Occupied JERUSALEM(WNAM Monitoring): 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.”
North Gaza fighting over
Israeli forces have ended combat operations in the Jabalia area of north Gaza after destroying more than 10 kilometers of tunnels during days of intense fighting that included over 200 air strikes, the military said on Friday. At the south end of Gaza, Israeli forces pressing an offensive into Rafah found rocket launchers and other weapons as well as tunnel shafts built by Hamas in the city center, the army said. Tank-led Israeli troops aim to break up Hamas’ fighting formations in the city on the border with Egypt.
In an update on more than two weeks of intense fighting in Jabalia, the Israeli military said troops had completed their operation and withdrawn to prepare for other operations in Gaza.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. In Jabalia, a densely packed 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 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.
