Hamas official: No progress in Gaza truce talks, Netanyahu ‘not interested’ in freeing hostages

Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan says there has been no progress in Gaza truce talks despite the terror group showing flexibility.

Hamdan accuses Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of placing obstacles hindering both parties from reaching an agreement, and says that the Israeli leader is “not interested” in securing the release of the hostages held by the terror group since the October 7 massacre in southern Israel.

“The occupation government is still evading, and negotiations are stuck in a vicious circle,” Hamdan says at a press conference held in Beirut.

The statement comes after the terror group’s Doha-based leader Ismail Haniyeh insisted that Hamas would not retreat from its demand for a permanent ceasefire in exchange for the release of the hostages. Hamas terrorists seized 253 people from Israel on October 7, of whom 130 are still in captivity in Gaza.

Israel has said that it will only agree to a temporary pause in fighting and that the war will not end until the terror group has been eliminated from Gaza in its entirety. It has rejected Hamas’s conditioning hostage releases on an end to the war and the withdrawal of IDF troops as “delusional.”