• Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades chief survives Israeli attack
• Netanyahu says will go after Hamas leadership
• Death toll from conflict nears 38,600

CAIRO: Gaza ceasefire talks plunged into uncertainty on Sunday when differing statements came from Hamas in the wake of an Israeli strike targeting its senior commander with one official saying the Palestinian group was withdrawing from negotiations while the other stating the opposite.

Israel said its weekend’s deadly attacks had targeted Mohammed Deif, but an official of the Palestinian group stated that the Hamas military chief was “well and directly overseeing” operations despite the bombing on a Gaza displacement camp on Saturday, which Israel said was an attempt to kill him.

Deif heads the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades and had announced in an audio message the start of Hamas’s unprecedented Oct 7, 2023 attack.

The Hamas official said the group was pulling out of negotiations towards a ceasefire because of Israeli “massacres” and repeated stalling.

The health ministry in the Gaza Strip said at least 92 people had been killed, more than half of them women and children, and 300 wounded in Saturday’s strike on Al-Mawasi, an Israeli-designated “safe zone” on the Mediterranean coast.

Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s Qatar-based political chief, told international mediators of the “decision to halt negotiations due to the (Israeli) occupation’s lack of seriousness, continued policy of procrastination and obstruction, and the ongoing massacres against unarmed civilians”, the official said.

But Hamas was “ready to resume negotiations” when Israel’s government “demonstrates seriousness in reaching a ceasefire agreement and a prisoner exchange deal”, the official quoted Haniyeh as saying.

Talks mediated by Qatar and Egypt — with the United States support — have for months tried but failed to bring a halt to the war.

Two Egyptian security sources at ceasefire talks in Doha and Cairo said on Saturday that negotiations had been halted after three days of intense talks.

Meanwhile, another senior Hamas official said on Sunday the group has not withdrawn from ceasefire talks.

However, Izzat El-Reshiq, a member of the political office of Hamas, accused Israel of trying to derail efforts by Arab mediators and the United States to reach a ceasefire deal by stepping up its attacks in the enclave.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was expected to convene his close circle of ministers later on Sunday to discuss the talks.

The strike on Saturday which targeted Deif killed Rafa Salama, commander of Hamas’s Khan Younis brigade, the Israeli military claimed on Sunday.

A senior Hamas official denied Deif had been killed and that Israeli claims were aimed at justifying the attack.

On Sunday, Israeli forces continued to press ahead with aerial and ground shelling of several areas across the coastal enclave, home to 2.3 million people, most of whom have been displaced by the war.

A strike on a UN-run school in Nuseirat camp, one of the Gaza Strip’s eight longstanding refugee camps, killed 15 Palestinians and wounded dozens more, Hamas media and health officials said.

At least 38,584 Palestinians have been killed and 88,881 others injured in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since Oct 7, Gaza’s health ministry said on Sunday, an increase of 141 deaths since the day prior.

Netanyahu said it remained unclear if Deif and another Hamas commander had been killed and promised to continue to target the Hamas leadership, saying more military pressure on the group would improve chances of a prisoner swap deal. “Either way, we will get to the whole of the leadership of Hamas,” Netanyahu told a news conference.

Published in Dawn, July 15th, 2024