World enews: Israel hopeful significant number of hostages could be freed in coming days

Israel’s ambassador to the US has expressed hope that Hamas could release a significant number of hostages held in Gaza “in the coming days”, amid reports of talks aimed at also securing a days-long humanitarian pause in the conflict.

Declining to go into details of the “very sensitive” negotiations to free some of the 240 captives seized in Hamas’s brutal cross-border incursion into Israel on 7 October, Michael Herzog told ABC’s This Week: “They are very serious efforts and I’m hopeful we can have a deal in the coming days.”

Echoing the Israeli diplomat’s positive sentiments, White House deputy national security adviser Jon Finer said on Sunday that he believed a deal to free a considerable number of hostages could be closer than ever.

“What I can say at this point is that some of the outstanding areas of disagreement, in a very complicated, very sensitive negotiation, have been narrowed,” Mr Finer told NBC’s Meet the Press programme.

But he warned: “Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. Sensitive negotiations like this can fall apart at the last minute.”

On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that the deal was imminent, in which all parties would freeze combat operations for at least five days while 50 or more hostages are released in groups every 24 hours. However, US and Israeli officials denied the report.

It came as the World Health Organisation chief said 31 “very sick” premature babies had been safely transferred from the al Shifa hospital – Gaza’s largest – more than a week after it was encircled and attacked by Israeli troops, who insist the hospital lies above an underground Hamas headquarters.

While hundreds of patients and staff had already fled the hospital as food, water and medical supplies ran out, with all but five doctors left on Saturday, international alarm had been growing over the fate of premature babies who had been left without incubators due to a power blackout.

A premature baby being fed after being transferred from Al-Shifa Hospital

(Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images)

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the babies were evacuated in ambulances of the Palestinian Red Crescent to a hospital in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where they were receiving urgent care before being moved to Egypt.

The babies suffered from dehydration, vomiting, hypothermia and some had sepsis because they didn’t receive any medication, and they had not been in “suitable conditions for them to stay alive,” said Mohamed Zaqout, the director of hospitals in Hamas-run Gaza.

A team of UN officials which visited the hospital on Saturday described it as a “death zone” and said 291 patients had still been there, including the now-rescued babies, trauma patients with severely infected wounds, and others with spinal injuries who were unable to move.

The WHO team reported signs of gunfire and shelling and a mass grave at Al Shifa’s entrance, and said it was making plans for the immediate evacuation of the remaining patients and staff, as evidenced by the babies’ departure on Sunday.

More than 12,000 people have been killed in Gaza – 5,000 of them children – since Israel’s intense retaliatory bombardment and subsequent invasion of the densely populated strip began on 7 October, according to the health ministry, whose figures are deemed credible by the UN.

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