GAZA (Dispatches) – The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas has submitted its response to a United States-backed ceasefire proposal, but a leading official from the group said the proposed deal offered “no guarantees to end the war”.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Basem Naim said that Hamas had still “responded positively” to the latest proposal relayed to it by U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, despite the Palestinian group saying that the proposal was different to one it had agreed upon with Witkoff a week earlier.
“One week ago, we agreed with Mr Witkoff on one proposal, and we said, ‘This is acceptable, we can consider this a negotiating paper,’” Naim said. “He went to the other party, to the Israelis, to get their response. Instead of having a response to our proposal, he brought us a new proposal … which had nothing to do with what we agreed upon.”
In a statement, Hamas had said that it had submitted a response to Witkoff, and that the proposal “aims to achieve a permanent ceasefire, a comprehensive withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and ensure the flow of aid” to Palestinians in Gaza.
Hamas added that 10 living Israeli captives would be released as part of the agreement, as well as the bodies of 18 dead Israelis, in exchange for an “agreed-upon number of Palestinian prisoners”.
Witkoff called Hamas’s response “totally unacceptable”.
“Hamas should accept the framework proposal we put forward as the basis for proximity talks, which we can begin immediately this coming week,” the envoy said in a post on social media. “That is the only way we can close a 60-day ceasefire deal in the coming days in which half of the living captives and half of those who are deceased will come home to their families, and in which we can have at the proximity talks substantive negotiations in good-faith to try to reach a permanent ceasefire.”
The Zionist regime has now killed more than 54,000 Palestinians since October 2023, with starvation looming across Gaza after weeks of Israeli blockade, and only a small flow of aid since the Zionist regime allowed it to resume in mid-May.
With hopes for a permanent truce seemingly fading once again, the level of hunger and desperation inside Gaza grows, with the Zionist regime allowing only a trickle of humanitarian aid into the strip after it had imposed a total blockade for more than two months. The UN warned on Friday that all of the 2.3 million population of Gaza is now at risk of famine. That came after it said in mid-May that one in every five Palestinians there is experiencing starvation.