Two years after the Gaza conflict erupted, President Donald Trump yesterday pledged US support for Gaza security guarantees and said he believes a deal is close to being completed for the remaining hostages.
Talking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump said, “I think there’s a possibility that we could have peace in the Middle East” beyond just Gaza. He said he would discuss Gaza with visiting Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.
A US official said US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who was Trump’s Middle East envoy during his first term, were headed to Egypt yesterday to join the negotiations there.
The talks seem to represent the most promising negotiations yet for ending a war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and devastated Gaza since the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken back to Gaza as hostages.
“We are very close to making a deal on the Middle East that will bring peace to the Middle East after all of these years,” Trump said at the start of an Oval Office meeting with Carney.
Asked what security guarantees the US was willing to offer, Trump pledged help without offering specifics.
“We are going to do everything possible – we have a lot of power – and we’re going to do everything possible to make sure everybody adheres to the deal,” he said.
Hamas yesterday said it wants to reach a deal to end the war in Gaza based on Trump’s plan but still has a set of demands, a statement signalling that indirect talks with Israel in Egypt could be difficult and lengthy.
Senior Hamas official Fawzi Barhoum set out Hamas’ position on the second anniversary of the Palestinian fighter group’s attack on Israel that triggered the Gaza war, and one day after the indirect negotiations began in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.
The talks appear the most promising yet for ending a war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and devastated Gaza since the October 7, 2023 attack.
But officials on all sides urged caution over the prospects for a rapid agreement, as Israelis remembered the bloodiest single day for Jews since the Holocaust and Gazans voiced hope for an end to the suffering brought by two years of war.
“The (Hamas) movement’s delegation participating in the current negotiations in Egypt is working to overcome all obstacles to reaching an agreement that meets the aspirations of our people in Gaza,” Barhoum said in a televised statement.
He said a deal must ensure an end to the war and a full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip – conditions that Israel has never accepted. Israel, for its part wants Hamas to disarm, something the group rejects.
Hamas wants a permanent, comprehensive ceasefire, a complete pullout of Israeli forces and the immediate start of a comprehensive reconstruction process under the supervision of a Palestinian “national technocratic body”, he said.
Underlining the obstacles lying ahead at talks, an umbrella of Palestinian factions including Hamas issued a statement vowing a “resistance stance by all means” and saying “no one has the right to cede the weapons of the Palestinian people”.
US officials have suggested they want to initially focus talks on a halt to the fighting and the logistics of how the hostages and Palestinian prisoners in Israel would be freed. But Qatar, one of the mediators, said many details had to be worked out, indicating that any agreement was not imminent.
In the absence of a ceasefire, Israel has pressed on with its offensive in Gaza, increasing its international isolation.
Opponents of Israel’s actions in Gaza held protests in Sydney, Australia and a handful of European cities on the anniversary of Hamas’ attack, despite denunciations by politicians who said such marches risked glorifying violence.
In the latest violence, residents of Khan Younis in southern Gaza and Gaza City in the north reported new attacks by Israeli tanks, planes and boats in the early hours yesterday.
The Israeli military said fighters in Gaza fired rockets into Israel, setting off air raid sirens at Israeli kibbutz Netiv Haasara, and that Israeli troops continued to tackle gunmen inside the enclave.
l Swedish activist Greta Thunberg yesterday alleged that she and other detainees of the Gaza flotilla were subjected to torture in the Israeli prison they were held.
Thunberg told a news conference in Stockholm that she and others were “kidnapped and tortured” by the Israeli military.
She declined to elaborate, adding when pressed that she didn’t get clean water and that other detainees were deprived of critical medication.
“Personally, I don’t want to share what I was subjected to because I don’t want it to make headlines and ‘Greta has been tortured’, because that’s not the story here,” she said, adding that what they were subjected to paled in comparison to what people in Gaza experienced daily.
&uuid=(email))