Hamas have said there will be no hostages-for-prisoners swap deal unless Israel’s war on Gaza ends [Getty]
A senior Hamas official has said Gaza ceasefire talks are ineffective until Donald Trump enters the White House and that recent US sanctions against six officials in the Hamas movement reaffirmed Washington’s absolute strategic alliance with Israel’s rulers, “no matter who heads the [Israeli] government”.
Mohammed Nazzal, a senior member of Hamas’ political bureau, told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, The New Arab’s Arabic-language sister edition, that while his inclusion on the list was a “badge of honour” he had never been involved with supplying arms or funds to Palestinian armed groups.
“The regrettable truth is that these lists are cooked up by [Israel’s] foreign intelligence agency ‘Mossad‘, and domestic security agency “Shin Bet“, before being issued by the US administration… in order to besiege the resistance,” he said.
He reiterated the legitimacy of the struggle to defend the Palestinian people and asserted that Israeli and US threats wouldn’t deter resistance to occupation.
Nazzal also said rumours that the Hamas leadership had been expelled from Qatar were part of a campaign led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself to put additional pressure on the Palestinian movement to “raise the white flag” due to Isreal being unable to defeat Palestinian armed groups in Gaza.
Regarding the state of ceasefire negotiations, Nazzal said these were currently suspended “because Netanyahu doesn’t want any agreement to happen in Joe Biden’s term and is waiting for Donald Trump to take his presidential powers”.
As it is still two months before Trump takes office, even if negotiations do resume “they aren’t expected to yield results”, he added.
He said the position of Hamas and Palestinian armed factions toward the ceasefire negotiations had not changed following the death of former leader Yahya Sinwar.
This was because their position had been mutually agreed on by all the parties with “the interest of our cause and our people at the forefront” and “didn’t reflect the stance of a specific person however high their status”.
He said the latest statistics put the entire Palestinian population at around 15 million, 55 percent of whom lived outside their homeland, and this distribution was a strength for Hamas because if they were “besieged in one place, the movement’s leaders elsewhere could take over running matters”.
“Currently the leadership bodies in [Hamas] are studying the options when it comes to filling the leadership spaces resulting from the martyrdom of their predecessors and are taking into consideration all the circumstances and facts applicable to the movement and the region,” he said.
This article is based on an article which appeared in our Arabic edition by Mahmoud Khalil on 21 November 2024. To read the original article click here.
