Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at the conditions for an Israel-Hamas truce agreement, Ukraine’s involvement in the killing of a top Russian military officer, and the discovery of mass graves in Syria.

Final Concessions

U.S., Israeli, and Qatari officials convened in the Middle East on Wednesday to try to finalize a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas. U.S. CIA Director William Burns met with Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani in Doha to discuss bridging the remaining gaps in the truce agreement, while Israeli President Isaac Herzog met with Adam Boehler, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s designated envoy for hostage affairs, in Jerusalem. Talks are also ongoing in Cairo.

Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at the conditions for an Israel-Hamas truce agreement, Ukraine’s involvement in the killing of a top Russian military officer, and the discovery of mass graves in Syria.

Final Concessions

U.S., Israeli, and Qatari officials convened in the Middle East on Wednesday to try to finalize a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas. U.S. CIA Director William Burns met with Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani in Doha to discuss bridging the remaining gaps in the truce agreement, while Israeli President Isaac Herzog met with Adam Boehler, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s designated envoy for hostage affairs, in Jerusalem. Talks are also ongoing in Cairo.

Sources close to the talks have indicated that a cease-fire deal could be signed in the coming days, with Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz saying on Monday that Israel is “closer to a cease-fire deal than we have ever been.” If an agreement is reached, it would mark the first pause in fighting since last November, when a weeklong truce deal saw Hamas release around 105 hostages in exchange for some 240 Palestinian prisoners.

Some experts are viewing the latest talks as the Biden administration’s last-ditch effort to end the 14-month war. Earlier this month, Trump warned that there will be “ALL HELL TO PAY” if Hamas does not release the remaining Israeli hostages by Jan. 20, when he will begin his second term at the White House. “Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit,” he wrote on Truth Social. It is unclear what Trump’s threat specifically entails.

The exact contours of the latest proposal aren’t public, but they appear to be based on the terms of a deal U.S. President Joe Biden outlined in May. Its focus was to impose a 60-day truce that negotiators hoped would eventually lead to a permanent cease-fire. During that time, Hamas would release some of its roughly 100 hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. In recent weeks, Hamas has provided Israel with a list of captives, including U.S. citizens, whom it would free under the suggested pact.

Israel has demanded that its forces be allowed to remain in two key Gaza areas: the Netzarim Corridor, which splits the northern and southern parts of the enclave, and the Philadelphi Corridor, which runs along Gaza’s border with Egypt. Hamas has previously demanded the complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, but the group has reportedly said it is now willing to tolerate an extended Israeli presence in those two areas so long as Israeli forces eventually leave.

“Serious and positive discussions” have taken place in Doha with Egyptian and Qatari mediators, Hamas said on Tuesday, but to reach a cease-fire deal, the group said that Israel needs to stop “setting new conditions.” A Palestinian official told Reuters on Wednesday that Israel has introduced clauses that Hamas has rejected, though he did not elaborate on what those were. Some analysts have said the lack of details leaked to the press indicates that Israel and Hamas are more serious about reaching an accord this time.

Since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, more than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to local authorities. On Wednesday, Israeli airstrikes across the enclave killed at least 20 Palestinians, and shelling near Al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia wounded seven medics and one patient.

Today’s Most Read

What We’re Following

Suspect arrested. Russia detained an Uzbek man on Wednesday who, authorities said, confessed to planting and detonating a bomb that killed Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov and his aide in Moscow the day before. The suspect claimed to have received instructions from Ukraine’s security service (SBU) to assassinate the high-ranking Russian military officer in exchange for $100,000 and residency in a European Union country, Russian authorities said. Unnamed SBU officials have said their organization was responsible for Kirillov’s death.

Kirillov oversaw Russia’s nuclear and chemical weapons forces and has been accused of ordering the use of ammunition with toxic compounds against Ukrainian positions. The Kremlin has denied these allegations, and in May, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said such accusations were “insufficiently substantiated,” though the possible reemergence of such materials was “extremely concerning.”

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov accused Kyiv on Wednesday of employing “terrorist methods,” and Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council, has pledged “inevitable retaliation” for the assassination.

“Machinery of death.” Recently discovered mass graves in Syria are evidence of a state-run “system of state terror, which became a machinery of death” under ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, an international war crimes prosecutor said on Tuesday. According to Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. war crimes ambassador at large who is now working to help document atrocities in Syria, more than 100,000 people were tortured and killed under the Assad regime. “We really haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis,” said Rapp, who previously led prosecutions at both the Rwanda and Sierra Leone war crimes tribunals.

Since the Syrian civil war began in 2011, tens of thousands of people have been imprisoned by the Assad regime, including many who were forcibly disappeared and some of whom experts believe were tortured or killed. “I don’t have much doubt about those kinds of numbers given what we’ve seen in these mass graves,” Rapp said after viewing two mass graves in the towns of Qutayfah and Najha near the Syrian capital of Damascus.

Syrian rebels who have since taken control of Damascus have vowed to bring members of Assad’s administration to justice. U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Tuesday that Washington is in talks with several United Nations agencies to make sure that Syrians receive answers and accountability.

Dirty energy. The International Energy Agency reported on Wednesday that global coal consumption is expected to hit a record high in 2024. Coal usage has “rebounded strongly” after dropping during the COVID-19 pandemic, the report said. And despite international calls to phase out the fossil fuel, the agency projects that coal demand will surpass 8.9 billion tons this year—and peak in 2027.

China is responsible for more than one-third of global coal usage. Although the United States and European Union have reduced their annual coal consumption, developing economies—such as India, the Philippines, and Vietnam—are offsetting these efforts with their own increased demand.

Participants at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in November tried to develop a pledge that would commit member states to phasing out heavily polluting fossil fuels. But these efforts remained largely unrealized, Foreign Policy’s Christina Lu reported at the time, and many of the world’s poorest nations were disappointed that wealthier nations didn’t offer more funding to combat climate change, despite those same countries emitting the most greenhouse gases.

Odds and Ends

Stabilizing market prices can be a slippery slope, but Polish authorities have argued that they know just where to start. On Tuesday, Warsaw’s strategic reserves agency announced that it will start selling 1,000 metric tons of butter to curb surging prices ahead of presidential elections in May 2025. The agency has blamed a shortage of milk for the global price increase, and it is now auctioning off 25-kilogram blocks of unsalted milk-based butter for a minimum of 28.38 zlotys (or $6.93) per kilo, plus tax. That’s going to require one big piece of toast.