A Palestinian girls walks amidst the debris a day after an operation by the Israeli Special Forces in the Nuseirat camp, in the central Gaza Strip on June 9, 2024, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas militant group. (Photo by Eyad BABA / AFP)
A Hamas official said Sunday the Palestinian group was withdrawing from Gaza truce talks, following a deadly Israeli strike that targeted militant commander Mohammed Deif more than nine months into the war.
Another Hamas official told AFP that "Commander Mohammed Deif", the Islamist group's military chief, was "well and directly overseeing" operations despite the bombing raid on a southern Gaza displacement camp on Saturday, which Israel said was an attempt to kill him.
Another senior official from the Iran-backed Islamist group, whose October 7 attack on southern Israel sparked the war, said Hamas was pulling out of negotiations towards a ceasefire because of Israeli "massacres" and repeated stalling.
The health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip said at least 92 people had been killed, more than half of them women and children, and 300 wounded in a strike on Al-Mawasi, an Israeli-designated "safe zone" on the Mediterranean coast.
Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas's Qatar-based political chief, told international mediators of the "decision to halt negotiations due to the (Israeli) occupation's lack of seriousness, continued policy of procrastination and obstruction, and the ongoing massacres against unarmed civilians", the official said.
But Hamas was "ready to resume negotiations" when Israel's government "demonstrates seriousness in reaching a ceasefire agreement and a prisoner exchange deal", the official quoted Haniyeh as saying.
Talks mediated by Qatar and Egypt, with United States support, have for months tried but failed to bring a halt to the war.
Israeli demonstrators, sometimes in the tens of thousands, have stepped up their actions demanding the government reach a deal to free the captives taken by Hamas on October 7.
Hamas's attack resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.
The militants seized 251 hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza including 42 the military says are dead.
Israel responded with a military offensive that has killed at least 38,584 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to data provided by the Gaza health ministry.
An Israeli security source said on Saturday that the Al-Mawasi strike showed Israel "will continue to target senior Hamas leadership" even as it "pursues negotiations for a hostage agreement".
Al-Mawasi, near the cities of Khan Yunis and Rafah, had in May been declared a safe humanitarian zone by the Israeli military and civilians ordered to evacuate to it. However, there have been multiple deadly incidents there blamed on Israeli strikes.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, described the area as "a sandy 14-square-kilometre (5.4-square-mile) agricultural land, where people are left out in the open with little to no buildings or roads".
"The claim that people in Gaza can move to 'safe' or 'humanitarian' zones is false", said Lazzarini on social media site X.
Israel said it had on Saturday targeted Deif as well as an associate, Rafa Salama.
Deif heads the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades and had announced in an audio message the start of Hamas's unprecedented October 7 attack.
Israel' military on Saturday said Salama, commander of Hamas's Khan Yunis brigade, had been killed by a strike "in the area of Khan Yunis."
Israel accuses both Salama and Deif of helping to "mastermind" the October 7 attack.
Deif has been among Israel's most wanted men for decades and is blamed by Israeli authorities for the killings of multiple civilians and soldiers.
At the site of the strike, an AFP photographer saw the charred remains of tents as Palestinians searched through the wreckage for any salvageable items.
Plastic covers, broken water tanks and other equipment used for makeshift shelters was scattered on the sand.
Scott Anderson, director of UNRWA affairs in the Gaza Strip, said that on a visit to Khan Yunis's Nasser hospital, where many of the casualties were taken, he had "witnessed some of the most horrific scenes I have seen" in the war.
"I saw toddlers who are double amputees, children paralysed and unable to receive treatment, and others separated from their parents," he said in a statement.
Anderson added that "impediments to humanitarian operations prevent us from supporting people anywhere near the scale necessary".
The deaths in Al-Mawasi drew condemnation from governments across the region, with Egypt's foreign ministry saying such "crimes... cannot be accepted under any justification whatsoever".
The Israeli military said of its attack targeting Deif that "the area that was struck... was not a tent complex, but an operational compound".
Separately on Sunday, rescuers said at least eight people were killed in strikes on different parts of Gaza City, where the Israeli military said its operations were ongoing.
On Thursday, US President Joe Biden had said that a framework for a truce and hostage deal he had set out earlier in the war was "now agreed on by both Israel and Hamas", though gaps remained.