Any exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners can only take place after a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, Osama Hamdan, a top Hamas official, said today.
As negotiations continued in Cairo between the Palestinian Islamist movement and representatives of the US, Qatar and Egypt, Hamdan gave a press conference in Beirut in which he reiterated Hamas’s terms: an end to Israeli military operations, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from The Gaza Strip and the return of the displaced to the areas they left.
“In the last two days, the movement presented its position on the proposal submitted by the brother mediators from Qatar and Egypt. We confirmed our conditions for reaching a truce: a complete withdrawal (of troops) from the Gaza Strip and the return of the displaced to the areas they left, especially in the north,” said Osama Hamdan, a member of Hamas’ political bureau.
The humanitarian crisis has worsened in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, where hundreds of thousands of residents are estimated to have remained in defiance of Israeli army orders to evacuate. The United Nations has failed to deliver food aid to the northern Palestinian enclave since January 23. Israeli authorities have denied access to UN convoys, while US jets today dropped humanitarian aid – the first of a series of such operations to follow.
Addressing the US government, Hamdan stressed: “We are telling Washington that more important than sending (humanitarian) aid is to stop arms supplies to Israel.”
Source: RES-MPE
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