A SENIOR Hamas official has said the Palestinian resistance group never agreed to surrender its weapons during indirect ceasefire talks that brought a pause to Israel’s two-year-long genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.
Mousa Abu Marzook made the remarks in an interview broadcast on Wednesday, two days after US President Donald Trump claimed Hamas had committed to disarm as part of the ceasefire framework.
‘Hamas has never agreed to hand over its weapons in any form. Hamas agreed to a framework plan to end the war.
‘The issue of handing over weapons was not discussed at all,’ Abu Marzook said.
He added that any arrangements concerning Gaza must proceed with Hamas’s consent.
The US-backed ceasefire came into effect on 10 October 2025.
Its first phase included the exchange of Israeli captives for Palestinian detainees and the partial withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces to the so-called yellow line, a lethal boundary imposed inside Gaza.
Despite Hamas meeting its obligations, Israeli forces continued attacks and maintained severe restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid into the besieged territory.
A second phase, announced earlier this month, envisaged a gradual withdrawal of Israeli troops, who still occupy more than half of the Gaza Strip, alongside the deployment of an international force.
On Monday, the Israeli military announced it had recovered the remains of the last Israeli captive held in Gaza, Ran Gvili.
Abu Marzook said Hamas had provided mediators with information on the location of Gvili’s body around a month earlier.
He said the transfer of Israeli captives, both living and dead, took place under agreed Hamas conditions and that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had no grounds to boast about the recovery.
Israel launched its assault on Gaza on 7th October 2023 but failed to achieve its stated objectives, despite killing at least 71,667 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and injuring a further 171,343.
Addressing a high-level meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday, Palestine’s UN ambassador Riyad Mansour warned that an ‘unprecedented catastrophe’ is unfolding in Gaza.
‘The suffering of Palestinian civilians, men, women and children, must end with equal urgency,’ Mansour said, calling for the full implementation of the ceasefire, an immediate end to the killings, and unrestricted humanitarian access to Gaza.
