According to a statement from the Turkish Foreign Ministry, Hakan Fidan met with the chairman of the Hamas shura council, Mohamed Ismail Darwish, and other members of the Islamic movement's political bureau on Friday evening and offered them his condolences for the death of Sinwar, which was confirmed yesterday by the Palestinian group itself.
Fidan and Darwish discussed the status of negotiations for a ceasefire to exchange Israeli hostages held by Hamas, as well as the humanitarian situation in Gaza, the statement said.
The Turkish minister confirmed the talks with "a Hamas delegation" at a press conference in Istanbul today, stressing that they had discussed mainly how to get humanitarian aid to Gaza and achieve "international mobilization" to stop the war.
The meeting also discussed efforts to achieve unity among the different Palestinian political groups, weakened by nearly two decades of fighting between the Islamist Hamas movement and the secular Fatah, which dominates the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
"Turkey supports an internal Palestinian consensus. The better this consensus is, the better the Palestinians will be able to strengthen their unity and solidarity and represent their positions, and the more difficult it will be to subject them to occupation and inhumane treatment," Fidan said.
The meeting between Darwish and Fidan on Friday came on the same day that Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also met in Istanbul for a meeting of the 3+3 Caucasus Platform.
On Thursday, the Israeli army announced that it was "verifying" whether the leader of the Islamist movement Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, had been "eliminated" during an operation in the Gaza Strip.
"During the army's operations in the Gaza Strip, three terrorists were eliminated," the army said in a statement.
Israeli forces are "verifying the possibility that one of the terrorists is Yahya Sinwar" and "at this stage, the identities of the terrorists cannot be confirmed," the statement added.
The announcement came shortly after the army announced the bombing of a school in the Jabalia refugee camp, in the north of the enclave, allegedly used as a "command and control center" by the Islamist movements Islamic Jihad and Hamas, in an attack that has already left at least 28 dead and 150 injured, according to the Hamas government press office.
Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar also took over the reins of the Islamist group's political office on August 6, following the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in a bombing blamed on Israel.
Sinwar, who spent 22 years in an Israeli prison until his release in 2011 during the exchange of more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit held in Gaza, was described by those who interrogated him as "extremely intelligent."
Since the start of the war in Gaza more than a year ago, his whereabouts have been virtually unknown to Israel, which has predicted that the Hamas leader would be in the tunnels, near some of the 100 or so hostages still held in the enclave for protection.
No comments:
Post a Comment