Negotiations in Cairo over a possible agreement to pause the fighting in Gaza have been extended for another three days, according to an Egyptian official briefed on the talks, after a first day of high-level negotiations on Tuesday ended without an agreement.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations, said the tenor of the talks was positive.
The talks over the next three days will involve lower-level officials, who will continue discussing a new framework for a deal, one that would ensure a certain number of hostages would be released and that the fighting would be halted for a certain number of weeks, a U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic talks.
Hamas and Israel have each rejected formulas proposed recently. Last month, a broad framework for an agreement was sketched out in Paris by representatives of the United States, Israel, Qatar and Egypt. That proposal included a six-week cease-fire and the exchange of hostages in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israel.
Hamas came back with a counterproposal that demanded the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip and envisioned trading Hamas’s remaining 136 hostages for thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails, including people serving long sentences. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, dismissed the counterproposal, saying he would never “surrender to the ludicrous demands of Hamas.”
So far, the multilateral talks in Cairo have not been able to bridge the gap, and the urgency of the diplomacy has grown as Israel has announced plans to press its ground offensive into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where roughly half the territory’s population has sought refuge, many sheltering in tents with little food, water and medicine.
President Biden had dispatched the C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, to join the talks. Mr. Burns met on Tuesday with the head of Israel’s intelligence agency, the prime minister of Qatar and high-level Egyptian officials, including President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, according to Egyptian media. Qatar has acted as a mediator for Hamas.
A third person briefed on Tuesday’s talks, also speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy, said that while some progress had been made, the sides remained far apart on a key point — the number of prisoners to be released for each hostage freed.
Israel had been reluctant to participate in the talks in the first place, reflecting Mr. Netanyahu’s ambivalence about continued negotiations with Hamas and its representatives, the first U.S. official said.