Israel estimates that 129 hostages remain in Gaza (File)
Gaza:
A top Hamas official accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Friday of issuing statements intended to torpedo prospects for a truce in the nearly seven-month war in Gaza.
Hossam Badran told AFP that Hamas was in the process of conducting internal dialogues within its leadership and with allied fighter groups before negotiators return to Cairo to continue negotiations towards a truce.
But he warned that Netanyahu’s repeated statements insisting he will send troops into the territory’s far southern city of Rafah were calculated to “thwart any possibility of concluding an agreement”.
“Netanyahu was the obstructionist in all previous rounds of dialogue and previous negotiations, and it is clear that he still is,” he said in a telephone interview.
“He is not interested in reaching an agreement, and therefore he says words in the media to thwart these current efforts.”
Mediators from Egypt, Qatar and the United States have proposed a deal that would halt fighting for 40 days and exchange Israeli hostages for potentially thousands of Palestinian prisoners, according to details released earlier by Britain.
The outcome of the indirect negotiations has remained highly uncertain, with back and forth over the number of hostages that could be released, and profound differences over the scope of any agreement.
Badran reiterated that Hamas’s goal remains a lasting ceasefire and “a complete and comprehensive withdrawal of the occupation forces from the Gaza Strip”.
That aim is at odds with the stated position of Netanyahu, who has vowed the army will keep fighting Hamas, including in Rafah, where some 1.5 million civilians are sheltering in cramped conditions.
But after months of stop-start negotiations, the head of Hamas’s Qatar-based political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, said Thursday that the group would “soon” send a delegation back to Egypt aiming for a deal that “realises the demands of our people”.
Haniyeh further said that Hamas was studying the latest proposal from Israel in a “positive spirit”.
Any deal reached would be the first since a one-week truce in November that saw 80 Israeli hostages exchanged for 240 Palestinian prisoners.
Israel estimates that 129 hostages remain in Gaza. The Israeli military says 35 of them are dead.
The Hamas attack on southern Israel that started the war resulted in the deaths of 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign against Hamas has killed more than 34,600 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
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