The Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdul Rahman Al Thani, announced on Wednesday that Doha is in the process of “evaluating” the mediation role it has been playing for months between Israel and Hamas, according to Agence France-Presse.
The Qatari official said during a joint press conference with the Turkish Foreign Minister, Hakan Fidan, in Doha, “Unfortunately, we saw that there is a misuse of this mediation, employing this mediation for narrow political interests, and this called for the State of Qatar to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of this role,” explaining, “We “Now we are at this stage to evaluate the mediation and also evaluate how the parties engage in this mediation.”
On Sunday, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced in a statement that Hamas had rejected the latest proposal to return the hostages. He said that Israel “will continue to achieve its goals in Gaza with full force,” according to Reuters.
The statement added, “The rejection of the proposal shows that Yahya Al-Sinwar, head of Hamas’s political bureau in the Gaza Strip, does not want an agreement and is trying to exploit the tensions with Iran and escalate the conflict at the regional level.”
On Saturday, Hamas announced that it had delivered to the Egyptian and Qatari mediators its response to a truce proposal with Israel in the Gaza Strip, stressing a permanent ceasefire.
In a statement, the movement affirmed its “adherence to its demands and the national demands of the people, which are represented by a permanent ceasefire, the army’s withdrawal from the entire Gaza Strip, the return of the displaced to their areas and places of residence, intensifying the entry of relief and aid, and beginning reconstruction.”
Israel rejects a permanent ceasefire and a complete withdrawal of its armed forces from Gaza. Netanyahu also announced his intention to carry out a ground operation in Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip, considering that the city constitutes the last major stronghold of Hamas.
The war broke out in Gaza following attacks by Hamas (classified as a terrorist organization in the United States and other countries), which resulted in the deaths of about 1,200 people in Israel, most of them civilians and including women and children, according to the Israeli authorities.
During the attack, about 250 people were kidnapped, 130 of whom are still hostage in Gaza, and 34 of them are believed to have died, according to official Israeli estimates.
On the other hand, more than 33 thousand people were killed in the Gaza Strip, most of them women and children, according to the health authorities in Gaza, as a result of the devastating Israeli military operations, while hundreds of thousands were displaced from their homes, heading to the south of the Strip, to escape the fighting.
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