By Jay Deshmukh with Lisa Golden in Beirut

JERUSALEM – Israel said Thursday (24) it will send negotiators to Qatar this weekend for talks seeking to reach an elusive Gaza deal, as the death toll soared from a sweeping Israeli operation in the Palestinian territory’s north.

The head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, David Barnea, will head to Qatari capital Doha on Sunday (27), the Israeli prime minister’s office said, to attend talks with US and Qatari officials.

The apparent resumption of the long-stalled truce negotiations comes with Israel under pressure to end its wars with Iran-backed Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Meeting with Qatar’s leaders in Doha on Thursday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that mediators would explore new options after the failure of previous efforts to seal a ceasefire and hostage release deal.

“We talked about options to capitalize on this moment and next steps to move the process forward,” Blinken told reporters.

The US and Qatar were seeking a plan “so that Israel can withdraw so that Hamas cannot reconstitute, and so that the Palestinian people can rebuild their lives and rebuild their futures,” he said.

Qatar said that US and Israeli teams would fly to Doha, with Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani adding that Qatari mediators had “re-engaged” with Hamas since the Israeli military killed the group’s leader Yahya Sinwar.

There was no mention of Hamas participating in the planned Doha meeting.

Israeli and US officials as well as some analysts said Sinwar, who was killed last week in Gaza, had been a key obstacle to a deal allowing for the release of 97 hostages still held by militants in Gaza, 34 of whom the Israeli military says are dead.

After the new talks were announced, an Israeli group representing families of hostages called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas to secure an agreement to free the remaining captives.

“Time is running out,” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said.

– Hundreds dead in days –

After nearly a year of war in Gaza sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, Israel expanded its focus to Lebanon a month ago, vowing to secure its northern border from Hezbollah attacks.

It has meanwhile kept up the pressure on Hamas, launching an operation earlier this month in the north of Gaza where tens of thousands of civilians are trapped.

“More than 770 people have been killed” in the territory’s north in the 19 days since the operation started, Gaza civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said, adding that the toll could rise as people were buried under the rubble.

He also said a strike on a school-turned-shelter in central Gaza killed 17 people on Thursday, while the Israeli military said it was targeting Hamas militants when it hit the site.

Palestinian woman Umm Muhammad told AFP she was sitting in a classroom when the strike hit.

“I hugged my little girl and I couldn’t see anything through the thick plume of smoke,” she said.

“I ran and screamed for my sister and found her alive downstairs, but there were (some) children torn to pieces.”

The civil defence agency also said it could no longer provide first responder services in the north, accusing Israeli forces of threatening to “bomb and kill” its crews.

The Israeli military says the goal of its assault is to destroy the operational capabilities Hamas is trying to rebuild in the north.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, based in the occupied West Bank, accused Israel of trying to “empty” northern Gaza of people and “starving the population”.

During his visit to the region, Blinken acknowledged “progress” on aid for Gaza but said more needed to be done, as he pledged another $135 million in assistance to the Palestinians.

The Gaza war began with Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed 42,847 people in Gaza, the majority civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry which the United Nations considers reliable.

The war in Lebanon erupted last month, nearly a year after Hezbollah began low-intensity cross-border fire into Israel in support of its ally Hamas.

At least 1,580 people have been killed in Lebanon since September 23, according to an AFP tally of Lebanese health ministry figures, though the real number is likely to be higher.

– ‘Falling off a humanitarian cliff’ –

In Lebanon, Israel conducted at least 17 raids overnight that levelled six buildings, according to Lebanon’s official National News Agency (NNA), sending a huge ball of fire enveloped in a tower of smoke soaring into the night sky.

On Thursday, the NNA reported artillery shelling on several border villages as well as “a series of air strikes” near the southern town of Bint Jbeil.

The Israeli military said it hit Hezbollah weapons production facilities in the group’s south Beirut bastion.

In south Lebanon, also a stronghold of Hezbollah, the group said its militants were clashing at close range with Israeli troops in a border village.

Hezbollah earlier said it launched a “large rocket salvo” at the northern Israeli town of Safed, after vowing to keep firing into Israel until a ceasefire is reached not only in Lebanon but also in Gaza.

At a conference in Paris on Thursday, $800 million was raised for humanitarian aid in Lebanon, according to the French government.

Attending the conference, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati called on “the international community to hold together and support efforts… to implement an immediate ceasefire”.

Imran Riza, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for Lebanon, warned that “Lebanon risks falling off a humanitarian cliff”.

“Attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure have reached alarming levels,” he said, decrying “unrelenting attacks on healthcare workers and first responders”.

-Agence France-Presse