Qatar’s chief negotiator has voiced frustration over talks for a truce in Gaza in an interview with AFP, a month after Israel resumed its strikes on the Palestinian territory and another round of negotiations ended without a deal.

“We’re definitely frustrated by the slowness, sometimes, of the process in the negotiation. This is an urgent matter. There are lives at stake here if this military operation continues day by day,” Mohammed Al-Khulaifi said on Friday.

“We’ve been working continuously in the last days to try to bring the parties together and revive the agreement that has been endorsed by the two sides,” the Qatari minister of state said.

“And we will remain committed to this, in spite of the difficulties,” he added.

“Critiques without any context, such as the ones that we keep hearing from Netanyahu himself, are often just noise,” he added.

Al-Khulaifi rejected recent remarks from Netanyahu to the US-based evangelical Christian channel Daystar that Qatar had promoted “anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism” on US college campuses.