Qatari mediators are urging Hamas to quicken the pace of hostage releases to include women and children held in Gaza and to do so without expecting Israeli concessions, according to three diplomats and a source in the region familiar with the talks, as Israel readies a ground assault on the enclave.

The Gulf state, in coordination with the US, is leading mediation talks with Hamas and Israeli officials over the release of more than 200 hostages captured in the Palestinian group’s cross-border onslaught on Oct 7.

Hamas on Monday freed two Israeli civilian women captives from the besieged enclave following the release of two hostages with dual US-Israeli nationality on Friday.

Qatar is now discussing a larger release of civilians with Hamas and Israel, a fifth source told Reuters on Tuesday after being briefed on the negotiations. The source said the talks were progressing.

The talks are not about any of the Israeli soldiers held by Hamas, the diplomats and regional source familiar with the talks said. Hamas says such captive soldiers are strategic assets the group can eventually exchange for major concessions from Israel.

In Washington, two US sources said that it was the US understanding that Qatar is pushing Hamas to release a large group of hostages immediately and without expecting any Israeli concessions in return.

Some 222 people aged from 9 months to 85 years were seized on Oct. 7 when Hamas went on a killing spree through southern Israel, shooting motorists, hunting down civilians including children in their own homes, and burning and stabbing people to death, according to survivors’ accounts. 

LOGISTICAL CHALLENGE

In response, Israel has launched a bombardment of Gaza that has killed more than 5,700 people, buried families in the rubble of their apartment blocks, maimed thousands and displaced a million people. It now plans a ground assault to destroy Hamas.

Among the arguments three of the sources say Qatar may be using in its contacts with Hamas is that releasing a large group of civilian hostages would ease a big logistical burden for the group as it navigates its confrontation with Israel.

Feeding and accommodating the captives, and tending to those who are wounded, are difficult for Hamas at a time when it is bracing for an Israeli assault and there is little food or medicine to spare for Gaza’s 2.3 million population, the diplomats and source said.

Keeping track of the captives, held by several groups in various locations, makes this task even more onerous, three of the sources said.

A source in the region familiar with the hostage negotiations said it appeared that Hamas had not anticipated taking so many hostages and had not made preparations for keeping so many individuals. Israeli officials have said many of the captives could be held in the warren of tunnels under Gaza.

When its fighters stormed into Israel on Oct 7, “Hamas did not expect the operation would be as catastrophically successful as it was. Now they have all these hostages and they don’t know what to do with them,” the source in the region added.

Qatar has also argued to Hamas that a large civilian release could reap diplomatic benefits by showing the group, seen as a terrorist organization by many Western countries, as sensitive to international humanitarian concerns over the captivity of children and other non-combatants, two of the sources said.

CAPTIVE SOLDIERS

A Hamas representative in Qatar did not respond to a request for comment. The Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to an email seeking comment.

In Jerusalem, an Israeli official said Hamas was using the hostage crisis for propaganda, trying to present itself as humane by releasing a handful of people they kidnapped. The official described this as “Nazi psychological warfare”.

US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters on Monday that Washington wanted “to see all the hostages released. We want to see them released unconditionally, and we want to see them released as soon as possible.”

A release of civilians would still leave Hamas holding Israeli soldiers and security personnel. Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan said on Saturday the fate of Israeli army captives was related to a possible exchange of prisoners and in any case would not be discussed until Israel stopped attacking Gaza.

Qatar, which has ambitious foreign policy goals, has a direct line of communication with Hamas and Israel. It has previously helped mediate truces between the two.

A US priority is to allow more time for negotiations on the release of hostages. But time may be running short.

The US has advised Israel to hold off on a ground assault and is keeping Qatar apprised of that effort as the Gulf state seeks to mediate further hostage releases, two sources in Washington briefed on the hostage negotiations said on Monday.

Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, a new report suggested after it found that some of the world’s mega-wealthy people are paying little to no tax. Researchers at the European Union (EU) Observatory said that most people pay a higher tax rate than the super-rich, who, according to them, are able to use complex business structures for avoidance. They suggested a minimum 2% tax rate on billionaires’ global health would raise $250 billion a year. 

According to the report, there are around 2,500 billionaires worldwide with a combined wealth of $13 trillion. Therefore, the researchers said the number of taxpayers affected by this proposal would be “very small” and they would be paying a “very modest” tax rate. 

“Even so, the revenue potential is large, due to the concentration of wealth at the top of the distribution and the low current tax rates of billionaires,” the researchers wrote in the report.

The EU Tax Observatory is a research laboratory co-funded by the European Union and based at the Paris School of Economics. According to the BBC, Its researchers said that the automatic sharing of the wealthy’s account information across more than 100 countries had significantly reduced offshore tax evasion. However, they also added that billionaires are still able to get away with paying tax rates equal to 0% or 0.5% of their wealth “due to the frequent use of shell companies to avoid income taxation”. 

The researchers commended an agreement in 2021 between 140 different countries to make sure companies pay at least 15% in corporation tax, but they also said that the plan had been “dramatically weakened” since then by a “growing list of loopholes”.

Currently, the world’s billionaires collectively pay around $44 billion a year in individual income taxes and wealth taxes, the researchers wrote. Introducing a 2% minimum wealth tax would boost this by about $214 billion, they estimated.

“It is time to establish a global minimum tax on the very rich,” Joseph Stiglitz, an economist, scholar, and Nobel Prize winner, wrote in the report, adding, “This may seem impossible to attain, but so was undermining bank secrecy and introducing a minimum tax on corporations just a few years ago.”

Also Read | Man Sells “Energy Drink” Made From Urine On Amazon, Company Calls It “Crude Stunt”

Further, citing previous studies, the researchers said that billionaires have “very low” individual income taxes and wealth taxes. “When expressed as a fraction of income and considering all taxes paid at all levels of government beyond personal taxes … the effective tax rates of billionaires appear significantly lower than those of all other groups of the population,” they wrote.

The researchers also explained the reason why billionaires generally have low effective tax rates. According to them, billionaires in many countries use personal wealth-holding companies to distribute dividends and avoid paying income taxes. 

“So many people struggle to make ends meet yet pay the taxes their governments ask of them,” Mr Stiglitz continued. “We need to make sure those at the top of the income ladder who certainly have the financial means don’t wriggle out of them. Glaring tax disparity undermines the proper functioning of our democracy; it deepens inequality, weakens trust in our institutions, and erodes the social contract,” he added. 

Other measures that the researchers called for included increasing the minimum corporate tax rate to 25% and removing loopholes from it, creating a global asset registry, and introducing mechanisms to tax wealthy people who have been long-term residents in a country and move to a low-tax country. 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday warned Iran that the United States would respond “decisively” to any attack by its proxies, as tensions rise with the Israel-Hamas war.

“The United States does not seek conflict with Iran. We do not want this war to widen. But if Iran or its proxies attack US personnel anywhere, make no mistake. We will defend our people, we will defend our security — swiftly and decisively,” Blinken told a UN Security Council session.

The United States has accused Iran of assisting a renewal of attacks on US forces based in Iraq as part of a coalition against the Islamic State group.

Iran’s clerical leadership supports Hamas, which carried out a bloody assault on October 7 inside Israel which has responded with massive retaliation. Iran also has a close relationship with Lebanon’s Shiite militia Hezbollah which has had repeated conflicts with Israel.

The United States, the top diplomatic backer of Israel, last week vetoed a draft resolution on the conflict, saying it should have explicitly defended Israel’s right to self-defence.

The United States has put forward a new resolution seen by AFP that would voice sympathy for both Israeli and Palestinian casualties and defend “the inherent right of all states to individual and collective self-defence” while complying with obligations under international law.

The new resolution “incorporates substantive feedback that we received from fellow Council members over recent days,” Blinken said.

Sharing graphic accounts of Hamas militants killing children and other civilians, Blinken asked, “Where’s the outrage? Where’s the revulsion? Where’s the rejection? Where’s the explicit condemnation of these horrors?”

“We must affirm the right of any nation to defend itself and to prevent such harm from repeating itself. No member of this Council —  no nation in this entire body — could or would tolerate the slaughter of its people,” Blinken said.