A Hamas political official has stated that the militant group will not make concessions under fire in its ongoing negotiations for a cease-fire and hostage release deal.
According to AP, Osama Hamdan, a Hamas official, made the comments on Tuesday following Israel's incursion into Rafah, where troops seized a key border crossing from Gaza to Egypt. At the same time, a delegation of Hamas officials arrived in Cairo to continue the negotiations.
Hamdan said the proposal Hamas had agreed to "represents the minimum that meets the demands of our people and our resistance" and was agreed upon by all the Palestinian factions operating in Gaza. He added that the "ball is in the Israeli court and in the court of the American administration" as the mediators had given guarantees that Israel would implement the agreement.
However, Hamdan stated that Hamas "will not respond to any initiative to stop the aggression or any exchange deal under military pressure and under the escalation of aggression, and these illusions, if (the Israelis) have them in their minds, will go unrealized."
He also said the group "will not accept the presence of any occupying force" on the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing, which "was and will remain for us a purely Egyptian-Palestinian crossing."
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