Palestinian resistance group Hamas said it was evaluating a proposal for a six-week pause with Israel, amid the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe due to Israel's attacks, as the U.N. seeks to restore funding for humanitarian aid in the blockaded enclave.
Hamas said earlier this week it was mulling proposals drawn up by mediators in Paris for a second truce nearly four months after the war began.
While a November pause to the fighting lasted a week, the latest accord aims to pave the way for an initial six-week halt to the fighting.
Over that period Israel would release between 200 and 300 Palestinian prisoners who are not deemed high-security detainees, in exchange for 35 to 40 hostages held in Gaza, the Hamas source close to Egyptian and Qatari mediators said.
Hamas captured about 250 hostages during Hamas's Oct. 7 attack on Israel. The attack resulted in the deaths of around 1,140 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
Israel says 132 of the hostages remain in Gaza including at least 29 people believed to have been killed.
Relentless bombardment by Israel and a ground invasion has killed at least 26,900 people in Gaza since then, most of them women and children, according to Gaza's health ministry.
The war has displaced the vast majority of Gaza's population of 2.4 million and prompted the United Nations to warn famine is imminent.
Under the new agreement, aid deliveries would be boosted by entering 200 to 300 trucks per day.
"The first stage includes negotiations around the withdrawal of Israeli forces and enabling the return of displaced people to Gaza (City) and the north of the strip," the source said.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ruled out pulling Israel's armed forces from Gaza, but in a meeting with some families of hostages on Wednesday he vowed to bring the captives home.
"We are making every effort, but the more discreet these efforts are, the greater are the chances of success," he said in a statement issued by his office.
"There is a real effort to bring everyone back... it's too early to say how it will unfold, but these efforts are underway as we speak."
The Hamas source said if the cease-fire lasts, a second stage would see Israeli reservist soldiers released from captivity in exchange for an undefined number of Palestinian prisoners.
Other soldiers and officers would subsequently be freed, the source said, once more in tandem with the release of Palestinians held in Israel.
The last issues addressed by the deal pertain to an exchange of bodies by the two sides, as well as the control of Gaza border crossings and rebuilding the shattered territory.
The Hamas source added that Egypt and Qatar were set to serve as mediators, in coordination with the United States and France.
As Qatari- and Egyptian-led mediation efforts gathered pace, a Hamas official said the group's leader Ismail Haniyeh "will be in Cairo today or tomorrow (Wednesday or Thursday)" to discuss the truce proposal.
A separate Hamas source told AFP the three-stage plan would start with an initial six-week halt to the fighting – now in its fourth month – that will see more aid deliveries into the besieged Gaza Strip.
Only "women, children and sick men over 60" held by Hamas will be freed during that stage in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israel, the source said, requesting anonymity due to the sensitivity of the talks.
There would also be "negotiations around the withdrawal of Israeli forces," with possible additional phases involving more hostage-prisoner exchanges, said the source, adding the territory's rebuilding is also among issues addressed by the deal.
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ruled out pulling forces from Gaza.
He has also ruled out releasing "thousands" of Palestinian prisoners as part of any deal, though his office earlier called the talks "constructive."
Ron Dermer, an Israeli minister close to Netanyahu, is expected to meet Wednesday with U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in Washington, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken is due for another Mideast trip in the "coming days," a U.S. official said.
The United States was among several top donor countries that suspended funding to the U.N.'s aid agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.
Israeli strikes killed at least 125 people overnight and into the early morning across the Palestinian territory, the health ministry in the Gaza Strip said, while the military announced it had begun flooding Hamas' tunnels.
AFPTV footage showed smoke rising over central Gaza and Khan Younis, the coastal strip's main southern city that has become the focus of fighting in recent weeks.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told a U.N. committee he had "met with donors to listen to their concerns and to outline the steps we are taking."
He called UNRWA "the backbone of all humanitarian response in Gaza."
UNRWA spokeswoman Tamara Alrifai told AFP the agency supports "an independent investigation" into the Israeli claims that led to the funding crisis. Israel accused several UNRWA staff members – out of the agency's 33,000 – of involvement in the Oct. 7 attack that sparked the war.
Alrifai said that "if the countries that suspended their funding to UNRWA maintain their decision, the impact will be catastrophic on the people of Gaza" who face mass displacement, threats of disease and famine and dire shortages.
The U.N. agency provides Gazans with basic food supplies, medical services and shelters, and "if we were to unplug these services, then the situation will truly be a free fall," she warned.
In Gaza City, in the north, bodies shrouded in white cloth were laid on a hospital floor and carried on donkey carts ahead of burial.
Hamas reported "dozens of air raids" overnight on Khan Younis, where vast areas have been reduced to a muddy wasteland of bombed-out buildings.
Witnesses said artillery shells hit the area of Nasser Hospital, the city's largest, where displaced Palestinians have been sheltering.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said on social media platform X that "Israeli shelling and gunfire continue" around another hospital in Khan Younis.
Staff and patients at the Red Crescent's Al-Amal Hospital "and thousands of displaced people, primarily children and women, live in constant fear and anxiety" it said.
Qatar, which helped broker a previous truce and hostage release in November, voiced hope the initial deal now being negotiated might lead to a permanent cease-fire.
The United States and Britain have also launched air strikes against Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels, who have carried out repeated attacks on shipping in the Red Sea in what the rebels describe as an act of solidarity with Palestinians.
As a result, the International Monetary Fund said container shipping through the vital trade route has dropped this year by about one-third.
