Friday briefing: As Middle East peace talks continue, the threat of Iran looms large

Good morning. Ten months after Israel’s invasion of Gaza began, the death toll compiled by health officials there has reached 40,000 – one in 50 of the territory’s prewar population. There are thousands more killed by Israeli forces whose bodies have not yet been recovered. Among those known to have died recently are Ayssel and Asser, four-day-old twins killed in an Israeli airstrike along with their mother and grandmother while their father, Mohamed Abuel-Qomasan, was out registering their births.

While a ceasefire is catastrophically overdue for Palestinians in Gaza, there is still no sign that one will soon be agreed. A new round of talks yesterday in Doha with Israel and mediators from the US, Egypt, and Qatar were said to have got off to a “promising start”. They are expected to continue today. But Hamas is not participating.

The issue has renewed urgency for Israel, with claims that a ceasefire is the most likely way to prevent Iranian retaliation for the recent killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. Today’s newsletter, with the Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent, Bethan McKernan, is about the state of the talks, the difficulties in assessing Iran’s intentions, and why Benjamin Netanyahu is not yet prepared to relent. Here are the headlines.

Five big stories

1. Contaminated blood | Victims of the contaminated blood scandal will begin receiving compensation before the end of the year, with some entitled to more than £2.5m, the government has confirmed. About 3,000 people who contracted HIV or hepatitis C as a result of the infusions have already registered as potential recipients.

2. Ukraine | Volodymyr Zelenskiy has claimed Kyiv’s troops have full control over the Russian town of Sudzha, which had a prewar population of 5,000 people and contains infrastructure pumping Russian gas towards Europe. Both Ukraine and Russia claimed advances elsewhere in Kursk region on Thursday.

3. Education | Pupils achieved the best A-level results in a generation on Thursday, with marks that highlighted the growing gap between the strongest and weakest-performing parts of the country.

4. Mpox | Sweden confirmed its first case of the more contagious variant of mpox, a viral infection that spreads through close contact, marking the first time it has been found outside Africa. The person was infected while in a part of Africa where there was a large outbreak of the disease.

5. US news | Five people have been arrested and charged over the death of Matthew Perry, prosecutors said, including the actor’s personal assistant and two doctors. The doctors supplied the Friends actor, who died at his Los Angeles home in October 2023, with a large amount of ketamine, the US attorney Martin Estrada said, and “took advantage of Mr Perry’s addiction issues to enrich themselves”.

In depth: ‘Outside a small group in Tehran, nobody knows what Iran’s calculations are’

Senior US officials say that Israel has done all it can militarily in Gaza to degrade Hamas, and defence minister Yoav Gallant (pictured right) has reportedly said that Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise of “absolute victory” is “gibberish”. Meanwhile, most analysts agree that the Israeli hostages who remain in Gaza can only be brought home through negotiation.

“On the ground, the IDF has done what it can,” Bethan McKernan said. “With urban areas cleared, we’ll supposedly see a move to limited, pinpoint operations. Over time, that will probably morph into guerrilla warfare with Hamas that will wear down the morale of troops and reservists, and hurt the economy.”

Nonetheless, Netanyahu appears unwilling to make the kind of meaningful concessions that might make a ceasefire plausible. “He has reportedly expanded the mandate of his negotiating team a little,” Bethan said. “But no major breakthrough is expected. Even a really positive outcome would still be an initial framework, and that would take time to implement.”

Israel’s stance

One reason for scepticism of Netanyahu’s commitment to reaching a deal quickly came in a report in the New York Times. It said that rather than moving towards compromise, Israel has added new conditions to its list of demands. Israel denies this, describing the new details in its proposals as “essential clarifications” that do not shift its stance. Netanyahu said that “it is Hamas which has demanded to add dozens of changes”.

The key details added to the Israeli negotiation platform in late July: a demand to maintain control of Gaza’s southern border, and a return to insistence on screening Palestinians returning to northern Gaza for weapons – a condition it had dropped in May.

“Netanyahu has done this a couple of times,” she added. “Hamas has done the same thing, so that argument can go both ways. But at the moment, Hamas is saying that it just wants to implement the plan presented by the Biden administration in May, and which it agreed to in July.”

Perhaps as a result of Haniyeh’s assassination hours after Israel killed a top Hezbollah commander in Beirut, a poll released last week found that Netanyahu’s party, Likud, would be the largest in the Knesset in new elections – the first time that result has been returned since the 7 October attack. Nonetheless, Bethan said, Israel’s prime minister is well aware of the political risks he faces when the war ends.

Meanwhile, protests pushing for a ceasefire have diminished over the summer, with the Knesset in recess. And the far-right elements in Netanyahu’s coalition, led by Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, continue to say that they will quit and topple the government if a ceasefire is agreed.

Hamas’s stance

Hamas was not involved in yesterday’s talks. They were not expected to attend, and any negotiations are carried out through intermediaries; in any case, Hamas has told mediators that it is prepared to hold discussions afterwards if Israel comes up with a serious proposal.

In any case, their absence is obviously a signal of how difficult a swift positive outcome remains. Among other issues, the organisation has demanded a defined end to the war, while Israel has only offered a pause in hostilities.

One somewhat unpredictable factor in its stance is the enforced change in its leadership. The assassination of Ismail Haniyeh led to the ascension of Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the 7 October attack, as the head of Hamas’s political bureau. Sinwar, who is believed to be hiding in Hamas’s tunnel network beneath Gaza, is thought to be less pragmatic than his late predecessor, and more inclined to continue the fight.

“Appointing Sinwar is a clear signal of Hamas adopting a harder line on a surface level,” Bethan said. “But on a practical level, he obviously doesn’t have the freedom to fulfil the same role as Haniyeh because of where he is. Others on the more moderate side may stick to the line Haniyeh was taking. So in reality, I don’t think it will affect the talks that much.”

The role of the US

Last week, the Biden administration joined Egypt and Qatar in a statement saying “there is no further time to waste nor excuses from any party for further delay”. It has tended to exert public pressure on Hamas while officials brief reporters about the White House’s frustration at Netanyahu’s intransigence. And some critics say that Washington could be doing much more to make its influence felt.

In this piece, Mohamad Bazzi, director of New York University’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, argues that the Biden administration has failed to use its considerable leverage to push Israel towards a deal. “With the US and other western allies continuing to provide the weapons that sustain Israel’s war machine, Netanyahu has had little incentive to stop the bloodshed,” Bazzi wrote.

There have been suggestions that Biden could be moving towards sanctions against Smotrich and Ben Gvir. “That would be designed to isolate Netanyahu,” Bethan said. “It would still be a really big deal to sanction democratically elected politicians in an allied state.”

At the same time, she noted, that is an option that has been available to Washington throughout the war. “It seems like too little, too late,” she said. “The US approved $20bn in new arms sales this week. If you’re trying to exert influence over Netanyahu, it’s hard to see how capitulating to his demands and OK-ing that deal helps you.”

How Iran will respond

In the background to all of this is the looming threat of Iranian retaliation over the attack on Haniyeh on its soil – a threat deemed serious enough that Israeli authorities have told people to stockpile food and water in safe rooms and placed search-and-rescue teams in major cities. US and Iranian officials have briefed that the best chance of forestalling such a response is for a ceasefire deal to be reached in Gaza.

Bethan is sceptical about the reliability of such reports. “Outside a very small group in Tehran, nobody really knows what Iran’s calculations are,” she said. “The assessments coming out of Israel and the US change every day – whether it will be immediate or in a few days, whether it will be unilateral, or if Hezbollah will respond first – every possible iteration has been floated by unnamed sources in the last couple of weeks.

“They’ve already waited two and a half weeks to retaliate – they could very possibly wait six months, or a year,” she added. “It’s complicated for them to calibrate a response that feels sufficient without triggering a regional war, and it’s complicated to coordinate with their proxies in the region, if that’s what they’re doing.”

That lack of clarity may be part of why Netanyahu feels emboldened not to shift his position. “It suits him to have Israel in a state of perpetual crisis,” she said. “It sounds so transparent and ludicrous, but it appears to be as simple as that.”

What else we’ve been reading

• In a persuasive opinion piece, Ciaran Thapar argues countering far-right racism will take much more than locking up rioters. “Fear-based solutions alone are plasters on a gaping wound,” he writes. “Violence is not inevitable [and] there is a wealth of evidence from across the world that might help us plan how to stem it.” Charlie Lindlar, newsletters team

• You probably have better things to do than watch Love Is Blind UK. That’s what I thought last week, and now here I am – nine episodes deep and reading the Reddit megathread. Vulture (£) are recapping the whole thing. Go on, treat yourself … Hannah J Davies, deputy editor, newsletters

• As he pulls together his first cookbook, Jay Rayner writes compellingly against precise measurements in recipes, and why cooking without space for experimentation is “as dull as assembling an Ikea table”. Charlie

• “We find our families in all kinds of places”: Ryan Gilbey has a lovely interview with Elliot Page and Dominic Savage about their new film Close to You, which sees the Juno star draw on his own experience of coming out as trans. Hannah

• Ahead of tonight’s opening game of the Premier League, Jonathan Wilson wonders if this season’s table could break recent results and be one to finally surprise us. Looming large? Those 115 charges against Manchester City … Charlie

Sport

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Paris 2024 | Australian breakdancer Rachael Gunn said the backlash she has received since competing at the Paris Olympics has been “devastating” and pleaded for privacy for her family and friends. Gunn, who is known as B-Girl Raygun, went viral after she lost all three of her round robin battles in Paris.

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