Hamas says it gave a “positive” response to the latest Gaza ceasefire proposal

He stresses that “the ball is in Netanyahu’s court,” while an Israeli minister says that stopping the offensive would be “stupid”

8 Jul. (EUROPA PRESS) –

A senior Hamas official said Monday that the group had responded “positively” to the latest proposal for a possible ceasefire agreement with Israel in the Gaza Strip, adding that “the ball is in the court” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“We have approached the proposals positively and with great flexibility and have given a positive response. The ball is in Netanyahu’s court,” said Husam Badran, a member of Hamas’s political wing, who said that “if the US administration is serious about stopping the war, it must put pressure on Netanyahu to reach a ceasefire.”

Badran, who has stated that “the criminal Netanyahu’s place is in the International Criminal Court (ICC) and not in the office of Prime Minister,” has denounced that “last night was one of the hardest in Gaza City” due to the “intensification of attacks against civilians,” according to the Palestinian daily ‘Filastin’, linked to Hamas.

“The victims of this conflict are our people and the criminal enemy is hiding behind a false grievance,” he stressed, while insisting that “the falsehood, lies and duplicity of international institutions that defend values ​​and humanity, using double standards in the Palestinian cause, is something that has become clear.”

For his part, Israel’s Finance Minister, ultra-nationalist Bezalel Smotrich, has defended the need to continue the offensive against Gaza and argued that “Hamas is collapsing and begging for a ceasefire.” “It is time to squeeze their necks until we crush and break the enemy,” he said.

“Stopping now, just before the end, and letting them recover to fight us again would be a senseless stupidity that will cause the achievements obtained during the bloody war to go down the drain. We must continue until victory,” he concluded in a message on his account on the social network X.

According to information collected by the Israeli newspaper ‘Haaretz’, Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar has traveled to Egypt to continue talks on a possible ceasefire agreement that would include the release of hostages kidnapped during the attacks carried out on October 7 by Hamas and other Palestinian factions.

The Israeli army launched a bloody offensive against the Strip following the attacks carried out on October 7 by Hamas and other Palestinian factions, which left some 1,200 dead and nearly 240 kidnapped. The Gaza authorities have reported nearly 38,200 dead, in addition to more than 550 Palestinians killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in operations by Israeli forces or in attacks carried out by settlers.