Hamas leader Ismaïl Haniyeh called American diplomatic chief Antony Blinken, who was traveling to the Middle East for the fourth time since October 7 to focus on “ending” Israel's offensive in Gaza.
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“We hope […] that this time he will focus on ending the aggression, with the aim of ending the occupation of all Palestinian land,” Mr Haniyeh said in this video released by his office on Friday evening.
“We hope that Mr. Blinken was able to learn the lessons of the last three months and understand the magnitude of the mistakes that the United States has made in its blind support of Israel,” added the leader of the Palestinian Islamist movement, who lives in exile in Qatar.
“The blood shed in the massacres and terrible destruction cannot lead to security and stability until the Palestinian people achieve their freedom and their independent and sovereign state with Jerusalem as its capital,” the Hamas leader further warned.
After the Palestinian movement's unprecedented attack on the south of the country on October 7, which resulted in the deaths of 1,140 people on the Israeli side, most of them civilians, according to a recent AFP count, Israel vowed to destroy Hamas official Israeli figures.
In this attack, around 250 people were kidnapped and taken to Gaza. About a hundred of them were released as part of a ceasefire at the end of November.
Since October 7, Israel has relentlessly shelled the Gaza Strip, a narrow and densely populated area on which it launched a ground offensive on October 27: these military operations left 22,722 people dead, mostly women and minors, according to a recent report by the Hamas Ministry of Health on Saturday.
The US secretary of state has begun a new regional trip to Turkey to push for more aid to Gaza and ways to prevent wildfires in a tense regional context.
The humanitarian situation in the besieged area is regularly described by the United Nations as “catastrophic”. On Friday, UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said the Gaza Strip had become “a place of death and despair” and “simply…” […] uninhabitable”.