Hamas chairman Ismail Haniyeh provides a short statement on the deal, while another senior official explains details of the truce and hostage release
The terrorist organization Hamas on Tuesday morning said a truce agreement with Israel was near, and its response was delivered to Qatar, senior officials told the media.
Hamas chairman Ismail Haniyeh said, in a statement sent to Reuters by his aide, that the group was “close to reaching a truce agreement” with Israel and its response was delivered to the Qatari mediators.
The Haniyeh statement gave no more details, but a senior Hamas official spoke to Al Jazeera TV about negotiations relating to the length of the truce, aid delivery to Gaza and the release of Israeli hostages.
“We leave the announcement of the details of the agreement to our brothers in Qatar. We have given our answer. They will complete the matter in the next few hours and then announce the achievement of this agreement,” senior Hamas official, Issat el Reshiq, told Al Jazeera TV.
“This is a limited truce for a few days and not a total ceasefire or a total cessation of (Israel’s) aggression. During this period, aid will be introduced to all areas of the Gaza Strip in exchange for the release of Israeli abductees, women and children, at the same time as the release of a limited number of Palestinian prisoners, women and children, from prisons in Israel,” el Reshiq explained.
The terrorist organization Hamas took about 240 hostages during its October 7 rampage into Israel, abducting civilians as young as 10-months-old up to elderly women in their 80s, as well as massacring families in their homes and at a music festival, killing at least 1,200 people.
Negotiations on the release of hostages has been a “sacred” task, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reassured families of abductees on Monday night, after meeting with them along with Israel’s War Cabinet at the military headquarters.
“Restoring our abductees is a sacred and supreme task – and I am committed to it. We have not relented from the task of returning them, and this is my responsibility and that of the War Cabinet,” Netanyahu stated.
“I listened to the pain of the families. We spoke heart to heart, I shared with them as much as I could the political, intelligence and operational efforts that we lead around the clock,” he added.
“I told the dear families: our abductees are always in front of my eyes – from the moment I get up in the morning until I go to bed late at night – all the time,” the Israeli prime minister said.
Over the past day there had also been a lot of developments, starting with the U.S. President Joe Biden, who said he believed a deal was near, reiterated by a senior White House official that it was “closer now than we’ve been before.”
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) president, Mirjana Spoljaric, even finally met Haniyeh in Qatar on Monday, in order to “advance humanitarian issues” related to the conflict, though a statement said negotiations aimed at releasing the hostages were not part of the discussions, since the organization wanted to remain a “neutral intermediary” ready “to facilitate any future release that the parties agree to.”
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