A senior Hamas official said on Sunday that Israel’s possible ground invasion of Rafah will undermine the negotiations for a prisoner exchange deal.
An unnamed Hamas official told Al-Aqsa television that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to avoid fulfilling the responsibilities of the exchange agreement by committing genocide and causing a new humanitarian disaster in Rafah.
The official said any attack by the Israeli army on the city of Rafah would mean that the negotiations between the Israeli government and Hamas are undermined.
“Netanyahu and his Nazi army will not be able to achieve what they could not achieve in more than four months, no matter how long the war lasts,” he reportedly added.
Netanyahu ordered the Israeli army on Friday to develop a plan to carry out a ground invasion of the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, while forcibly evacuating Palestinians from the area.
The United Nations says Rafah, normally home to fewer than 300,000 people, now hosts 1.4 million Palestinians who were displaced from their homes.
According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 28,176 Palestinians have been killed, and 67,784 wounded in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza starting on October 7.
Moreover, at least 8,000 people are unaccounted for, presumed dead under the rubble of their homes throughout the Strip.
Palestinian and international organizations say that the majority of those killed and wounded are women and children.
The Israeli aggression has also resulted in the forceful displacement of nearly two million people from all of the Gaza Strip, with the vast majority of the displaced forced into the densely crowded southern city of Rafah near the border with Egypt – in what has become Palestine’s largest mass exodus since the 1948 Nakba.
(PC, MEMO)