The Hamas terrorist group has rejected Israel’s latest peace proposal.
The leader of Hamas’s negotiating team, Khalil Al-Hayya, said in a televised speech Thursday that it would not agree to more partial deals with Israel, demanding instead a comprehensive one to end the war and swap Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners.
Israel had sought the release of 10 living hostages in return for a 45-day cease-fire, according to The Times of Israel. Israel also offered to free 1,231 Palestinian security prisoners and resume the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, according to the outlet.
The terrorist group still holds 59 Israelis, with up to 24 believed to be alive.
Israel seeks the return of the bodies of dead hostages as well.
Egyptian mediators have sought to revive the January cease-fire agreement, which expired in March, as the two sides could not agree on a second phase.
During the two-month halt to the fighting, 25 living hostages and the bodies of 8 more were returned to Israel in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, some serving life sentences.
Netanyahu has repeatedly said Israel will no longer accept Hamas as an administrative or military force on its border.
Netanyahu’s continuation of the offensive against Hamas is backed by members of his hardline coalition, some of whom have threatened to collapse his government if he ends the war.
Meanwhile, members of the Israeli public have grown increasingly restive since the war’s resumption.
Polls show a majority of Israelis supporting an end to the war in exchange for the release of all the remaining hostages, according to The Times of Israel.
The war began with Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre that killed 1,200, most of them Israeli civilians, while wounding thousands and taking 251 people hostage.
Israel retaliated by attacking the Gaza Strip.
In 15 months of war that followed, broken only by an eight-day cease-fire in November 2023, the densely crowded area has been ravaged by war.
Around 50,000 people have been reported dead. Israel says almost half of those were Hamas fighters.
Many of Gaza’s buildings were destroyed, and its population of about 2 million has been uprooted repeatedly as they fled to avoid fighting or in response to Israeli warnings of coming attacks.
Israel resumed fighting with air strikes on the night of March 18–19, targeting much of Hamas’s remaining leadership.
Its army has reoccupied land, including strategic corridors dividing Gaza from Egypt and between Gaza’s cities.
The Israeli army has said it will remain in them this time around, unlike the first 15 months of the war, to obstruct the movements of arms and Hamas fighters.
