Hamas leader says hostage deal is ‘all or nothing’
Hamas’s de-facto leader has said he will only agree to a new truce if it guarantees the release of all Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli jails, according to reports.
Al Arabi Al Jadidi, a Qatari newspaper, on Thursday quoted an unnamed Egyptian official saying the “leadership of Hamas” had rejected Israel’s offer of a temporary truce in exchange for the release of several dozen Israeli hostages.
Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, insisted on a lasting ceasefire and all Palestinian prisoners being released, including several high-profile figures, the newspaper reported.
Sinwar also reportedly demanded that Israel halt its combat operations in Gaza before the deal goes into effect.
Hamas later on Thursday said it would reject any deals to free more hostages until Israel stops bombing Gaza.
“If Israel wants its prisoners alive, then it has no other options but to stop the aggression and the war,” said Abu Obeida, a spokesman for Hamas’s military wing.
No discussions
Meanwhile, Israeli media quoted an unnamed senior Israeli official saying there were no discussions under way on a possible hostage release.
The official told several media outlets that Israel expects Hamas to meet its previous commitment to release all women and child hostages first, before further steps are discussed.
“There is a national Palestinian decision that there should be no talk about prisoners or exchange deals, except after a full cessation of aggression,” the official said.
Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper on Thursday reported that Hamas wants at least three high-profile figures including Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian leader jailed during the Second Intifada, his relative and Hamas member Abdullah Barghouti and Ahmad Saadat, a senior figure in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, to be freed in a future deal.
Marwan Bargouthi and Saadat are political heavyweights with ambitions to lead the Palestinian Authority.
A recent opinion poll in the West Bank showed that Barghouti was a more popular choice as the leader of Palestine than Mahmoud Abbas, the current Palestinian president.
Network of tunnels
Earlier on Thursday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it had uncovered a network of tunnels running underneath Gaza City from a property allegedly owned by Sinwar.
Footage released by the Israeli army showed a spiral staircase in a shaft leading down to tunnels kitted out with surveillance cameras, heavy blast doors and electricity.
Sinwar has been Israel’s prime target since it launched its ground invasion.
The IDF last week dropped flyers on Gaza promising a $400,000 (£315,000) bounty for information leading to his capture, while cabinet ministers earlier this week berated the military for failing to catch him.
With his slight frame and close-cropped hair, the 61-year-old stands out among the Hamas leadership, many of whom have lived abroad in luxury for years and are seen as distant from the hardships of Gazans.
The second most powerful member of Hamas after Ismail Haniyeh, the group’s overall leader, Sinwar was born in a refugee camp in Gaza’s Khan Younis.
After a childhood marked by poverty, with his family forced to rely on UN aid, Sinwar soon became politically active.
At 26 he was detained after he was injured when an improvised explosive device he was making accidentally went off. It was only in custody that Israeli investigators discovered his involvement in the killings of four fellow Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel.
Rising through ranks
Sinwar would spend the next 22 years in jail until his release in 2011 as part of a landmark prisoner exchange.
Quickly rising through the ranks, he was elected head of the terrorist organisation in the Gaza Strip and became de-facto ruler of Gaza in 2017.
But Sinwar remained committed to freeing the rest of the Palestinians being held prisoner in Israel’s jails.
Several Hamas leaders have said that achieving this was one of the main aims of the Oct 7 attacks.
So far, some 240 Palestinians have been released by Israel in exchange for 105 Israelis.
Meanwhile, a report by the UN and several NGOs released on Thursday declared “catastrophic hunger” in Gaza, just one step away from the official declaration of famine, as it said more than half a million people are starving due to “woefully insufficient” quantities of food. The UN has declared famine only twice in the past 20 years.
“It doesn’t get any worse,” said Arif Husain, chief economist for the UN’s World Food Programme. “I have never seen something at the scale that is happening in Gaza. And at this speed. How quickly it has happened, in just a matter of two months.”
Humanitarian aid
More than 1.3 million people in Gaza are believed to be in the emergency or in catastrophe phase, according to the UN classification.
Israel has begun to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza in recent weeks, but the amount arriving is still inadequate to meet the needs of more than 2 million people.
A Telegraph reporter has seen aid food packages including packs of energy biscuits labelled “not for sale” on sale at several locations in the south of Gaza.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) said the north of the enclave was without a functional hospital because of a severe lack of fuel, staff and supplies.
Only nine out of 36 health facilities were partially functional in the whole of Gaza, according to the WHO. All these facilities are concentrated in the south of the enclave.
