight of people scavenging for food in a garbage heap. It’s a woman cooking in secret, hiding food from her starving cousins. It’s a family selling its grandmother’s jewellery for a single meal, their faces blank and emotionless, their eyes glazed. This is the degradation, the humiliation, the shame – and, yes, the dehumanisation – that happens when human beings scrabble for food like animals.

This is a reality that no statistics can capture. And the methods for measuring food emergencies and assigning them grades – “famine” being the worst – break down when society breaks down in this way.

But just as an experienced physician can diagnose a fever without having to send blood samples to the laboratory, veteran humanitarian workers, who witnessed the depths of human suffering in Biafra in 1969 or in Ethiopia in 1984, recognise these symptoms when they see them.

And they see it in Gaza today.

Turn to the statements of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – the US and Israel-backed organisation that began operating in May – and you enter a different world. The GHF presents itself as a professional, compassionate operation designed for the 21st century. You will see images of order and efficiency, and a proud announcement that it delivered more than 2m meals yesterday from its four “secure distribution sites”.

And alongside the pictures of those starving children, of women collapsing from hunger, there are also pictures of healthy young men. In contrast to the footage, filmed by Palestinian journalists, of the desperate scramble for the little aid still provided through the UN, the GHF has images of orderly distributions, of its own workers holding the hands of Palestinian children.

Israeli spokespeople insist that the United Nations has hundreds of trucks of food inside the Gaza perimeter that it refuses to distribute.

But that rosy picture doesn’t stand even the simplest scrutiny. There are four reasons why it’s at best an improvisation by amateurs and at worst a cover for the crime of ongoing mass starvation.

First, the numbers just don’t add up. In April, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN calculated the food stocks remaining in Gaza, after 18 months of siege and war, and two months of total Israeli blockade. It estimated that food availability would fall to only half what’s needed to sustain life at some point between May and July. That means that the aid effort needs to cover the entirety of Gaza’s food needs. Two million meals a day is less than half of what’s needed. The GHF rations may have slowed the march of starvation, but not by much.

Second, you can’t relieve famine by numbers alone. The GHF system is like standing at the edge of a big pond and feeding the fish by throwing breadcrumbs. Who gets to eat its rations?

Starvation strikes the vulnerable minority. The metric used by the UN for determining when acute food insecurity is at famine levels is when 20% of families are facing extreme food shortage. Starvation strikes the weakest, not the strongest.

Over the decades, humanitarian programmes have worked out how best to target the poorest, such as women without their husbands, looking after several children and perhaps elderly parents as well. It’s the last mile of aid delivery that counts.

The GHF runs four ration stations. Three are in the far south of Gaza in the ruins of Rafah, one in central Gaza. They’re all in military zones. They open for short periods and short notice. To get these rations, people must camp out in the rubble – ready to rush to the gates at a moment’s notice, and running the gauntlet of the Israel Defense Forces’ military posts. They know that the only means IDF soldiers have for crowd control is firing live ammunition – even when they’re not shooting to kill.

When the GHF speaks of “secure distribution sites”, it’s referring to how it controls its packages up to the point of handing them over, not to how it safely delivers them to the neediest. Dozens of aid seekers are killed each day trying to reach these sites.

How will the overstressed mother of hungry children, or elderly or disabled people, join this stampede? How would they run the gauntlet not only of those military posts but also of the gangsters keen to steal the most valuable foodstuffs for themselves, or to sell in the market? The GHF has no idea who is eating the rations. Theirs isn’t a formula for feeding the poorest. It’s the law of the jungle.

Third, the assistance must be designed for what people really need. Top of the list are specialised foods to care for malnourished children who cannot consume regular meals, such as Plumpy’Nut, a ready-to-use therapeutic food.

The GHF ration box typically contains flour, pasta, tahini, cooking oil, rice and chickpeas or lentils. No baby food. No Plumpy’Nut. And it has no trained nurses or nutritionists in the community to actually provide therapeutic care to starving children.

Consider the desperate mother who’s literally at the end of the food chain: how will she cook the rations she gets? How does she find clean water? Israel has reduced water availability to a small fraction of need, and is bombing the remaining desalination plants. What can she use to make a fire? Without electricity or cooking gas, she may burn garbage to heat food.

And last and most tellingly, a truly humanitarian operation supports the afflicted people, respecting the dignity of those in need, working with the communities. The GHF, essentially, does the opposite: it humiliates and undermines.

The social breakdown that we are witnessing, the degrading of human beings, is not a byproduct of the harm that Israel is inflicting. That’s the central element of the crime: destroying Palestinian society. The government of Israel shows no indication that it cares in the slightest whether Palestinians live or die. It wants to avoid the stigma of being accused of starvation and genocide, and the GHF is its current alibi. Let’s not be fooled.

Alex de Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University in Massachusetts. He has been a humanitarian worker and written on famine and related issues for 40 years

CNN —

Twenty-one months into Israel’s war in Gaza, the enclave is gripped by escalating scenes of death and hunger, with some killed while trying to reach aid, others dying of starvation, and growing condemnation of Israel’s conduct even among many of its closest allies.

Palestinians in Gaza are suffering from man-made “mass starvation” due to the aid blockade on the enclave, the chief of the World Health Organization warned reporters at a briefing on Wednesday.

“Parents tell us their children cry themselves to sleep from hunger,” Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “Food distribution sites have become places of violence.”

The United Nations says more than a thousand people have been killed by Israeli forces while seeking food since late May, when a controversial new Israel- and US-backed aid group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, began operating.

Of those, hundreds have died near GHF sites, according to the UN. The GHF was created to replace the UN’s aid role in Gaza and has been widely criticized for failing to improve conditions.

All 2.1 million people in Gaza are now food insecure. On Tuesday, Gaza’s health ministry said 900,000 children are going hungry, and 70,000 already show signs of malnutrition.

But how did it come to this?

A complete siege after Hamas’ October 7 attack

Before the war, Gaza was already one of the most isolated and densely populated places on earth, with around two million people packed into an area of 140 square miles. Israel has maintained tight control over the territory through a yearslong land, air and sea blockade, with severe restrictions on the movement of goods and people. More than half of its residents were food insecure and under the poverty line, according to the UN.

Between 500 and 600 truckloads of aid entered Gaza daily before the conflict. That number has since plummeted to an average of just 28 trucks per day, a group of humanitarian organizations said Wednesday. It’s unclear if the figure includes trucks used in GHF’s operations.

Following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack, which left 1,200 people dead and more than 250 taken hostage, Israel ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza, halting the supply of electricity, food, water and fuel.

A humanitarian crisis swiftly unfolded, as trapped residents faced both hunger and a devastating Israeli military campaign in response. Human rights groups have repeatedly criticized Israel’s use of food as a “weapon of war” and accused it of imposing “collective punishment.”

Brief respite and a short-lived ceasefire

Following international pressure, the first trucks carrying aid entered Gaza in late October. A temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas began on November 24, 2023, slightly increasing aid flow. But the truce collapsed a week later.

Aid deliveries subsequently dwindled again, and stringent Israeli inspections further delayed shipments. Israeli authorities said screening was necessary to prevent Hamas from diverting supplies but humanitarian officials accused Israel of deliberately throttling aid.

Palestinians, including children struggle to receive hot meals distributed by a local charity in Gaza City on July 14. Mahmoud ssa/Anadolu/Getty Images

Further compounding the crisis was the Israeli campaign against the UN and its aid delivery system, which Israel said was ineffective and allowed aid to fall Hamas’ hands. The UN denies this.

Among the agencies targeted was the UN’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which Israel accused of having staff involved in the October 7 attack. A UN investigation found that nine of UNWRA’s 13,000 Gaza-based employees “may have” participated and no longer worked at the agency.

In January this year, Israel banned UNRWA from operating in Gaza, cutting off viral services like food, health care and education to hundreds of thousands of people.

The breakdown of social order

As Israel’s campaign leveled much of Gaza, displacing most of its residents and weakening Hamas’ grip on the territory, lawlessness began to spread.

Looting became a new hurdle for UN trucks, and casualties mounted at aid delivery points. Israel has repeatedly blamed Hamas and armed gangs for the chaos.

The UN warned just weeks into the war that civil order was beginning to collapse, with desperate Palestinians taking flour and hygiene supplies from warehouses. By November 2024, the UN again raised the alarm, saying the capacity to deliver aid was “completely gone.”

Injured Palestinians are transported to hospitals after Israeli forces open fire on civilians waiting for humanitarian aid in the Zikim area on Sunday. Ali Jadallah/Anadolu/Getty Images

In “one of the worst” looting incident, over 100 trucks were lost, it said. Drivers were forced to unload trucks at gunpoint, aid workers were injured, and vehicles were damaged extensively.

As Hamas’ grip on Gaza waned and the territory’s police force was hollowed out, gangs emerged to steal aid and resell it. Israel has also armed local militias to counter Hamas – a controversial move that opposition politicians have warned will endanger Israeli national security.

The arming of militias appears to be the closest that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come to empowering any form of alternate rule in the strip. Since the start of the war, the Israeli leader has refused to lay out a plan for Gaza’s governance once the conflict ends.

Another ceasefire collapse and a new aid system

On January 19, another temporary ceasefire was reached. Aid resumed, but remained well short of what was needed.

Israel reinstated a total blockade of Gaza on March 2 after the truce expired. Two weeks later, it resumed fighting, with officials saying the goal was to force Hamas to accept new ceasefire terms and release hostages.

By July, the World Food Programme (WFP) assessed that a quarter of Gaza’s population was facing famine-like conditions.

At least 80 children have died of malnutrition since the conflict began, the Palestinian health ministry says. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), most of these occurred after the March blockade.

In May, GHF, the controversial new Israeli- and American-backed organization, announced it would begin delivering with Israel’s approval. Just days before GHF began operating, its director Jake Wood resigned, saying it was impossible to do his work “while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence.”

Injured Palestinians are transported to hospitals after Israeli forces open fire on civilians waiting for humanitarian aid in the Zikim area on Sunday. Ali Jadallah/Anadolu/Getty Images

The foundation was created to replace the UN’s role in Gaza, while complying with Israeli demands that the aid not reach Hamas. The GHF said it would coordinate with the Israeli military, but that security would be provided by private military contractors.

The UN has refused to participate, saying the GHF model violates some basic humanitarian principles. Critics have noted that there are only a small number of GHF distribution sites, in southern and central Gaza – far fewer than hundreds under the UN’s previous model. This has forced massive crowds to gather at limited locations.

The GHF has defended its system, saying it is a “secure model (that) blocks the looting.”

But soon after it began operating on May 27, the plan turned deadly as those seeking aid increasingly came under fire near GHF aid sites.

Palestinian officials and witnesses have said Israeli troops are responsible for most of the deaths. The Israeli military acknowledged firing warning shots toward crowds in some instances, but denied responsibility for other incidents.

And the deaths aren’t limited to the vicinity of GHF aid sites. On Sunday, Israeli forces killed dozens waiting for aid in northern Gaza, according to the Palestinian health ministry. Israel said troops fired warning shots after sensing an “immediate threat”

The ministry of health recorded nine deaths due to famine and malnutrition in 24 hours from Thursday, according to Health Ministry director Munir Al-Bursh, bringing the total of Palestinians who died of starvation to 122.

On Wednesday, 111 international humanitarian organizations called on Israel to end its blockade and agree to a ceasefire, warning that supplies in the enclave are now “totally depleted” and that humanitarian groups are “witnessing their own colleagues and partners waste away before their eyes.”

An Israeli official said at a press briefing on Wednesday that they expect more aid to enter the enclave in the future.

“We would like to see more and more trucks entering Gaza and distributing the aid as long as Hamas is not involved,” the official said. “As we see for now, Hamas has an interest: First, to put pressure on the State of Israel through the international community in order to (have) an effect in the (ceasefire) negotiation process; and second, to collapse the new mechanism that we have established that is making sure that they are not involved in the aid delivery inside Gaza.”

International pressure continues to mount on Israel, including from the United States.

And on Monday, the foreign ministers of 25 Western nations slammed Israel for “drip feeding” aid into the Gaza Strip. Israel’s foreign ministry said it “rejects” the statement, calling it “disconnected from reality.”

CAIRO — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Friday his government was considering “alternative options” to ceasefire talks with Hamas after Israel and the U.S. recalled their negotiating teams, throwing the future of the negotiations into further uncertainty. Netanyahu’s statement came as a Hamas official said negotiations were expected to resume next week and portrayed the recall of the Israeli and American delegations as a pressure tactic. Egypt and Qatar, which are mediating the talks alongside the United States, said the pause was only temporary and that talks would resume, though they did not say when.

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The teams left Qatar on Thursday as President Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, said Hamas’ latest response to proposals for a deal showed a “lack of desire” to reach a truce. Witkoff said the U.S. will look at “alternative options,” without elaborating.

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In a statement released by his office, Netanyahu echoed Witkoff, saying, “Hamas is the obstacle to a hostage release deal.”

“Together with our U.S. allies, we are now considering alternative options to bring our hostages home, end Hamas’s terror rule, and secure lasting peace for Israel and our region,” he said. He did not elaborate. Israel’s government didn’t immediately respond to whether negotiations would resume next week.

Stall in talks comes as hunger worsens

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More then two dozen Western-aligned countries and more than 100 charity and human rights groups have called for an end to the war, harshly criticizing Israel’s blockade and a new aid delivery model it has rolled out. The charities and rights groups said even their own staff were struggling to get enough food .

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On Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that France would recognize Palestine as a state . “The urgent thing today is that the war in Gaza stops and the civilian population is saved,” he said.

Jordan has requested to carry out airdrops of aid into Gaza “due to the dire situation,” a Jordanian official said. The official said the airdrops will mainly be food and milk formula.

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An Israeli security official said the military was coordinating the drops, which were expected in the coming days. The two officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the yet-to-be-finalized plans.

Desperate Palestinians gathered at a charity kitchen in Gaza City on Friday, clutching empty pots waiting for a share of watery lentil soup. Such kitchens distributing cooked meals have been a main source of food for many Palestinians, but the number of meals they produce every day has plummeted to 160,000 from more than a million in April, according to the U.N.

“We’ve been living three months without bread,” said one woman in line, Riham Dwas. “We’re relying on charity kitchens, surviving on a pot of lentils and there are many times when we don’t even have that.”

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When she can’t find food, she takes her children to a hospital to be put on saline IV drips for sustenance.

Mourners carry the bodies of strike victims

An Israeli airstrike hit a school-turned-shelter for displaced people in Gaza City, killing at least five people, including an 11-year-old boy, according to hospital officials. Afterwards, dozens of mourners marched carrying the bodies from Shifa Hospital as women nearby screamed and wept.

“Enough!” screamed Taraji Adwan, whose son and grandson were among the dead. She said the strike hit as she was filling up water jugs.

“Stop the war! Our children are dying from starvation, malnutrition, dehydration, lack of food, strikes, and dying from fear and destruction. Enough, Hamas! Enough, Israel! Enough, world!” she said.

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The Gaza Health Ministry said around 80 people were killed since Thursday night, mostly in strikes but including nine killed while seeking aid.

Talks have struggled over issue of ending the war

Hamas official Bassem Naim said Friday that the group was told that the Israeli delegation returned home for consultations and would return early next week to resume ceasefire negotiations.

Hamas said that Witkoff’s remarks were meant to pressure the group for Netanyahu’s benefit during the next round of talks and that in recent days negotiations had made progress. Naim said several gaps had been nearly solved, such as the agenda of the ceasefire, guarantees to continue negotiating to reach a permanent agreement and how humanitarian aid would be delivered.

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In a joint statement, Egypt and Qatar also said progress had been made. “It is a natural to pause talks to hold consultations before the resumption of the dialogue once more,” they said.

The sides have held weeks of talks in Qatar, reporting small signs of progress but no major breakthroughs. Officials have said a main sticking point is the redeployment of Israeli troops from positions in Gaza after any ceasefire takes place.

The deal under discussion is expected to include an initial 60-day ceasefire in which Hamas would release 10 living hostages and the remains of 18 others in phases in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel. Aid supplies would be ramped up, and the two sides would hold negotiations on a lasting ceasefire.

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The talks have been bogged down over competing demands for ending the war. Hamas says it will only release all hostages in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal and end to the war. Israel says it will not agree to end the conflict until Hamas gives up power and disarms. The militant group says it is prepared to leave power but not surrender its weapons.

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Hamas is believed to be holding the hostages in different locations, including tunnels, and says it has ordered its guards to kill them if Israeli forces approach.

Some 50 hostages remain in Gaza but fewer than half are believed to be alive. Their families say the start-stop talks are excruciating.

“I thought that maybe something will come from the time that the negotiation, Israeli team were in Doha,” said Yehuda Cohen, whose son Nimrod is being held hostage. “And when I heard that they’re coming back, I ask myself: When will this nightmare end?”

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