Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer was set to meet with US envoy Steve Witkoff in London on Wednesday night, according to a Hebrew media report, which called the meeting a last-ditch effort to revive negotiations over a ceasefire and hostage-release deal.
Channel 12 news, which carried the report, said that the main stumbling block in talks for a deal at the moment is that the Qatari mediators are unwilling to engage following last week’s Israeli strike targeting Hamas leaders in Doha, which is thought to have failed.
Witkoff traveled to London with US President Donald Trump, who was on a state visit to the United Kingdom.
The report said the US is pushing Israel to make some sort of gesture to mollify the Qataris.
Qatar wants to return to its role as mediator, Col. “Alef,” the deputy head of the IDF’s Intelligence Directorate’s Research Division, told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee during a classified briefing Wednesday, according to the Ynet news site.
Ahead of the strike on Doha last week, the US reportedly made a proposal involving the release of all hostages on the first day of a truce and, if subsequent talks bear fruit, the end of the war in Gaza. Hamas said they were discussing the offer when the airstrike was carried out.
The terror group said last month, after rejecting previous offers for a phased hostage-truce deal, that it had accepted a US proposal for a partial deal that Israel had sought for several months.
However, the development came after Jerusalem had already changed its position, declaring it would no longer accept a phased deal and would only negotiate for the release of all the hostages at once.
The terror group has said it is willing to end the war, but has not accepted Israel’s conditions, which include the release of the hostages, Hamas’s disarmament, the demilitarization of Gaza and a new government for the Strip that includes neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority.
Around a hundred protesters, many of them family members of the captives, demonstrated outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s private residence for the second night in a row on Wednesday, demanding a hostage-release and ceasefire deal.
“Where is this government? Why, amid the extreme fear and sadness, do we need to wage a battle for the return of our loved ones against those who abandoned them?” said Maccabit Meir, the aunt of twin Hamas hostages Gali and Ziv Berman, to the crowd.
She accused the government of “choosing to sacrifice them [the hostages] over and over” ever since Hamas’s onslaught on October 7, 2023, which sparked the ongoing war.
Police erected crowd control barriers, distancing the protesters from Netanyahu’s home, keeping them some 150 meters (500 feet) away. Last night, police hung tarps up on fences around the building, which hostage families claimed was meant to stifle their protest.
As protesters chanted for a hostage deal, four activists dressed in Greco-Roman garb coated themselves in fake blood and lay on the street.
One protester held a sign that read: “This is Sparta,” referencing Netanyahu’s controversial remarks earlier in the week that Israel may be forced to become a self-reliant “super-Sparta” amid increasing global isolation.
A counter-protester approached the demonstration and shouted at the protesters, accusing them of supporting the notion that the Gaza war is a genocide. Police distanced him from the rest of the crowd, and he eventually left the area.
Terror groups in the Gaza Strip are holding 48 hostages, including 47 of the 251 abducted by Hamas-led terrorists on October 7, 2023. They include the bodies of at least 26 confirmed dead by the IDF. Twenty are believed to be alive and there are grave concerns for the well-being of two others, Israeli officials have said. Among the bodies held by Hamas is an IDF soldier killed in Gaza in 2014.
Hamas released 30 hostages — 20 Israeli civilians, five soldiers, and five Thai nationals — and the bodies of eight slain Israeli captives during a ceasefire between January and March 2025, and one additional hostage, a dual American-Israeli citizen, in May 2025 as a “gesture” to the United States. The terror group freed 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November 2023, and four hostages were released before that in the early weeks of the war.
In exchange, Israel has freed some 2,000 jailed Palestinian terrorists, security prisoners, and Gazan terror suspects detained during the war.
Eight hostages have been rescued from captivity by troops alive, and the bodies of 51 have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the Israeli military as they tried to escape their captors, and the body of a soldier who was killed in 2014.