A Hamas official said Sunday that the Palestinian group was withdrawing from Gaza truce talks, as Israeli bombardments hit a school a day after a deadly strike targeting the militant commander Mohammed Deif.
Speaking after the strike on southern Gaza’s Al-Mawasi, which the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said killed at least 92 people, a senior official from Iran-backed Hamas cited Israeli “massacres” as a reason for suspending negotiations.
A second Hamas official said Deif, commander of the Islamist group’s military wing, was “well and directly overseeing” operations despite the Israeli bombing raid that the military said was an attempt to kill him.
On Sunday, Israeli forces struck a UN-run school in the central Nuseirat refugee camp that the military said “served as a hideout” for militants.
The civil defense agency in Gaza said 15 people were killed in the strike, the fifth attack in just over a week to hit a school used as shelter by displaced Palestinians.
The first Hamas official, quoting the group’s Qatar-based political chief Ismail Haniyeh, said Israel’s “lack of seriousness, continued policy of procrastination and obstruction, and the ongoing massacres against unarmed civilians” were behind the “decision to halt negotiations.”
But according to the official, Haniyeh told international mediators Hamas was “ready to resume negotiations” when Israel’s government “demonstrates seriousness in reaching a ceasefire agreement and a prisoner exchange deal.”
Talks mediated by Qatar and Egypt, with United States support, have for months tried but failed to bring a halt to the war.
Israeli demonstrators, sometimes in the tens of thousands, have stepped up their actions demanding the government reach a deal to free the captives taken by Hamas militants on 7 October.
The military’s chief of staff Herzi Halevi said in a video message that “continuous... military pressure” could help create “the conditions for an agreement to return the hostages.”