A Hamas official said on Sunday that the Palestinian group was withdrawing from Gaza truce talks, following a deadly Israeli strike that targeted commander Mohammed Deif more than nine months into the war.
Another Hamas official told reporters that “Commander Mohammed Deif”, the group’s military chief, was “well and directly overseeing” operations despite the bombing raid on a southern Gaza displacement camp on Saturday, which Israel said was an attempt to kill him.
Another senior official from group said Hamas was pulling out of negotiations towards a ceasefire because of Israeli “massacres” and repeated stalling.
The health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip said at least 92 people had been killed, more than half of them women and children, and 300 wounded in a strike on Al Mawasi, an Israeli-designated “safe zone” on the Mediterranean coast.
Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s Qatar-based political chief, told international mediators of the “decision to halt negotiations due to the (Israeli) occupation’s lack of seriousness, continued policy of procrastination and obstruction, and the ongoing massacres against unarmed civilians,” the official said.
But Hamas was “ready to resume negotiations” when Israel’s government “demonstrates seriousness in reaching a ceasefire agreement and a prisoner exchange deal,” the official quoted Haniyeh as saying.
Talks mediated by Qatar and Egypt, with United States support, have for months tried but failed to bring a halt to the war.
On Thursday, US President Joe Biden had said that a framework for a truce and hostage deal he had set out earlier in the war was “now agreed on by both Israel and Hamas,” though gaps remained.
‘Horrific scenes’
Al Mawasi, near the cities of Khan Younis and Rafah, had in May been declared a safe humanitarian zone by the Israeli military and civilians ordered to evacuate to it. However, there have been multiple deadly incidents there blamed on Israeli strikes.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, described the area as “a sandy 14-square-kilometre agricultural land, where people are left out in the open with little to no buildings or roads.”
“The claim that people in Gaza can move to ‘safe’ or ‘humanitarian’ zones is false,” said Lazzarini on social media site X.
Israel said it had on Saturday targeted Deif as well as an associate, Rafa Salama.
At the site of the strike, a photographer saw the charred remains of tents as Palestinians searched through the wreckage for any salvageable items.
Plastic covers, broken water tanks and other equipment used for makeshift shelters was scattered on the sand.
Scott Anderson, director of UNRWA affairs in the Gaza Strip, said that on a visit to Khan Younis’s Nasser hospital, where many of the casualties were taken, he had “witnessed some of the most horrific scenes I have seen” in the war.
“I saw toddlers who are double amputees, children paralysed and unable to receive treatment, and others separated from their parents,” he said in a statement.
Anderson added that “impediments to humanitarian operations prevent us from supporting people anywhere near the scale necessary.”
Separately on Sunday, rescuers said at least eight people were killed in strikes on different parts of Gaza City, where the Israeli military said its operations were ongoing.
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