A SENIOR official of the Hamas resistance group says the US and Israel are pursuing a temporary ceasefire in the Gaza Strip in a bid to ‘buy time’ to prolong their genocidal war on the Palestinian territory.
Osama Hamdan, a Lebanon-based Hamas official, made the remarks in an interview with Lebanon’s al-Mayadeen news channel, as Gaza truce negotiations, mediated by the US, Egypt and Qatar, have failed to achieve a breakthrough.
He said: ‘From the first day of the Gaza ceasefire talks, it was clear that all the Americans and Israelis wanted was a temporary truce and they refused to cease hostilities permanently. Both the United States and Israel are manoeuvring and trying to buy some time.’
Hamdan warned that Hamas will not continue aimless negotiations, adding that the resistance group seeks a written agreement and will not settle for less.
He added that the occupying regime actually wants to ‘catch its breath and worsen the humanitarian crisis’ in the besieged Gaza.
So far, the Tel Aviv regime has killed at least 30,717 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 72,156 others. Israel is intentionally starving the Palestinian people by blocking the passage of relief supplies into Gaza in what is considered a war crime under the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute.
Instead of halting the flow of its weapons to Gaza, the US has recently embarked on a public relations campaign and airdropped aid on the blockaded territory. For the past five months, US has fully backed the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza, supplying it with money and weapons. Now it is airdropping aid for Palestinians in Gaza.
Hamdan said that the amount of the airdropped aid did not exceed two truckloads, noting that the US is complicit in the regime’s inhumane siege on Gaza.
He continued: ‘Those who want to come to Gaza to contribute to the liberation project are welcomed, while those who want to side with the Israeli occupation will be treated as an occupier.’
The Hamas official also warned that the more Israel escalates its aggression against Gaza, the more the resistance front will be pushed towards higher levels of the battle against the regime. His message was that: ‘The Palestinian people will emerge victorious.’
Meanwhile, a new report has emerged to reveal that the United States has quietly authorised over 100 separate weapons’ sales to Israel since the start of the Gaza war in early October, despite all the mounting alarm over the occupying regime’s genocidal campaign against the besieged territory.
US officials told members of Congress in a recent classified briefing that the sales include thousands of precision-guided munitions, small diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
The report comes as only two approved weapons sales authorised by US President Joe Biden had been made public so far but the latest triple-digit figure has not been previously reported. In fact, the Biden administration bypassed Congress to initiate $106 million in sales of tank ammunition as well as $147.5 million of components needed to make 155mm shells.
The 100 other weapons transfers were processed without any public debate because each fell under a specific dollar amount that requires the executive branch to individually notify Congress.
Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior Biden administration official and current president of Refugees International, said these transactions are ‘an extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time, which really strongly suggests that the Israeli campaign would not be sustainable without this level of US support.’
Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned in protest over the Biden administration’s Gaza policy, also noted: ‘The arms transfer process lacks transparency by design.’
The vast number of transfers since early October was financed by more than $3.3 billion in US taxpayer funds Washington provides to Israel every year. Two former American diplomats have called on the administration of US President Joe Biden to no longer provide offensive weapons or military aid to Israel’s new regime.
The relentless Israeli military campaign against Gaza has so far killed more than 30,700 people, most of them women and children. It is high time that the workers of the UK, the USA and the EU stopped this war on Gaza by taking general strike actions to bring down their governments and bring in Workers Governments and socialism!
