Hamas weighs Gaza truce deal proposal
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Hamas said it was considering in a “positive spirit” a proposed truce and hostage release deal with Israel as the bloodiest ever Gaza war claimed more lives yesterday.
Nearly seven months of war have devastated the Palestinian coastal territory, which the United Nations said would require a rebuilding effort on a scale not seen since World War II.
After months of stop-start negotiations, Qatar-based Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh said the group would “soon” send a delegation back to Egypt for ceasefire discussions, aiming for a deal that “realises the demands of our people”.
Haniyeh told Egyptian and Qatari mediators in calls on Thursday that Hamas was studying the latest proposal from Israel with a “positive spirit”.
After a meeting in Cairo last weekend, the Hamas delegation had returned to Qatar to discuss the proposal.
The war began with Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed at least 34,596 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Gaza’s Civil Defence agency and medics said the toll rose overnight when Israeli warplanes struck a neighbourhood in Rafah, southern Gaza, killing six people in a family house.
The destruction there adds to the 72 per cent of Gaza’s residential buildings which a UN report on Thursday said have been completely or partially destroyed.
“The scale of the destruction is huge and unprecedented... this is a mission that the global community has not dealt with since World War II,” said Abdallah al-Dardari, the UN Development Programme’s Regional Director for Arab States. (AFP)