Iran FM meets Hamas chief in Doha as Gaza death toll nears 20,000

“Today, no one has any doubts that the Palestinian nation and resistance front, despite going through a lot of pain and suffering and seeing more than 20,000 Palestinians martyred over the past 75 days, has proved the superiority of its strength and willpower over the Zionist regime’s killing machine,” Amirabdollahian told Haniyeh.

The foreign minister decried the United States’ unflinching and unlimited support for the Zionist regime in the current war on Gaza, and stressed Washington’s international legal responsibility toward the war crimes and genocide against Palestinians, and referred to some attempts and political messages by the US government to find a way out of the current deadlock and military strategic failure.

He added, “The fact that the US has come to the conclusion that war is not the solution, is a major development, and they had better drop their ongoing futile and failed support for the occupying regime’s lunatic military strategy.”

The top diplomat touched upon the White House’s strategic confusion about the Gaza crisis, adding, “All inside the White House believe the Zionist regime should achieve victory in the battlefield, but now, having come to realize the realities on the ground and being sure about the resistance front and Palestinian people’s strong resistance, while offering full-fledged military support to the child-killing Zionist regime, they seek to get out of this war respectably using a political ploy and save the Israeli regime from this strategic failure.”

Haniyeh, for his part, stated that the Israeli regime has not achieved any of its declared strategic objectives despite the countless crimes it has committed,

The regime claimed it had secured its domination over northern Gaza, but now resistance forces are present across the entire regions of the northern Gaza Strip and continue to resist although the Zionist regime, with the United States’ full-fledged support, keeps committing heinous crimes against residents throughout the Gaza Strip and meting out inhumane treatment to detained Palestinian residents, he continued.

The Hamas chief lauded the backing offered by resistance groups in the region as well as the Islamic Republic of Iran’s political, diplomatic and media support for the resistance front and the Palestinian people, adding such support as well as the large-scale popular moves in Islamic and non-Islamic countries in support of Palestine brings numerous spiritual and mental effects for the Palestinian nation and great political pressure on the Zionist regime and the Western governments backing the regime.

Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip since the Oct. 7 have killed at least 19,700 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 52,500 others, according to health authorities in the enclave.

The war has left Gaza in ruins with half of the coastal territory’s housing stock damaged or destroyed, and nearly 2 million people displaced within the densely-populated enclave amid shortages of food and clean water.