Egypt, Qatar, and the United States continued to try to mediate a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict as Israeli artillery fire and airstrikes pounded the entire Gaza Strip.
An airstrike hit a house Friday night west of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, killing 11, said a doctor at Nasser Hospital.
As efforts to negotiate a ceasefire reached full gear over the weekend, Hamas dispatched some of its delegates to Cairo but said they would not directly join the negotiation process. At the same time, fighting continued in Palestinian territory.
The conflict began with an unprecedented October 7 attack by Hamas against Israel. Since then, it has devastated much of Gaza, displaced nearly its entire population, and brought a humanitarian catastrophe.
The White House said the latest round of talks had been positive, but Israeli military presence along the Gaza Strip-Egypt border remains a deep divide.
Earlier periods of optimism during the last months of on-off ceasefire and hostage release negotiations repeatedly concluded without agreement.
'All Hamas will get are briefings by senior Egyptian officials on the negotiations with Israel; operative details will be left to the Egyptians,' a senior Hamas official said. Hamas was demanding that Israel pull all of its forces from Gaza, including from inside the border area along the Egypt-Gaza frontier - the Philadelphi Corridor.
The current truce is based on a formula proposed by U.S. President Joe Biden on May 31 that he said at the time entered the category of "Israeli proposal".
A second Hamas official said that his organization among them its leader Yahya Sinwar had already agreed to the Biden plan and summoned for its enactment without making any change in the wording of the plan.
Under Biden's initiative, already relayed to the UN Security Council, the three-stage program would start with an exchange of hostages for Palestinians held in Israeli jails, followed by a "full and complete ceasefire" lasting six weeks.
But Mr. Netanyahu insisted that Israeli troops could remain along the corridor to keep Hamas from rearming itself by smuggling from Egypt.
The White House said CIA Director William Burns was taking part in the Cairo talks on behalf of the U.S., along with heads of Israel's intelligence and security agencies.
An Egyptian source close to the negotiations said new U.S. proposals were being discussed with international mediators in an effort to bridge the gap between the positions of Israel and Hamas.
It also said Sunday's expanded negotiations were a "critical development" for the deal if Washington could push Netanyahu hard enough.
During the day, three soldiers were reported killed in central Gaza, pushing the military toll to 338 since the ground offensive began October 27.
The United Nations said tens of thousands of civilians were fleeing the advance of Israeli troops from Deir el-Balah and Khan Younis after Israel issued evacuation orders, which generally precede military operations.
Gaza's Health Ministry said 40,334 people were killed in Gaza as a result of the Israeli military campaign, while the United Nations Rights Office mentioned that among the killed are mostly women and children.
It said Palestinian militants had taken 251 hostages, 105 of whom remain in Gaza, including 34 that the military believes are dead.
The Israeli military this week returned remains of six hostages from a tunnel in the Khan Younis area; all had gunshot wounds.
Thousands of protesters in Israel demonstrated in Tel Aviv and other cities on Saturday, a day before the talks, demanding a deal to free remaining hostages.
Efforts to secure a truce in Gaza and prevent escalation of the conflict have been made more urgent by the killing last month of two senior Iran-backed militants, which drew threats of retaliation from Tehran and its Lebanese ally, Hezbollah.
All the people in Gaza wanted was for the fighting to stop.
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