Hamas: Biden truce optimism an illusion
Published on: Sunday, August 18, 2024
By: AFP
A Palestinian mourns his relatives, killed in an Israeli strike, at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.
GAZA: A senior Hamas official on Saturday dismissed US President Joe Biden’s optimism after the American leader said a Gaza ceasefire was closer after talks in Doha.
“To say that we are getting close to a deal is an illusion,” Hamas political bureau member Sami Abu Zuhri said in a statement sent to AFP.
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“We are not facing a deal or real negotiations, but rather the imposing of American diktats.”
Biden said on Friday; “We are closer than we have ever been to a ceasefire in the Gaza war.”
Deadly Israeli strikes hit Lebanon and Gaza on Saturday as the US secretary of state headed back to Israel aiming to finalise a Gaza truce agreement, which diplomats say could help avert a wider regional conflagration.
Lebanon’s health ministry said an Israeli air strike in southern Lebanon killed 10 people including a Syrian woman and her two children.
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The strike was among the deadliest in southern Lebanon since the onset of near-daily exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah following the start of the Gaza war in October.
Israel’s military said it struck a Hezbollah weapons storage facility.
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In Hamas-run Gaza, civil defence rescuers said an Israeli air strike killed 15 people from a single Palestinian family.
The deaths in Al-Zawaida, central Gaza, added to a toll that the territory’s health ministry says exceeds 40,000.
“We are in the morgue seeing indescribable scenes of limbs and severed heads and children who are dismembered,” said Omar al-Dreemli, a relative.
The United Nations on Friday appealed for seven-day pauses in the fighting so it could vaccinate children against polio, after the Palestinian health ministry reported Gaza’s first polio case in 25 years.
Militants also seized 251 hostages, 111 of whom are still held in Gaza, including 39 the military says are dead. More than 100 were freed during a one-week truce in November.
Health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says war death toll at 40,074 08/17/2024 19:17:25 GMT+08:00The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said Saturday that at least 40,074 people have been killed in the war between Israel and Palestinian militants, now in its 11th month.
The toll includes 69 deaths in the previous 48 hours, according to ministry figures, which also list 92,537 people as wounded in the Gaza Strip since the war began when Hamas militants attacked Israel on October 7.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will leave on Saturday for Israel and seek to “conclude the agreement for a ceasefire and release of hostages and detainees”, the State Department said.
With a deal “now in sight, no one in the region should take actions to undermine this process,” Biden said.
Egyptian, Qatari and US mediators are working to finalise details of a framework ceasefire and hostage-release deal initially outlined by Biden in May. He said Israel had proposed it.
In a joint statement after two days of talks in Qatar, the mediators said they presented both sides with a proposal that “bridges remaining gaps”.
Talks aiming to secure a deal are to resume in Cairo “before the end of next week”, they said.
Hamas did not attend the Doha talks. An official of the Islamist movement, Osama Hamdan, told AFP on Thursday the group would join if the meeting set a timetable for implementing what Hamas had already agreed to.
A prospective cessation of hostilities has centred around a phased deal beginning with an initial truce.
On Friday, officials told AFP that Hamas will not accept “new conditions” from Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office on Tuesday had detailed its conditions for a truce, including “a veto on certain prisoners” being released from its jails.
Netanyahu has denied being the obstacle to a deal, blaming Hamas.
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