Hamas weighs truce offer as Gaza strikes continue
PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES: Scores were reported killed in overnight bombings across the Gaza Strip on Sunday as Hamas said it needed more time to consider a proposal that would halt its war with Israel in the besieged Palestinian territory.
International mediators have tried to seal a proposed truce deal thrashed out last week in Paris. However, a top Hamas official in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan, said on Saturday that the proposed framework was missing some details.
Hamas needed more time to “announce our position,” Hamdan said, “based on ... our desire to put an end as quickly as possible to the aggression that our people suffer.”
A Hamas source has said the proposal involves an initial six-week pause that would see more aid delivered into Gaza and exchanges of some Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.
Hamas’ Qatar-based leader Ismail Haniyeh has said any ceasefire must lead to “a full withdrawal” of Israeli troops from Gaza.
Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said early Sunday that at least 92 people had been killed overnight, including in what the group’s media office said was an Israeli bombardment of a kindergarten in Rafah where displaced people were sheltering.
Concerns over a potential Israeli ground incursion into the southern border city have mounted in recent days, with hundreds of thousands of displaced seeking refuge from the fighting there in makeshift shelters and encampments.
Many made the journey from even harder-hit areas after being told the city was a safe zone, but strikes have continued there as well, with mourners gathering outside a local hospital Saturday to pray for the dead after another bombardment.
“The children were just sleeping, and suddenly the bombardment happened. The bedroom fell on my children. God took one of my children, and three escaped death,” Ahmad Bassam al-Jamal told Agence France-Presse (AFP), his voice breaking. “My child now is a martyr in heaven.”
The city that had been home to 200,000 people now hosts more than half of Gaza’s population, the United Nations said.
Israeli forces in Gaza have methodically destroyed buildings in an attempt to create a buffer zone inside the Palestinian territory, endangering civilian lives, experts and human rights groups claimed.
The plan, not publicly confirmed by Israel, appears to entail taking a significant chunk of territory out of the already tiny Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, something experts as well as Israel’s foreign allies have warned against.
Border security has become a priority for many Israelis, and the return to communities near the Gaza border would be seen as a sign that Hamas no longer posed a threat.