Israel will not agree to any halt in fighting in Gaza that is not part of a deal that includes a return of hostages, a senior Israeli security official said on Friday.
The comment came after a statement from Hamas declaring that it would be ready to reach an agreement including an exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners, as long as Israel stopped the fighting in Gaza.
“There will be no truce, or any halt in fighting whatsoever, in Gaza which is not part-and-parcel of a hostage-release deal,” the official said in comments sent to Reuters. “Any ceasefire would arise solely within the framework of a deal.”
Israeli forces have ended operations in north Gaza’s Jabalia area after days of intense fighting and over 200 airstrikes, while probing further into Rafah in south Gaza, targeting what they say is the last major redoubt of Hamas battalions.
Israeli troops found caches of rocket launchers and other weapons, as well as Hamas tunnel shafts in the centre of Rafah, the military said on Friday, pressing an offensive to break up militant combat units it says are hunkered down in the city on the border with Egypt.
In an update on more than two weeks of fierce fighting in Jabalia, the Israeli military said troops had completed their operation and withdrawn to prepare for other operations in Gaza.
During the operation, troops recovered the bodies of seven of the 250 hostages Hamas-led militants abducted when they stormed over the border into Israel on Oct. 7 last year and killed around 1,200 people, according to Israeli tallies.
Since then, over 36,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s air and land war in Gaza, its Hamas-run health ministry says, and much of the densely populated enclave lies in ruins.
Israel will not agree to any halt in fighting that is not part of a deal that includes the return of surviving hostages, a senior Israeli security official said on Friday. Hamas had said on Thursday that it would be ready for an accord, including an exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel, as long as the Israelis stopped the war.
In Jabalia, a crowded urban district populated by refugees from the 1948 war of Israel’s founding and their descendants, Hamas turned the “civilian area into a fortified combat compound”, the Israeli military statement said.
It said Israeli troops killed hundreds of militants in close-quarter combat and seized large caches of weaponry and destroyed rocket launchers primed for use.
Underground, Israel forces disabled a weapons-filled tunnel network extending over 10 km and killed Hamas’ district battalion commander, it said.
Israel has blamed what it calls Hamas’ deliberate embedding of fighters in residential areas for the high civilian toll in the war. Hamas has denied using civilians as cover for fighters.
Jabalia has been battered by intense combat for weeks, underscoring Israel’s difficulty in destroying Hamas units.
There were weeks of heavy fighting in Jabalia in the early stages of the Israeli campaign and in January, the military said it had killed all the Hamas commanders and eliminated the combat formations of Gaza’s ruling group in the area.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vow to eradicate Hamas as a fighting and political force has run up against the Islamist group’s deep roots in Gaza’s social fabric.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Israel on Wednesday to come up with a post-war plan for Gaza, warning that without one, further military gains might not be durable, and lawlessness, chaos and a Hamas comeback could ensue.
