Photo credit: BBC
Hamas has indefinitely postponed the release of Israeli hostages who were set to be freed from the Gaza Strip this weekend, a spokesman said on Monday accusing the Israeli government of violating an already fragile cease-fire agreement.
The New York Times reports that the move threatens to derail both the six-week truce agreed to last month and the prospects for agreement on a lasting end to the war. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was consulting with his top advisers on Monday night and planned to move up a scheduled meeting with his security cabinet to Tuesday morning, a top official said.
Hours later, President Trump issued an ultimatum to Hamas on Monday evening, saying that if all Israeli hostages were not released from Gaza by 12 o’clock on Saturday, then the cease-fire agreement with Israel should be cancelled and “all hell is going to break out.”
Mr Trump said, “Israel can override it, but from myself, Saturday at 12 o’clock, and if they’re not, they’re not here, all hell is going to break out.”
Asked whether he meant retaliation from Israel, the president said: “You’ll find out, and they’ll find out too. Hamas will find out what I mean.” Asked whether he would rule out any US involvement after the Saturday deadline, he said, “We’ll see what happens.”
Hamas and Israel have accused each other of violating various aspects of the cease-fire agreement. However, they have continued releasing the hostages and prisoners each week.
The group’s statement came shortly after the publication of a Fox News interview in which Mr Trump said Palestinians would not be allowed to return to Gaza under his plan to relocate the entire population. Hamas and much of the international community have emphatically rejected that. Mr Trump later said he could cut aid to Jordan and Egypt if they refused his demand to permanently take in most Palestinians from Gaza.
Earlier on Monday, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Hazem Qasem, said “New demands are not acceptable.”
He told a Saudi-based TV station: “We have an agreement to implement. We are open to ideas regarding a new form of Palestinian government and administration of Gaza but not to the deportation.”
While another Hamas spokesman, Abu Obeida, said on Monday that this weekend’s hostage exchange was on hold, mediators from Qatar and Egypt could work with Israeli and Hamas negotiators to find a resolution before then. in January, mediators helped the two parties overcome a separate dispute.
On another front, the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmood Abbas, ordered changes to the policy of paying the families of Palestinians who are jailed or killed by Israel, even those involved in violent acts – a practice that has long been denounced by Israel and the United States. The language of Mr Abbas’s decree is opaque, leaving it unclear how such payments would change.
in Gaza, a key point of tension between Israel and Hamas is the fate of the second phase of the deal, which calls for a permanent end to the fighting, a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the release of more hostages and prisoners.
Talks on the details were supposed to begin last week, but Israel dispatched officials to Qatar without a mandate to negotiate that part of the deal, according to four Israeli officials, an official from a mediating country and a diplomat briefed on the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the delicate cease-fire.
Mr Netanyahu has suggested that he won’t pursue the second phase of the deal if it means the war will end. He had vowed to wipe out Hamas as a fighting force and prevent it from asserting control over Gaza. For its part, Hamas has insisted that the second phase included the end of the conflict.
In a statement on Monday, Mr Obeida, the spokesman for Hamas’s military wing, accused Israel of a host of violations of the cease-fire agreement, including delaying the return of displaced Palestinians to northern Gaza, blocking the delivery of some humanitarian aid and opening fire on civilians.
In Gaza, after Hamas failed to release a female hostage who Israel said was to be freed in January under the agreement, Israel delayed the agreed return of displaced Palestinians to their homes in northern Gaza. But the exchange eventually went forward, and the hostage was released.
COGAT, the Israeli agency that oversees policy for the Palestinian territories, on February 7 said that more than 12,000 trucks had entered Gaza since the agreement was set in place.
Widespread anger over the conditions of some of the hostages released so far – malnourished, buffeted by hostile crowds, paraded before cameras and, in some cases, made to give statements of thanks to Hamas militants – has drawn accusations in Israel that Hamas was not complying with the cease-fire agreement.
A spokesman for Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, called Hamas’s announcement ” a complete violation of the cease-fire agreement and the hostage release deal.”
The six-week cease-fire deal, which is scheduled to last until March 2, called for the release of 25 living hostages and the bodies of eight killed in exchange for the release of about 1,500 Palestinians from Israeli prisons.
It also required Israel’s military to withdraw from a key corridor bisecting Gaza that had prevented Palestinians who had fled south early in the war from returning to their home in the northern part of the territory.
The Israeli military completed its withdrawal from most of the area, known as the Netzarim Corridor on Sunday
