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Senior Hamas official Moussa Abu Marzouk has reiterated that the movement remains morally and humanitarianly committed to returning the bodies of Israeli soldiers recovered in Gaza, while emphasising that no specific timeline has been set for the process.
In remarks released on Sunday, Abu Marzouk said Israel was seeking pretexts; including claims of delayed repatriations, to evade the current agreement and potentially resume military operations.
He accused Israel of continuing to violate the terms of the truce by targeting areas designated as safe zones and further damaging Gaza’s already devastated infrastructure.
Abu Marzouk also criticised US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, describing him as “the foreign minister of Israel” over his recent statements against the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). He stressed that UNRWA “represents the lifeblood of the Palestinian people in Gaza and is indispensable.”
The Hamas official argued that current US pressure on Israel is motivated not by sympathy for Hamas but by a desire to prevent Israel from deepening its own crisis, amid shifting global opinion and growing dissent among Jewish public figures over Israeli policies.
Abu Marzouk warned against any attempt to disarm Hamas or remove it from security control in Gaza, saying such measures would plunge the enclave into chaos and internal strife.
He also questioned the feasibility of deploying international forces in Gaza without a just and sustainable framework, citing past failures in Bosnia and Iraq.
“True stability will only be achieved through the presence of a dominant force on the ground that believes in agreements and can impose security,” Abu Marzouk concluded.
READ: Egyptian committee in Gaza receives heavy equipment for humanitarian missions
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
