“What the occupier Israel failed to achieve through its air and sea raids, it will not be able to achieve with a ground offensive. It is bound to fail,” Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Meshaal said on Friday.

Israel has killed nearly 250 people and injured at least 1,900 others since it began its latest onslaught against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip on July 8.

Israeli forces on Thursday launched a ground offensive against the blockaded sliver after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the army to push the aggression against Gaza into a new stage.

Meshaal further said that the Palestinian resistance movement has “clear demands” for a ceasefire with Tel Aviv, which include an end to Israel’s brutal aggression against Palestinian people in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, as well as “the lifting of the Gaza siege.”

The Hamas leader urged the international community to “assume its responsibility and put an end to Israeli terrorism.”

In an earlier interview with the British newspaper The Telegraph, published on July 17, Meshaal said Hamas will not accept a simple cessation of fire and that the agreement must comprise long-term commitments to improve the “rights of the Palestinian people.”

He noted that the Tel Aviv regime must “stop the aggression” on the coastal enclave, free the Palestinians arrested over the recent death of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank and “end the siege on Gaza permanently.”

“These are our clear demands,” said Meshaal. “We won’t accept an agreement that prolongs the suffering of our people anymore. In Gaza, for the past seven years of siege, its 1.8 million people have been living in a prison.”

BA/BA