HAMAS would observe a truce with Israel of five years or more and convert into a political party if an independent Palestinian state was established along the pre-1967 borders, a top official with the Islamist group has said.

Khalil al-Hayya spoke to the Associated Press news agency in Istanbul on Wednesday night amid a stalemate in months of talks aimed at agreeing a ceasefire in Gaza.

The suggestion that Hamas would disarm appeared to be a significant concession, given that the militant group is officially committed to Israel’s destruction.

However, it seems unlikely that Israel would accept the offer. It has vowed to crush Hamas following the deadly October 7 attacks that triggered the war and its current leadership is bitterly opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state.

There was no immediate reaction from Israel or the Palestinian Authority, which Hamas drove out of Gaza in 2007, a year after winning parliamentary elections.

Mr Hayya said Hamas wants to join the Palestine Liberation Organisation, headed by the rival Fatah faction, to form a unified government for Gaza and the West Bank.

He pledged that his organisation would accept “a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the return of Palestinian refugees in accordance with the international resolutions,” along Israel’s pre-1967 borders.

If that happens, he said, Hamas’s military wing would be wound up.

Israel is now preparing to send troops into the southern city of Rafah, to which more than one million Palestinians have fled the hope of finding refuge from Israeli attacks.

It claims that invading the city is necessary to destroy Hamas’s remaining forces in Gaza, but Mr Hayya insisted that such an offensive would not defeat his organisation, claiming that Israel’s forces “have not destroyed more than 20 per cent of [Hamas’s] capabilities, neither human nor in the field.”

He insisted that Israeli attempts to eradicate the group would not prevent future Palestinian armed uprisings.

“Let’s say that they have destroyed Hamas. Are the Palestinian people gone?” he asked.

In Rafah, Israeli air strikes killed at least five people yesterday, hospital officials said yesterday.

Among the victims of the overnight attacks were two children, aged six and eight.

In central Gaza, four people were killed by Israeli tank shelling.

The day before, Hamas released a video showing an Israeli-US hostage who was abducted during the October 7 attack, along with about 250 other people.

Hersh Goldberg-Polin accused Israel’s government of abandoning the hostages and said that about 70 had been killed by Israeli bombing, though he was clearly speaking under duress.