Hamas says pulling out of Gaza truce talks after deadly Israeli strike

GAZA - A Hamas official said July 14 the Palestinian group was withdrawing from Gaza truce talks, following a deadly Israeli strike that targeted militant commander Mohammed Deif more than nine months into the war.

The Islamist group’s military chief Deif was “well and directly overseeing” operations, another Hamas official told AFP, despite the bombing raid on a southern Gaza displacement camp on July 13, which Israel said was an attempt to kill him.

The first senior official from the Iran-backed group, whose

October 7 attack on southern Israel sparked the war,

said Hamas was pulling out of negotiations towards a ceasefire partly because of Israeli “massacres”.

The health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip said at least 92 people had been killed and 300 wounded in a strike on Al-Mawasi, an Israeli-designated “safe zone” on the Mediterranean coast.

Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s Qatar-based political chief, told international mediators of the “decision to halt negotiations due to the (Israeli) occupation’s lack of seriousness, continued policy of procrastination and obstruction, and the ongoing massacres against unarmed civilians”, the official said.

But Hamas was “ready to resume negotiations” when Israel’s government “demonstrates seriousness in reaching a ceasefire agreement and a prisoner exchange deal”, the official quoted Haniyeh as saying.

Talks mediated by Qatar and Egypt, with United States support, have for months tried but failed to bring a halt to the war.

Israeli demonstrators, sometimes in the tens of thousands, have stepped up their actions demanding the government reach a deal to free the captives taken by Hamas on October 7.

Hamas’s attack resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.

The militants seized 251 hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza including 42 the military says are dead.

Israel responded with a military offensive that has killed at least 38,584 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to data provided by the Gaza health ministry.

An Israeli security source said that the July 13 strike showed Israel “will continue to target senior Hamas leadership” even as it “pursues negotiations for a hostage agreement”.

‘Horrific scenes’

Al-Mawasi, near the cities of Khan Yunis and Rafah, had in May been declared a safe humanitarian zone by the Israeli military, which told civilians to evacuate to it. However, there have been multiple deadly incidents there blamed on Israeli strikes.

Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said on social media site X: “The claim that people in Gaza can move to ‘safe’ or ‘humanitarian’ zones is false.”

Israel said it had on July 13 targeted Deif, who heads the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, as well as an associate, Rafa Salama.

Israel’s military on July 14 said Salama, commander of Hamas’s Khan Yunis brigade, had been killed by a strike “in the area of Khan Yunis.”

Israel accuses both Salama and Deif of helping to “mastermind” the October 7 attack.

Deif has been among Israel’s most wanted men for decades and is blamed by Israeli authorities for the killings of multiple civilians and soldiers.

At the site of the strike, an AFP photographer saw the charred remains of tents as Palestinians searched through the wreckage for any salvageable items.

Plastic covers, broken water tanks and other equipment used for makeshift shelters was scattered on the sand.

Scott Anderson, director of UNRWA affairs in the Gaza Strip, said that on a visit to Khan Yunis’s Nasser hospital, where many of the casualties were taken, he had “witnessed some of the most horrific scenes I have seen” in the war.

“I saw toddlers who are double amputees, children paralysed and unable to receive treatment, and others separated from their parents,” he said in a statement.

Anderson added that “impediments to humanitarian operations prevent us from supporting people anywhere near the scale necessary”.

Gaza City strikes

The deaths in Al-Mawasi drew condemnation from governments across the region, with Egypt’s foreign ministry saying such “crimes... cannot be accepted under any justification whatsoever”.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, during a press conference with his visiting Saudi counterpart, said Israel does not intend to end the war and commits “new massacres each time there is a positive atmosphere” towards peace.

The Israeli military said of its attack targeting Deif that “the area that was struck... was not a tent complex, but an operational compound”.

Separately on July 14, rescuers said at least eight people were killed in strikes on different parts of Gaza City, where the Israeli military said its operations were ongoing.

The war has sent regional tensions soaring, with violence drawing in Iran-backed Hamas allies including Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah group, which has traded regular fire with Israeli forces, and Yemen’s Huthi rebels whose maritime attacks have disrupted Red Sea shipping.

Israel has also intensified attacks on Syria, where on July 14 state media said a soldier was killed in strikes on Damascus.

The Israeli military – in a rare acknowledgement of military action in Syria – said it was responding after the launch of two drones from Syrian territory. AFP