TEL AVIV, August 15. /TASS/. The Israeli delegation will begin negotiations in Doha on the Gaza settlement in the coming hours and it has been given broad powers to reach a deal with the radical Hamas movement, Dmitry Gendelman, an adviser to the Israeli Prime Minister's Office told TASS on Thursday.

"The Israeli delegation will begin talks in Doha in the afternoon and it has been given broad authority and a mandate from the country’s prime minister to reach an agreement on the deal," he said.

He added that "the [Israeli] political-military cabinet will convene for a meeting tonight [August 15] to follow the developments at the talks" in Doha.

Gendelman told TASS on Wednesday that the next round of talks on settling the situation in the Gaza Strip had been scheduled for August 15 in the capital of Qatar. The Israeli delegation, which set off to Doha, is headed by Mossad intelligence director David Barnea, he specified.

Deteriorating situation in region

Tensions flared up again in the Middle East on October 7, 2023, when militants from the Gaza Strip-based radical Palestinian movement Hamas staged a surprise attack on Israeli territory from Gaza, killing residents of Israeli border settlements and taking over 240 hostages, including women, children and the elderly.

Hamas described its attack as a response to the aggressive actions of Israeli authorities against the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City. In response, Israel declared a total blockade of the Gaza Strip, home to 2.3 million Palestinians before the crisis, and has been delivering air strikes on Gaza as well as some parts of Lebanon and Syria. Clashes have also been reported on the West Bank.

The Palestinian Hamas movement announced on July 31 that the head of its political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in an Israeli strike on his residence in Tehran, where he was attending the inauguration ceremony of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC, Iran's elite military units) said that Haniyeh was killed by a short-range projectile with a warhead weighing about seven kilograms, adding that his assassination was organized by Israel with US support. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has warned that Israel will be severely punished for the killing of the Palestinian politician.