Hamas has said it would only settle for a deal that encompasses all of the Palestinian resistance movement’s demands from the Israeli regime amid the genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.
“Our consistent position is that the only option [out there] is the conclusion of a comprehensive truce agreement,” Osama Hamdan, Hamas’s senior representative in Lebanon, told Qatar’s Al Araby TV channel on Monday.
“The occupiers always try to focus on the issue of captive exchange,” and evade the group’s other demands, the Palestinian official said.
He said those demands included the complete cessation of the Israeli aggression, the regime’s full withdrawal, the return of the displaced people, an end to the siege that has been imposed by Tel Aviv on Gaza, and the beginning of the coastal sliver’s reconstruction process.
The regime began the war on October 7 in response to Al-Aqsa Storm, a retaliatory operation by Gaza’s resistance groups, during which hundreds were taken captive.
At least 34,683 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed in Gaza and 78,018 others injured so far during the brutal military onslaught.
Talks led to ‘specific mechanism’
The remarks came after two days of intense negotiations in the Egyptian capital of Cairo with Egyptian, Qatari, and American mediators, following which the Palestinian negotiators returned to Gaza for consultation with the group’s leadership.
“We negotiated with mediators, including the Americans, concerning certain issues and we arrived at a specific mechanism,” Hamdan said.
The Palestinian negotiators, however, still needed to consult Hamas’s leadership concerning the mechanism before coming up with a “final standpoint.”