The Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas called on Hamas to “hand over the hostages and be done with it” in his strongest speech yet against the militant group in Gaza.
“Hamas has given the criminal occupation excuses to commit its crimes in the Gaza Strip, the most prominent being the holding of hostages,” Abbas said in a televised speech from Ramallah, the de-facto capital of the Palestinian territories partially controlled by his PA.
“You sons of dogs, hand over what you have and relieve us of this,” he said to the Palestinian Central Council, as he called on the group to hand over control to his party, whose Fatah movement has been largely outlawed from the territory since Hamas took over in 2007.
International post-war visions for Gaza have involved a PA takeover of the territory, something Israel has strongly opposed. The organisation has also been criticised for its security co-operation with Israel, leading to accusations of corruption and weakness.
The Palestinian leader “repeatedly and suspiciously lays the blame for the crimes of the occupation and its ongoing aggression on our people”, Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official, said, calling Abbas’s remarks “insulting”.
The terror group released a video on Wednesday of Omri Miran, one of the 59 Israeli hostages it has held captive for eighteen months. The video, which has not been published in the Israeli press after his family requested privacy, shows Miran marking his second birthday spent in captivity.
Omri Miran has been held hostage by Hamas since October 7, 2023
AFP
His wife Lishay Miran-Lavi wrote on X: “On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, when we say ‘Never again’, an Israeli citizen cries out for help from Hamas’s tunnels. It is a moral failure for the State of Israel. Our Omri is strong and will not break — but our hearts are broken.” The videos are known to be filmed under duress and are seen by Israelis as psychological warfare.
“For a year and a half, he and 58 other hostages have been waiting to be brought home. We will not give up. We will continue to fight until Omri returns to us — and especially to Roni and Alma, who are waiting with all their hearts to hold him again,” she said of their daughters.
Hamas recently rejected a fresh Israeli proposal for a truce that would involve a six-week cessation of hostilities in return for the release of ten living hostages, including the US-Israeli soldier Edan Alexander.
“Every day there are deaths. Why? Because they refuse to hand over the American hostage,” Abbas said of Alexander, who was on the list to be freed as a gesture to the US administration during short-lived direct talks with Hamas.
Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has vowed to defeat the terror group on Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day, saying the tables have turned since October 7 massacre that killed some 1,200 Israelis, most of them on that day.
“No pressure and no decision will prevent us from coming to terms with the barbarians who raped, murdered and burned,” Netanyahu said. “Anyone who feared that after the October 7 massacre we would face another Holocaust, has seen that we have turned the tables.”
Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister
OHAD ZWIGENBERG/AP
He added: “They massacred, they raped, and kidnapped our loved ones. No-one will stop us defending ourselves — if we have to stand alone, we’ll stand alone, if we have to fight with our fingernails. But we will not give up on victory.
“This Holocaust day I promise, the military pressure on Hamas will continue, will we return all our hostages, we will defeat Hamas and we will prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.”
Israel has intensified its war against Hamas since fighting resumed last month, shattering the fragile truce allowing the release of some hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners who were in Israeli prisons.
• Netanyahu: I won’t stop when Hamas ready to fall
Strikes overnight on Tuesday killed 23 people in a school in Gaza City, where people were sheltering. The Israeli military said Hamas use civilians as human shields.
“The command and control centre was used by the terrorists to plan and execute terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF troops,” the IDF and the Shin Bet, the Israeli intelligence service, said in a statement, adding that “numerous steps were taken to mitigate harm to civilians”, including the use of “aerial surveillance and additional intelligence”.
The IDF has come under renewed scrutiny in recent weeks after it killed 15 medical workers at point-blank range in southern Gaza and then gave a false account of the incident.
According to the Hamas-run health ministry, 39 people have been killed and 105 wounded in the past 24 hours, with 51,300 people killed in Gaza since the start of the war.
In the West Bank, the Israeli military shot and killed a 12-year-old boy during an operation on Wednesday. According to the Palestinian news outlet Ma’an, Mahmoud Mithqal Abu al-Haija was killed during clashes that erupted in al-Yamoun, west of Jenin, after Israeli forces stormed the town.