Negotiators for Israel and Hamas will hold talks in Egypt on Monday to work out the technicalities and specifics of implementing President Donald Trump's Gaza peace plan, including the logistics involved in handing over Israeli hostages.
Sources told The National that Egyptian earth movers were expected to receive clearance from the Israeli military to cross into Gaza, where they will be taken to “specific sites” to help with the search for and exhumation of the remains of deceased hostages.
The sources earlier said that Hamas leaders had lost contact with operatives in charge of some of the living hostages – they are 20 out of a total of 48 – due to the intensity of Israel's military operations in Gaza.
They have also said that the burial spots of some of the deceased hostages have become difficult to find because they were buried in tunnels that were later destroyed by Israeli strikes.
“It is likely now that the handover of the hostages, both alive and dead, will be carried out over a week rather than three days” as stated in Mr Trump's plan, said one of the sources.
“This new timeline is dictated by the logistical difficulties involved and the need for Israel's military to pull back to lines far enough from the areas where the handover will take place.”
Mr Trump on Sunday described his peace proposal for Gaza as a "great deal for everybody". He separately warned Hamas it faced "complete obliteration" if it tried to cling on to power in Gaza.
Israel's top general meanwhile said troops "will return to fighting" in Gaza if talks fail. Israel claimed to have eased its bombardment due to a "change in the operational situation", although Palestinian officials reported dozens more deaths over the weekend.
Hamas, said the sources, wants all Israeli military activities in Gaza, including reconnaissance flights, to be suspended during the process of handing over the hostages, which had previously been done through the International Red Cross.
In return for the release of the hostages, Israel would free hundreds of Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli prisons, including scores who have been convicted of security-related charges and sentenced to long or lifetime jail terms.
Hamas, according to the sources, was showing “flexibility” on the issue of disarmament, which is stipulated by Mr Trump's plan. The group, they added, is showing readiness to lay down its arms and hand them over to Egypt.
In Washington on Sunday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Hamas has agreed in principle to what happens after the war ends but cautioned that negotiating the disarmament of Hamas will be "hard".
"We will know very quickly whether Hamas is serious or not by how these technical talks go in terms of the logistics," Mr Rubio told NBC News about the release of hostages from Gaza.
The negotiations in Egypt on Sunday and Monday follow Hamas's decision on Friday to agree to releasing all the hostages and accepting the key parts of Mr Trump's 20-point plan.
The White House said Mr Trump is to send two envoys to Egypt – his son-in-law Jared Kushner and special Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. The senior Hamas officials taking part in the negotiations are Khalil Al Hayya, Moussa Abu Marzouk, Ghazi Hamad and Mohammed Darwish.
Also taking part in the negotiations are officials from Turkey which, like Egypt and Qatar, maintains close ties to Hamas. Turkey has been mediating in the conflict for months in an unpublicised capacity.
The Hamas and Israeli negotiators along with representatives of mediators from Egypt, Qatar and the US held an "exploratory" meeting on Sunday in Cairo, according to the sources. Full-blown negotiations will commence later on Monday in Egypt's Red Sea resort of Sharm El Sheikh, said the sources.
Mr Witkoff and Mr Kushner are scheduled to join them later this week, but only if sufficient progress has been made by then.
On Saturday, the US president sought to pile more pressure on Hamas to act quickly, saying he would “not tolerate delay” from the group. He warned Hamas to move quickly towards a deal “or else all bets will be off”.
He said on Truth Social that Israel had agreed to an initial line of withdrawal in Gaza and that this had been shared with Hamas.
“When Hamas confirms, the Ceasefire will be immediately effective, the hostages and prisoner exchange will begin, and we will create the conditions for the next phase of withdrawal,” he wrote alongside a map of the proposed line.
Besides the release of hostages and disarming Hamas, the American president's plan provides for the gradual withdrawal of Israel from Gaza, the exclusion of Hamas and other militant groups from the governance of postwar Gaza and the reconstruction of the war-devastated enclave.
Significantly, it explicitly states that the enclave's estimated two million residents would not be thrown out of the enclave and that Israel will not be allowed to annex Gaza or the occupied West Bank as demanded by extremist members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government and leaders of the settler movement.
Under the proposal, the administration of the territory would be taken up by a technocratic and non-partisan panel of Palestinians and overseen by a transitional authority led by Mr Trump himself.
The Gaza war was triggered by Hamas's October 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel that left 1,200 people dead. Israel's military response was a relentless campaign that has to date killed more than 67,000 Palestinians, Gaza's health authorities said.
Israel's military conduct in Gaza has given rise to charges of genocide, which it denies. Its use of food as a weapon has left hundreds of thousands in Gaza hungry and, according to the UN last month, some facing famine.
