Joe Biden’s optimism about an imminent Israel-Hamas ceasefire is just a bid to keep hostile powers calm and there have been “no improvements”, a spokesman for the militant group has told Sky News.
The US president told reporters on Friday he was “optimistic” and there are “just a couple more issues” that US, Qatari, and Egyptian negotiators have to resolve between the two sides.
But speaking to Sky News’ special correspondent Alex Crawford, Hamas’s spokesman in Lebanon Dr Ahmad Abdulhadi said this was “not true”.
“The Biden administration is trying to show that the environment is positive. But the first round showed there are no improvements,” he said.
“The mediators told us that the disagreed points haven’t been solved and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu added more conditions on it and made it even more complicated.”
He said Mr Biden’s claims were just to “keep everything sounding positive in the media” and “keep the Axis of Resistance calm and to stop it responding to the assassination and not slip into a regional war”.
The Axis of Resistance refers to the Iranian-led alliance between various Islamist groups, including Hamas.
Israel is suspected to have killed Hamas’s chief political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran last month, in what the group described as a “treacherous Zionist raid on his residence in Tehran”.
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Aftermath of Israeli strike in Lebanon
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The two descriptions of the negotiations come amid rising tensions in the region and as fresh Israeli strikes were reported in Lebanon and Gaza on Saturday.
In Gaza, a strike that hit a house and an adjacent warehouse sheltering displaced people in Zawaida killed at least 18 people, including a family of 15 members, on Saturday morning, according to hospital authorities.
Meanwhile, Lebanon’s health ministry reported at least 10 people, including a mother and her two children, were killed and five others wounded after an Israeli strike hit a residential building in the southern city of Nabatieh early on Saturday.
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said it is verifying the report into the Gaza fatalities and claimed it was targeting a Hezbollah weapons storage facility in its overnight attack on Lebanon, adding that it also hit several other “military structures” it deemed a threat in the south of the country.
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