Hamas says no point in further Gaza truce talks

GAZA CITY: A senior Hamas official said Tuesday the group was no longer interested in truce talks with Israel and urged the international community to halt Israel’s “hunger war” against Gaza.

“There is no sense in engaging in talks or considering new ceasefire proposals as long as the hunger war and extermination war continue in the Gaza Strip,” Basem Naim told AFP.

He said the world must pressure the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end the “crimes of hunger, thirst, and killings” in Gaza.

The comments by Naim, a Hamas political bureau member and former Gaza health minister, came a day after Israel’s military said expanded operations in Gaza would include displacing “most” of its population.

They come a day after Israel said its security cabinet approved the military’s plan for expanded operations, which an Israeli official said would entail “the conquest of the Gaza Strip and the holding of the territories”.

Nearly all of the territory’s inhabitants have been displaced, often multiple times, since the start of the war sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

Gaza has been under total Israeli blockade since March 2 and faces a severe humanitarian crisis.

Israel’s military resumed its offensive on the Gaza Strip on March 18, ending a two-month truce.

The spokesperson for Gaza’s civil defence agency, Mahmud Bassal, said Tuesday that three Palestinians including a little girl were killed in Israeli dawn attacks on different areas of Gaza.

A UN spokesman said Monday Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was “alarmed” by the Israeli plan that “will inevitably lead to countless more civilians killed and the further destruction of Gaza”.

“Gaza is, and must remain, an integral part of a future Palestinian state,” Farhan Haq said.

The Israeli decision comes as the UN and aid organisations have repeatedly warned of the humanitarian catastrophe on the ground, with famine again looming.

On Monday, a senior Israeli security official said that “a central component of the plan is a large-scale evacuation of the entire Gazan population from the fighting zones… to areas in southern Gaza”.

Military spokesman Effie Defrin said the planned offensive will include “moving most of the population of the Gaza Strip… to protect them”.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot in a radio interview on Tuesday called Israel’s plan for a Gaza offensive “unacceptable”, and said its government was “in violation of humanitarian law”.

For Palestinians, any forced displacement evokes memories of the “Nakba”, or catastrophe — the mass displacement in the war that led to Israel’s creation in 1948.

On Monday, the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said at least 2,459 people had been killed since Israel resumed its campaign on March 18, bringing the overall death toll from the war to 52,567.