Russia and Ukraine have agreed to a new prisoner swap and the return of thousands of war dead during direct talks in Istanbul although little headway was made towards ending the war.

The delegations met on Monday at the Ottoman-era Ciragan Palace in the Turkish city, and officials confirmed that both sides will exchange prisoners of war and the remains of 6,000 soldiers killed in combat.

Negotiators from both sides confirmed they had reached a deal to swap all severely wounded soldiers as well as all captured fighters under the age of 25.

“We agreed to exchange all-for-all seriously wounded and seriously sick prisoners of war. The second category is young soldiers who are from 18 to 25 years old – all-for-all,” Ukraine’s lead negotiator and Defence Minister Rustem Umerov told reporters in Istanbul.

Russia’s lead negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, said the swap would involve “at least 1,000” on each side – topping the 1,000-for-1,000 POW exchange agreed at talks last month.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking from Vilnius, Lithuania, said the two parties “exchanged documents through the Turkish side” and Kyiv was preparing for the next group of captives to be released.

The Istanbul meeting marks the second direct dialogue in less than a month, but expectations were low. The talks on May 16 produced another major prisoner swap but failed to reach a ceasefire.

“The exchange of prisoners seems to be the diplomatic channel that actually works between Russia and Ukraine,” Al Jazeera correspondent Dmitry Medvedenko said, reporting from Istanbul.

“We’ve actually had exchanges of prisoners throughout this war, not in the numbers that have been happening as a result of these Istanbul talks,” Medvedenko added.

Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, said Kyiv also handed over a list of children it accuses Russia of abducting and demanded their return.

As for a truce, Russia and Ukraine remain sharply divided.

“The Russian side continued to reject the motion of an unconditional ceasefire,” Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergiy Kyslytsya told reporters after the talks.

Russia said it had offered a limited pause in fighting.

“We have proposed a specific ceasefire for two to three days in certain areas of the front line,” top negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said, adding this was needed to collect bodies of dead soldiers from the battlefield.

At the negotiating table, Russia presented a memorandum setting out the Kremlin’s terms for ending hostilities, the Ukrainian delegation said.

Umerov told reporters that Kyiv officials would need a week to review the document and decide on a response. Ukraine proposed further talks on a date between June 20 and June 30, he said.

After the talks, Russian state news agencies Tass and RIA Novosti published the text of the Russian memorandum, which suggested that Ukraine withdraw its forces from the four regions that Russia annexed in September 2022 but never fully captured as a condition for a ceasefire.

As an alternate way of reaching a truce, the memorandum presses Ukraine to halt its mobilisation efforts and freeze Western arms deliveries, conditions were suggested earlier by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The document also suggests that Ukraine stop any redeployment of forces and ban any military presence of third countries on its soil as conditions for halting hostilities.

The Russian document further proposes that Ukraine end martial law and hold elections, after which the two countries could sign a comprehensive peace treaty that would see Ukraine declare its neutral status, abandon its bid to join NATO, set limits on the size of its armed forces and recognize Russian as the country’s official language on par with Ukrainian.

Ukraine and the West have previously rejected all those demands from Moscow.

Ceasefire hopes remain elusive

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the talks “magnificent”.

“My greatest wish is to bring together Putin and Zelenskyy in Istanbul or Ankara and even add [United States President Donald] Trump along,” he said.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, who chaired the talks, said the world was watching closely. He acknowledged the two sides had discussed the conditions for a ceasefire but no tangible outcome was announced.

Oleksiy Goncharenko, a Ukrainian member of parliament, told Al Jazeera he was not very optimistic about talks in Istanbul.

“Russia clearly shows that they don’t want to end the war because Ukraine proposed a 30-days ceasefire in March, and the American and Europe proposition was the same, but only one country [Russia] refused,” Goncharenko said.

Meanwhile, Ukraine has ramped up its military efforts far beyond the front lines, claiming responsibility for drone attacks on Sunday that it said damaged or destroyed more than 40 Russian warplanes. The operation targeted airbases in three distant regions – the Arctic, Siberia and the Far East – thousands of kilometres from Ukraine.

“This brilliant operation will go down in history,” Zelenskyy said, calling the raids a turning point in Ukraine’s struggle.

Ukrainian officials said the attacks crippled nearly a third of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. Vasyl Maliuk, head of the Security Service of Ukraine, said the mission had taken more than a year to plan.

Zelenskyy said the setback for Russia’s military would increase pressure on Moscow to return to the negotiating table.

“Russia must feel the cost of its aggression. That is what will push it towards diplomacy,” he said during his visit to Lithuania, where he met leaders from NATO’s eastern flank and Nordic countries.

Ukraine’s air force, meanwhile, reported that Russia launched 472 drones on Sunday – the highest number since the start of its full-scale invasion in 2022 – aiming to exhaust Ukrainian air defences. Most of those drones targeted civilian areas, it said.

On Monday, Russian forces bombarded southern Ukraine’s Kherson region, killing three people and injuring 19, including two children. Separately, five people were killed and nine injured in attacks near Zaporizhzhia in the neighbouring Zaporizhia region.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its forces had intercepted 162 Ukrainian drones overnight across eight regions and Crimea while Ukraine said it shot down 52 out of 80 drones launched by Russia.

Zelenskyy warned that if the Istanbul talks fail to deliver results, more sanctions against Russia will be necessary. “If there’s no breakthrough, then new, strong sanctions must follow – urgently,” he said.

Today, three Palestinians have been killed and 35 wounded by Israeli fire near an aid distribution centre in the Gaza Strip’s southern city of Rafah. The attack came a day after Israeli tanks opened fire on thousands of desperate and hungry Palestinians at the same site, killing at least 31 people. One person was also shot dead at another distribution site near the Netzarim Corridor in central Gaza the same day.

There are currently only four such sites distributing food to Gaza’s starving population of two million people, who for nearly three months were forced to contend with a full Israeli blockade that prevented the entry of all aid into the enclave.

On May 19, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu magnanimously opted to allow a resumption of “minimal” aid deliveries to Gaza, having determined that impending mass starvation was a “red line” that might jeopardise the undying support of the US, Israel’s traditional partner in crime and the primary enabler of its slaughter.

And yet these mass killings suggest that the new “minimal” arrangement offers Palestinians a decidedly horrific choice: either die of starvation or die trying to obtain food – not, of course, that these are the only two options for dying in a genocidal war in which Israel has indiscriminately bombed hospitals, refugee camps and everything else that can be bombed, killing more than 54,400 people.

The aid distribution hubs are run by a sketchy new outfit called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), initially an Israeli brainchild that operates as a private aid organisation registered in both Switzerland and the US state of Delaware. As The Guardian newspaper noted, the GHF has “no experience distributing food in a famine zone”. It does, however, have ties to the US and Israeli governments and employs former US military and intelligence officers.

So it is that food distribution in Gaza now transpires under the supervision of armed US security contractors at hubs conveniently located near Israeli military positions. The four sites that are currently operational are located in central and southern Gaza while a significant part of the enclave’s population is in the north. To reach the hubs, many Palestinians must walk long distances and cross Israeli military lines, further endangering their lives.

No mechanism is in place to distribute food to elderly, sick or wounded Palestinians – not to mention starving people unable to engage in such physical exertion in the hopes of putting something in their stomachs.

Furthermore, the GHF initiative feeds into Israel’s forced displacement scheme whereby surviving Palestinians will be concentrated in the south in preparation for their eventual expulsion, as per US President Donald Trump’s plan for a reborn Gaza Strip largely devoid of Palestinians.

In other words, the GHF is not in Gaza to alleviate hunger or cater to the needs of its population; rather, the food distribution hubs are a lucrative PR stunt aimed at creating a “humanitarian” distraction from a continuing policy of deliberate starvation and genocide.

The United Nations and aid organisations have lambasted the weaponisation of humanitarian aid while the situation was apparently too much to handle even for Jake Wood, the former US marine sniper who served as the GHF’s executive director before his recent resignation on the grounds that “it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence”.

The massacres of the past two days are not the first such incidents to occur on the GHF’s watch. Since the launch of the initiative in late May, there have been numerous killings of Palestinians near distribution points. According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, the total number of people killed while seeking aid from this scheme has reached 52 so far.

And yet the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza trying to engage in that most necessary human activity of eating is hardly new. Recall that on February 29, 2024, at least 112 desperate Palestinians were massacred while queueing for flour southwest of Gaza City. More than 750 were wounded.

After that particular episode, then-US President Joe Biden announced that the US would airdrop food into Gaza, another costly PR spectacle incapable of providing even a drop in the bucket in terms of the humanitarian needs of the population. A more straightforward and efficient move would obviously have been to pressure the Israelis to cease blocking aid trucks from entering Gaza by land – and for the US to, you know, cease bombarding Israel with billions of dollars in aid and weaponry.

As it turned out, airdrops can be lethal too, and just a week after Biden’s announcement, five Palestinians were killed when a parachute attached to an aid pallet failed to open. To be sure, there are few things more abominably ironic than hungry people being killed by food aid literally crashing onto their heads.

Call it humanitarian slaughter.

Then there was Biden’s $230m humanitarian aid pier, which shut down in July after a mere 25 days of service. It was heavily criticised by aid groups as another expensive, complex and ineffective means of getting food and other aid into Gaza. But then again, effectiveness was never the point.

Now, if the GHF’s Gaza debut is any indication, the militarised distribution of food will continue to provide opportunities for mass killing as crowds of starving Palestinians gather around aid hubs. The phrase “shooting fish in a barrel” comes to mind – as if the Gaza Strip weren’t enough of a barrel already.

To be sure, the idea of luring starving people to specific geographical points to facilitate Israel’s genocidal conquest is singularly diabolical. And as the US persists in enabling Israel’s fish-in-a-barrel approach, any remotely moral world would refuse to stomach the arrangement any longer.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Iraqi authorities have opened an investigation into a mass die-off of fish in the country’s central and southern marshlands, the latest in a series of such incidents in recent years.

One possible cause for the devastation is a shortage of oxygen, triggered by low water flow, increased evaporation and rising temperatures driven by climate change, according to officials and environmental activists. Another is the use of chemicals by fishermen.

“We have received several citizens’ complaints,” said Jamal Abd Zeid, chief environmental officer for the Najaf governorate, which stretches from central to southern Iraq, adding that a technical inspection team had been set up.

He explained that the team would look into water shortages, electrical fishing, and the use by fishermen of “poisons”.

For at least five years, Iraq has endured successive droughts linked to climate change. Authorities further attribute the severe decline in river flow to the construction of dams by neighbouring Iran and Turkiye.

The destruction of Iraq’s natural environment adds another layer of suffering to a country that has already faced decades of war and political oppression.

“We need lab tests to determine the exact cause” of the fish die-off, said environmental activist Jassim al-Assadi, who suggested that agricultural pesticides could also be responsible.

Investigations into similar incidents have shown that the use of poison in fishing can lead to mass deaths.

“It is dangerous for public health, as well as for the food chain,” al-Assadi said. “Using poison today, then again in a month or two … It’s going to accumulate.”