DOha — Qatar Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani lambasted Israel for violating the Gaza ceasefire, while US officials arrived in Israel on Monday to discuss the implementation of the next stages of the truce.
Speaking at Qatar’s legislative council, the emir stated that the international community must protect Gazans and ensure Israel is held to account for violations, which have killed dozens of Palestinians since the truce came into effect.
He also warned that Israel was accelerating settler expansion in the occupied West Bank and carrying out multiple incursions into the Al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem, the third-holiest site in Islam.
“What happened in Gaza was genocide,” he said, echoing the assessment of multiple experts regarding the war on Gaza.
The emir also denounced the Israeli strike on a Hamas delegation in Doha last month while Qatar was acting as a mediator for Gaza ceasefire talks, which led to widespread condemnation from allies of the US and Israel about the illegal attack.
The latest developments come as US President Donald Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, and US Vice President JD Vance arrived in Israel on Monday and Tuesday respectively for a series of meetings on Gaza’s future.
Vance is likely to pressure the Israeli government not to walk away from the ceasefire deal, as concerns grow that Netanyahu will abandon the deal and resume its war on the enclave.
Qatar has criticised Israel for its genocide in Gaza and demanded it be held accountable. Getty Images
Israeli media said that Vance had intended to visit Gaza during his trip, but it was later decided that he would monitor developments in the area remotely due to security concerns.
The envoys met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, where they discussed “developments and updates in the region”, according to a spokeswoman for the Prime Minister’s Office.
Israeli media reported that the envoys will meet with Israeli officials to advance Trump’s ceasefire framework, which comes with a series of steps, and currently stuck at its first stage.
Despite the truce, Trump has levelled a series of threats against Hamas in recent days.
“We made a deal with Hamas that they’re going to be very good… and if they’re not, we’re going to go and we’re going to eradicate them, if we have to. They’ll be eradicated, and they know that,” he said.
Meanwhile, senior Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya said he has been assured that the truce will hold and the war is over, despite Israel killing 97 people since the deal came into effect.
Al-Hayya stressed that Hamas was serious about returning the bodies of captives held in the besieged enclave as agreed, however, noted that without heavy machinery, it will be difficult to recover all of them.
He pressed for more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, despite an Israeli siege on the enclave continuing.
So far, around 986 aid trucks have entered Gaza since the truce commenced, although Gaza’s government media office said a total of 6,600 trucks were supposed to have entered by Monday evening.
In a statement, the office said the drastically low amount of aid to enter the Strip is an example of the “continued policy of strangulation, starvation and humanitarian blackmail practised by the [Israeli] occupation”.
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed over 67,000 Palestinians since October 2023. The war has been determined to be a genocide by leading rights group Amnesty International.
Source: The New arab
