Hamas Leaders Stick to Hard Line on Gaza Talks

With negotiations stalled, a senior Hamas official said in an interview that the group continues to insist Israel permanently halt the war

By Benoit Faucon in Doha, Qatar, Summer Said in Cairo and Omar Abdel-Baqui

in Dubai - March 9, 2024

Hamas is sticking to demands for a permanent end to the Gaza war, a senior political official in the militant group said, showing that wide gaps with Israel remain as negotiators prepare to resume truce talks.

Unyielding positions by Israel and Hamas have caused negotiations to stall. Arab negotiators are meeting Sunday and planning to push for a much shorter cease-fire than discussed before—a two-day pause in fighting at the start of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which is set to begin either Monday or Tuesday.

The senior Hamas official, Husam Badran, warned that unrest would escalate in the West Bank and Jerusalem without a deal and said that his group was ready to keep negotiating.?

“We didn’t declare negotiations have been stopped. We are the party most keen to stop this war,” Badran, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, said in an interview Saturday with The Wall Street Journal.?

Badran, who was speaking at the group’s offices in Doha, Qatar, listed Hamas’s conditions, including a permanent cease-fire, allowing displaced civilians to return to their homes in northern Gaza, allowing sufficient aid to flow through all crossings, a plan to rebuild Gaza, and a withdrawal of the Israeli military from the enclave.

Israel has said its priority in the talks is to secure the release of dozens of hostages captured during the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israeli negotiators are facing a “brick wall of delusional, unrealistic Hamas demands.”

The race to forge a deal that halts the fighting in the Gaza Strip comes at a critical time as Israel has said that it would begin an offensive in Rafah—where over a million Palestinians are sheltering and where Israel says Hamas leaders are hiding—during Ramadan. Ramadan, a month of fasting, prayer and reflection for observant Muslims, can also be a time of heightened tensions in Jerusalem as tens of thousands of Palestinians, facing movement restrictions, seek access to holy sites that are under tight Israeli security control.?

Arab mediators are trying to salvage a proposal that involved a 40-day cease-fire and the release of around 40 hostages.

Badran said discussions on a swap of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners had taken a back seat to questions of how to relieve the humanitarian situation and end the fighting. He said at least 60 hostages taken from Israel had died in captivity, a figure slightly higher than the estimated 50 dead provided by private Israeli assessments, which the Journal reported on last month.

Arab mediators say Hamas refused Israel’s request for a list of living hostages. Israel has said Hamas has ignored its requests to provide a list of living hostages the group would be willing to exchange as part of a deal. Badran denied that, saying there had been no official Israeli request for such a list. He said many of the prisoners are held by other factions, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad, making them harder to locate.

The talks, mediated by Egypt, Qatar and the U.S., ran for four days this week. They are expected to resume in Cairo on Sunday, Egyptian officials said. Badran said Hamas’s political leadership in Doha was meeting Saturday afternoon to discuss the negotiations.?

Asked by reporters Friday about the prospect of a pause in fighting between Israel and Hamas by Ramadan, President Biden said, “It’s looking tough.”

Badran said he didn’t trust the U.S. could be an honest broker, given Washington’s robust support for Israel,?and said the group had better chances on mediation from European countries including France. “They are trying to be more objective,” he said of France.

He blamed Netanyahu for the failure of the talks so far. “The only complication in the negotiations is Netanyahu’s stance, who refuses to deal with anything on the table,” he said. “Netanyahu is the most dangerous [person] for the stability of this region. He is the fire starter.”

Delegations from Israel and Hamas were invited to Cairo, but Egyptian officials said Netanyahu’s hard line has given Israeli mediators little room to maneuver.?

Egyptian officials said they had hoped to resume talks Saturday but that neither side had been cooperative.

Badran said that at a meeting last week in Moscow, Hamas and other Palestinian factions, including secular politicians and PIJ, had agreed to “expand operations against the occupation in the West Bank and Jerusalem.”

He said that a lack of progress in the talks would lead to more unrest beyond Gaza during Ramadan.

“The genocide in Gaza could open a new arena with conflict in the West Bank,” he said, citing the sizable death toll and arrests of Palestinians there since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war. Israel has rejected that its actions in Gaza are genocide. Continuing the war would weaken stability in the region, Badran said.

On Thursday, Hamas said it was pausing its participation in talks aimed at securing a cease-fire in Gaza, after Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas chief in Gaza who has led the group’s fight against Israel, emerged from days of silence to issue a hardened stance.

Sinwar, who had been largely disengaged from the talks until recently, is demanding that Israel commit to discussing a permanent halt in the fighting, putting him at odds with other Hamas leaders, according to officials familiar with the discussions.?

Badran denied any division within the group and said it was united in wanting a permanent end to the fighting. He said a proposal for a six-week cease-fire instead of a permanent one had come from the U.S.

Arab and Israeli officials say they fear that Sinwar is deliberately undermining the talks in the hope that Ramadan will galvanize popular Arab support for Hamas, leading to an escalation of tensions in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

“Hamas is doubling down on its position, uninterested in a deal, and seeks to inflame the region during Ramadan,” the Israeli prime minister’s office said. “Cooperation with the mediators is continuing all the time in an effort to bridge the gaps and promote agreements.”

Qatar has threatened to expel Hamas officials from their base in Doha should they fail to persuade the group’s Gaza-based leaders to agree to a deal, according to a Hamas official and Egyptian officials.?Badran denied such a threat had been made.

Sinwar believes Hamas has the upper hand in negotiations, Egyptian officials say, citing internal political divisions within Israel, including cracks in Netanyahu’s wartime government and mounting U.S. pressure on Israel to do more to alleviate the suffering of Gazans.?

U.S. officials have expressed frustration with Israel over the deteriorating humanitarian conditions in the besieged Gaza Strip. The U.S. began airdropping food into the enclave last week to circumvent restrictions on getting aid in by ground, and after an aid mission overseen by Israel last week turned deadly.

But airdrops can only cover a fraction of the growing needs. The risks of airdropping aid were seen Friday when five Palestinians were killed after the parachute of an airdrop failed to open and at least one aid parcel fell on them, Gaza officials said. A U.S. defense official said the deaths weren’t caused by American airdrops.

On Thursday, Biden said he directed the U.S. military to build a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza for cargo ships to deliver aid. The project will take time to scale up and once ashore, aid could face the same challenges of safe distribution faced by truck convoys.?

Anat Peled in Tel Aviv contributed to this article.

Hamas Leaders Stick to Hard Line on Gaza Talks - WSJ

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