Hamas says hostages will not go home alive as long as Israeli forces remain in Gaza.

Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip “will not be returned alive” unless Israeli forces leave, a Hamas spokesman said on Wednesday, underscoring the dire situation facing the Israeli government: it has pledged to free the hostages, end the war to continue and defeat Hamas.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is under significant pressure to do whatever is necessary to get the remaining hostages still alive – more than a hundred of them, the government says – safely home. Yet public opinion surveys show that most Israelis also support his stated goal of eliminating Hamas, which led the deadly attack on Israel on October 7, as a military force.

“We confirm that the enemy prisoners will not be returned alive to their families,” Osama Hamdan, a Hamas spokesman, said at a news conference in Beirut, Lebanon, unless Israel meets the conditions Hamas has set, “the first of which is comprehensive cessation of aggression against Gaza.”

Parsing the meaning of such statements is challenging, in part because Hamas has not always followed through on previous threats. Shortly after its invasion of Israel, Hamas said it would kill the prisoners brought to Gaza unless Israel stopped its retaliatory bombings; it did not carry out this threat, although the bombings continued, and later released more than 100 hostages, largely in exchange for the release of Palestinians in Israeli prisons.

It was also unclear whether Mr Hamdan said the hostages, who had been in captivity for more than three months, would be killed or whether they would be held indefinitely. It has held some of its kidnapping victims for years.

Mr Hamdan dismissed rumors of a deal that would see Hamas leaders in Gaza safely exiled, hostages released and Israeli troops withdrawing from the area. Israeli news media reported that something along these lines was discussed by the governments of Qatar and Egypt.

“There is no initiative, like the Qatari initiative, an Israeli withdrawal and the departure of Hamas leaders,” said Mr. Hamdan, calling it an Israeli attempt to deceive people.

He was also dismissive of Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, who met with Middle Eastern leaders to hammer out a plan for governing and rebuilding Gaza after the war. That plan calls for the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited power in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, to also administer Gaza — essentially ousting Hamas, which took control of Gaza in 2007.

“Following Blinken’s statement that many countries in the region are ready to invest in Gaza’s future, we affirm that the Palestinian people are the only ones who decide their future without interference from anyone,” Mr. Hamdan said.