Hamas sets conditions for truce

Hamas is ready to accept a temporary truce with Israel provided the Israelis halt their targeted killings and release Palestinian prisoners, the militant group’s leader said today.

Khaled Mashaal said recent meetings between Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and militant groups had produced “positive results”. The talks had focused on their halting attacks on Israel to pave the way for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations to resume.

“There is a talk about pacification,” Mashaal said, referring to a truce. “But it is a conditional pacification whereby the (Israeli) occupation must abide by specific conditions. The most important of which is the cessation of all kinds of aggression, invasion, assassination, killings and the release of all Palestinian prisoners.”

“If the (Israeli) enemy abides by these conditions, we, in Hamas, and other resistance forces in general, are ready to deal positively with the issue of pacification or temporary truce,” Mashaal told the London-based newspaper Al Hayat.

Mashaal, who survived an Israeli attempt to assassinate him in Jordan in 1997, is officially the leader of Hamas’ political bureau. But he is considered the overall leader after Israel’s assassination last year of the founder of the group, Sheik Ahmed Yassin.

Hamas and the group Islamic Jihad are responsible for killing scores of Israelis in suicide bombings. They refuse to accept the Jewish state’s right to exist and they opposed the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s decision to negotiate with Israel. The two groups are on a US list of terrorist organisations.