Hamas seeking Israel’s collapse to protect Palestinians, achieve regional peace: Official

A senior member of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas says the group is seeking to destroy the Israeli regime in order to protect the Palestinian people and achieve peace, stressing that Israel’s genocide in Gaza and carnage in Lebanon have paved the way for the occupying regime’s collapse.

Osama Hamdan, who is Hamas’s representative in Lebanon and also a member of the group’s political bureau, told al-Mayadeen television network on Monday that Israel has failed to achieve the goals of its aggression on Gaza and now is trying to achieve in the negotiations what it failed to gain on the battlefield.

Hamdan noted that talks regarding a five-day ceasefire in Gaza do not fulfill Palestinians’ demands as the aggression will continue again.

“We are seeking to stop the aggression against our people,” he said.

Israel “wants to restore the captives held by the resistance, and for the latter to raise the white flag, then decide whether it wants to end the war or not”, while “we are trying to protect our people strategically by removing this entity, so that the region can live in security and peace.”

Elsewhere in his remarks, Hamdan stressed that “any announcement of a ceasefire in Lebanon “pleases us, because Hezbollah stood with our people and made great sacrifices.”

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He also hailed the record-breaking 51 military operations conducted by Hezbollah against Israel on Sunday, saying they delivered a clear message to the Israeli regime that the crimes it has committed in Palestine and Lebanon “will not break the resistance, but will increase its determination.”

“Yesterday, the occupation and the leaders of this entity realized that 14 months of crime and murder in the Gaza Strip and the aggression on Lebanon … were not and will not be sufficient for the survival of this entity. Rather, they laid the foundation for the demise of this entity.”

Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7, 2023 after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime's decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.

The regime’s bloody onslaught on Gaza has so far killed at least 44,235 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured more than 104,638 others. Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under rubble.

Israel has also been targeting Lebanon since October 2023, when it launched the war on the Gaza Strip.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement has been responding to the aggression with numerous retaliatory operations, targeting the occupied Palestinian territories.

At least 3,768 people have been killed by Israeli fire, and 15,699 others wounded since the clashes began last year, according to the health ministry.

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