A senior Hamas official has spoken for the first time since last week’s Israeli attack on the group’s leadership in the Qatari capital Doha, describing the moment of the attack and how the officials managed to barely escape.

“We were in a meeting, the negotiating delegation and some advisers. Less than an hour after we began reviewing the American proposal that we received from the Qatari mediators, we heard loud explosions,” Ghazi Hamad told Al Jazeera Arabic on Wednesday.

“We immediately left the scene, because we knew from the start that the explosions were Israeli shelling. We’ve lived in Gaza and experienced Israeli shelling before,” Hamad added.

Israel killed five Hamas members and a Qatari security official while trying to assassinate senior Hamas leaders. Those targeted were

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