By NIDAL AL-MUGHRABI, MOHAMMAD SALEM and MAAYAN LUBELL Reuters
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CAIRO/GAZA/JERUSALEM — Efforts to secure a ceasefire and hostage release in Gaza gathered momentum on Friday after Hamas made a revised proposal on the terms of a deal, and Israel said negotiations would continue into next week.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the head of the Mossad intelligence agency returned from an initial meeting with mediators in Doha, the capital of Qatar, and that negotiations would continue next week.

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“There are still gaps between the sides,” Netanyahu’s office said.

Earlier, a source in Israel’s negotiating team, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there was now a real chance of achieving agreement.

Those remarks were in sharp contrast to past instances in the nine-month-old war in Gaza when Israel said conditions attached by Hamas were not acceptable.

A Palestinian official close to the internationally mediated peace efforts said the latest proposal by the militant Islamist group could lead to a framework agreement if embraced by Israel.

He said Hamas was no longer demanding as a pre-condition an Israeli commitment to a permanent ceasefire before signing an agreement, and would allow negotiations to achieve that throughout a first six-week phase.

“Should the sides need more time to seal an agreement on a permanent ceasefire, the two sides should agree there would be no return to the fighting until they do that,” the official told Reuters.

Hamas later said it rejected the presence of foreign forces in Gaza, signalling its opposition to any plan to send an international contingent to the Gaza Strip to help keep the peace in the Palestinian enclave.

The Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), a Palestinian group allied with Hamas, said separately that it would consider any international or other forces in Gaza as occupiers.

Hamas said it had told Hezbollah it had agreed to a ceasefire proposal in Gaza and that the Lebanese group’s leader had welcomed the step, two sources familiar with the matter said.

“If there is a Gaza agreement, then from zero hour there will be a ceasefire in Lebanon,” said one of the sources, an official in Hezbollah, which says its rocket and drone attacks on northern Israel are in support of the Palestinians.