GAZA: Qatar will host Gaza ceasefire talks on Thursday, sources close to the negotiations said, seeking a so-far elusive agreement that the United States hopes would stop Iran striking the Zionist entity and avert a wider war. US, Qatari and Egyptian mediators have invited the Zionist entity and Hamas for negotiations aimed at ending fighting that the health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip says has claimed nearly 40,000 lives in the Palestinian territory.

The talks will be held in the Qatari capital Doha, a source close to Hamas and a second source close to the negotiations said Wednesday, though it remained unclear if the Palestinian group planned to participate. According to a US source familiar with the Doha meeting, CIA director William Burns is scheduled to take part. The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told AFP the heads of the Zionist Mossad spy agency and Shin Bet secret service would go to Doha.

A Hamas official said the Islamist movement was “continuing its consultations with the mediators”, after demanding the implementation of a three-phase proposal that US President Joe Biden laid out on May 31, instead of holding more talks. A truce deal in Gaza, based on “the framework agreement that’s on the table”, could help de-escalate regional tensions and “prevent an outbreak of a wider war”, said US envoy Amos Hochstein on a visit to Beirut on Wednesday.

The Zionist military offensive in Gaza has killed at least 39,965 people, according to the territory’s health ministry, mostly women and children. The Zionist military said it carried out dozens of air strikes across Gaza in the past 24 hours while ground troops were engaged in “operational activity” in the southern city of Rafah. Civil defense rescuers reported artillery shelling and air strikes across the Gaza Strip, with four family members killed in a residential complex near Khan Yunis.

Zionist troops also killed five Palestinians in air strikes and a raid in the north of the occupied West Bank on Wednesday, sources said. Tubas governor Ahmad Saad told AFP that four Palestinians were killed in the town of Tammun and one in Tubas. “The (Zionist) forces are withholding the bodies of the five martyrs, and when we inquired with the liaison office, we were officially informed about the five martyrs,” Saad said.

Palestinian official news agency Wafa reported that “the army entered Tubas at dawn and shot and killed a young man hiding in his home”.

Earlier, the Zionist police said they had shot dead a Palestinian teenager who was “climbing the wall” separating Jerusalem from the West Bank to “throw Molotov cocktails”. The 16-year-old was taken to hospital for treatment but was pronounced dead, the police said in a statement shortly after midnight Tuesday.

US President Joe Biden’s administration on Tuesday approved more than $20 billion in new weapons sales to the Zionist entity, brushing aside pressure from rights activists to stop arms deliveries over the death toll in Gaza. In a notification to Congress, the State Department said it had approved a sale of 50 F-15 fighter jets to the Zionist entity for $18.82 billion.

The Zionist entity will also buy nearly 33,000 tank cartridges, up to 50,000 explosive mortar cartridges and new military cargo vehicles. The F-15 aircraft, which will begin to be delivered in 2029, will upgrade the Zionist entity’s current fleet and include radar and secure communications equipment.

Josh Paul, who resigned from the State Department last year in protest at policy on Gaza, said the Zionist entity had given the United States no reason to believe it is moving away from “abject brutality”. “Authorizing billions of dollars in new arms transfers effectively provides (the Zionist entity) a carte blanche to continue its atrocities in Gaza and to escalate the conflict to Lebanon,” said Paul, now at the Middle East rights group Dawn.

Meanwhile, the Zionist entity approved a new settlement on a UNESCO World Heritage Site near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, its far-right finance minister said on Wednesday. Bezalel Smotrich, who also heads civil affairs at the defense ministry, said his office had “completed its work and published a plan for the new Nahal Heletz settlement in Gush Etzion”, a bloc of settlements south of Jerusalem.

All of the Zionist entity’s settlements in the West Bank, occupied since 1967, are considered illegal under international law, regardless of whether they have Zionist planning permission. “No anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist decision will stop the development of settlements,” Smotrich, who lives in a settlement, posted on X. “We will continue to fight against the dangerous project of creating a Palestinian state by creating facts on the ground.”

The anti-settlement group Peace Now denounced the plan, calling it a “wholesale attack” on an area “renowned for its ancient terraces and sophisticated irrigation systems, evidence of thousands of years of human activity”. Over the years, dozens of unauthorized settlements have sprung up in the West Bank. Excluding east Jerusalem, some 490,000 Zionist settlers now live in the territory, alongside some three million Palestinians.

Far-right parties in the Zionist entity’s governing coalition have pressed for an acceleration of settlement expansion. The Nahal Heletz settlement, which received preliminary approval along with four others in June, lies between Gush Etzion and the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, south of Jerusalem. Peace Now said it will flank houses in the Palestinian village of Battir, a world heritage site known for its stepped agricultural terraces, vineyards and olive groves.

“These actions are not only fragmenting Palestinian space and depriving large communities of their natural and cultural heritage, they also pose an imminent threat to an area considered to be of the highest cultural value to humanity,” the organization said in a statement. According to a European Union report, last year the Zionist entity advanced plans for 12,349 homes to be built in the West Bank, the most in 30 years. – Agencies