The leadership of the Hamas terrorist group met in the Gaza Strip on Monday to consolidate a ceasefire agreement with Israel but failed to reach an understanding.
The parties met in order to prevent last month's conflict between the Jewish State and Gaza’s terrorist factions from rekindling, but Israel refused to comply with any of Hamas' demands.
Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip Yahya Sinwar told the media that Jerusalem's steadfastness was an outgrowth of its failures to understand the motivations of the Palestinian people.
“Israel continues with its policies against the Palestinian people, against the [Palestinian] prisoners and against the Gaza Strip and tries to extort us when it comes to the issue of easing the living conditions of the residents of the Gaza Strip," Sinwar said.
"We have informed the UN representatives that we would not accept this. The meeting was bad, it was not good at all."
Sinwar also said that the different factions in Gaza will convene in the near future to discuss their next steps.
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Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip preparing to launch explosive-laden balloons into Israel
(Photo: Getty Images)
The meeting came on the heels of last week's spate of incendiary balloon attacks launched from Gaza into Israeli soil which caused dozens of fires that consumed large swathes of farmland and endangered residential areas near the border.
The Israeli military responded with a series of attacks on several Hamas targets in the southern and northern Gaza Strip, including several buildings and at least one rocket launching pit.
These strikes were preceded by warnings from both Defense Minister Benny Gantz and Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who warned of heavy retaliation if Hamas kept encroaching on Israeli sovereignty.
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Israeli military strikes in the Gaza Strip in retaliation for incendiary balloon attacks
(Photo: AFP)
The Gaza-ruling faction brushed off the Israeli attacks as "merely a show" enacted by the new Israeli government "designed to improve the morale of soldiers that collapsed in the face of the resistance’s attacks during the last campaign."
Hamas threatened to respond if attacks persisted.