Hamas says it's open to a Gaza truce but stops short of accepting a Trump-backed proposal
Trump said Tuesday that Israel had agreed on terms for a 60-day ceasefire in Gaza and urged Hamas to accept the deal before conditions worsen. The U.S. leader has been increasing pressure on the Israeli government and Hamas to broker a ceasefire, and hostage agreement and bring about an end to the war.
Trump said the 60-day period would be used to work toward ending the war — something Israel says it won't accept until Hamas is defeated. He said that a deal might come together as soon as next week.
But Hamas' response, which emphasized its demand that the war end, raised questions about whether the latest offer could materialize into an actual pause in fighting.
Hamas official Taher al-Nunu said that the militant group was 'ready and serious regarding reaching an agreement.'
He said Hamas was 'ready to accept any initiative that clearly leads to the complete end to the war.'
A Hamas delegation is expected to meet with Egyptian and Qatari mediators in Cairo on Wednesday to discuss the proposal, according to an Egyptian official. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, because he wasn't authorized to discuss the talks with the media.
Disagreement on how the war should end
Throughout the nearly 21-month-long war, ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas have repeatedly faltered over whether the war should end as part of any deal.
Hamas said in a brief statement Wednesday that it had received a proposal from the mediators and is holding talks with them to 'bridge gaps' to return to the negotiating table to try to reach a ceasefire agreement.
Hamas has said that it's willing to free the remaining 50 hostages, less than half of whom are said to be alive, in exchange for a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and an end to the war.
Israel says it will only agree to end the war if Hamas surrenders, disarms and exiles itself, something the group refuses to do.
An Israeli official said that the latest proposal calls for a 60-day deal that would include a partial Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and a surge in humanitarian aid to the territory. The mediators and the U.S. would provide assurances about talks to end the war, but Israel isn't committing to that as part of the latest proposal, the official said.
The official wasn't authorized to discuss the details of the proposed deal with the media and spoke on condition of anonymity.
It wasn't clear how many hostages would be freed as part of the agreement, but previous proposals have called for the release of about 10.
Israel has yet to publicly comment on Trump's announcement. On Monday, Trump is set to host Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, days after Ron Dermer, a senior Netanyahu adviser, held discussions with top U.S. officials about Gaza, Iran and other matters.
Trump issues another warning
On Tuesday, Trump wrote on social media that Israel had "agreed to the necessary conditions to finalize the 60 Day CEASEFIRE, during which time we will work with all parties to end the War.'
'I hope, for the good of the Middle East, that Hamas takes this Deal, because it will not get better — IT WILL ONLY GET WORSE,' he said.
Trump's warning may find a skeptical audience with Hamas. Even before the expiration of the war's longest ceasefire in March, Trump has repeatedly issued dramatic ultimatums to pressure Hamas to agree to longer pauses in the fighting that would see the release of more hostages and a return of more aid for Gaza's civilians.
Still, Trump views the current moment as a potential turning point in the brutal conflict that has left more than 57,000 dead in the Palestinian territory.
Gaza's Health Ministry said the death toll passed the 57,000 mark Tuesday into Wednesday, after hospitals received 142 bodies overnight. The ministry doesn't differentiate between civilians and combatants in its death count, but says that more than half of the dead are women and children.
Since dawn Wednesday, Israeli strikes killed a total of 40 people across the Gaza Strip, the mMinistry said. Hospital officials said four children and seven women were among the dead.
The Israeli military, which blames Hamas for the civilian casualties because it operates from populated areas, was looking into the reports.
The war began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking roughly 250 hostages.
The war has left the coastal Palestinian territory in ruins, with much of the urban landscape flattened in the fighting. More than 90% of Gaza's 2.3 million population has been displaced, often multiple times. And the war has sparked a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, pushing hundreds of thousands of people toward hunger.
Hospital director killed
The director of the Indonesian Hospital, Dr. Marwan Sultan, was killed in an apartment in an Israeli strike west of Gaza City, a hospital statement said. The hospital is the Palestinian enclave's largest medical facility north of Gaza City and has been a critical lifeline since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
The hospital was surrounded by Israeli troops last month, and evacuated alongside the other two primary hospitals in northern Gaza.
The bodies of Sultan, his wife, daughter and son-in-law, arrived at Shifa Hospital torn into pieces, according to Issam Nabhan, head of the nursing department at the Indonesian Hospital.
'Gaza lost a great man and doctor," Nabhan said. "He never left the hospital one moment since the war began and urged us to stay and provide humanitarian assistance. We don't know what he did to deserve getting killed.'
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Bassem Mroue reported from Beirut. Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut, and Josef Federman in Jerusalem, contributed to this report.
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NBC News
41 minutes ago
- NBC News
Thom Tillis' exit shakes up the battle for the Senate as key races take shape
GOP Sen. Thom Tillis' surprise retirement announcement has shaken up not only North Carolina's Senate race, but also the broader fight for the majority in the chamber heading into next year's midterm elections. Democrats face a difficult task of netting four seats to win the Senate majority. Aside from battleground North Carolina, the party's top pickup opportunity is in Maine, where Sen. Susan Collins is the only Republican senator representing a state that former Vice President Kamala Harris won in 2024. But the five-term incumbent has proved difficult to unseat. And beyond that, Democrats would need to win races in traditionally red states, in addition to holding a handful of swing-state seats. But with Tillis now declining to seek a third term, Democrats are starting to see a clearer, if still uphill, path to the majority. 'If Democrats want to take back the Senate, it starts in North Carolina,' said Morgan Jackson, a veteran Democratic consultant in the state. The Democratic fields in North Carolina and Maine are still taking shape, and decisions from potential contenders could come in the next few weeks after a new fundraising quarter kicked off on Tuesday. Candidates often launch campaigns early in a quarter in hopes of posting a big fundraising number right out of the gate. In recent days, Republican Scott Brown launched a Senate bid in New Hampshire, while former Democratic Rep. Colin Allred announced he is running in Texas. Tar Heel State shake-up Tillis' exit now means the Republican field in North Carolina is in flux, with all eyes on a potential contender with the same last name as President Donald Trump. Trump told reporters Tuesday that his daughter-in-law Lara Trump 'would always be my first choice' to run for Senate in North Carolina, her home state. Some Tar Heel State Republicans said potential candidates would likely defer to Lara Trump if she decides to run. 'The Trump lane is the path to victory. 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Cooper continues to strongly consider a run for the Senate and he'll decide in the coming weeks,' said Jackson, a Cooper adviser. Jackson said Tillis' exit has not affected Cooper's deliberations, noting Cooper's decision 'has always been based on a personal decision of what is the best way to serve the state and the people. And that calculation has not changed.' Other key matchups take shape The Democratic field is also still in flux in Maine. Collins' spokespeople did not return a request for comment on her plans, but she told CNN in May, 'It's certainly my inclination to run and I'm preparing to do so,' adding that she has 'not made a formal announcement because it's too early for that.' Jordan Wood, a Maine native who served as former California Rep. Katie Porter's chief of staff, is in the race on the Democratic side. Maine state House Speaker Ryan Fecteau and former state Sen. Cathy Breen told the Portland Press Herald in May that they were considering runs. 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The Guardian
41 minutes ago
- The Guardian
The Gaza discourse has been Vylanised – but that diversionary strategy just doesn't work any more
If you are in the business of anointing monsters, you can see why your eyes would light up at a punk act called Bob Vylan. Until last weekend, sure, it might have been a tough sell to proclaim them as an avatar for Britain's revolting youth: prominent though they might be on the UK's punk scene, they had about about 220,000 monthly listeners on Spotify – a mere 1,000,000 away from a place in the top 10,000. But then, at Glastonbury, they made the most powerful possible case for broad media attention: they said something controversial about Israel's assault on Gaza, and opened up a chance to have a go at the BBC. And so the following morning, on the front page of the Mail on Sunday: 'NOW ARREST PUNK BAND WHO LED 'DEATH TO ISRAELIS' CHANTS AT GLASTONBURY.' Pascal Robinson-Foster, aka Bobby Vylan, had started a round of 'antisemitic chanting' that was broadcast live on the corporation's coverage of the festival, the story explained. Keir Starmer called it 'appalling hate speech'. The calls for the band members' arrest were quickly picked up, and before long the Conservatives were suggesting that the BBC should be prosecuted as well. On Monday, the story splashed in the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express. In fact, Robinson-Foster hadn't chanted 'Death to Israelis', but 'Death to the IDF', a sharply different proposition, and one focused on the military machine attacking Gaza, the Israeli Defense Forces, rather than Israeli civilians. Nonetheless, the Mail on Sunday's headline elision stuck. In much of the coverage, the idea that the chant was inherently antisemitic wasn't even a question. The assertion was barely explained in any of the front page stories; the BBC and even Glastonbury's Emily Eavis went along with it too. If you were looking for a rationale, the closest you got came from Stephen Pollard in the Mail on Sunday: after comparing the scene to the Nuremberg rallies, he added that 'what they meant – because the IDF is the army of the world's only Jewish state – was 'Death, death to the Jews''. Later, Andrew Neil went further: 'I was going to say that they sometimes seem to have more in common with the Nuremberg rally,' he mused. 'But even the Nazis didn't say 'death to the Jews'.' Meanwhile, Yvette Cooper has ordered that Palestine Action should be banned as a terrorist group for its targeting of buildings and businesses in opposition to Israel's actions in Gaza, even though it has no agenda for violence – and after a last-minute legal challenge to the proscription failed on Friday, supporting them is now a criminal offence. In that environment, any uncertainty about the Bob Vylan story would plainly be treated as apologism for hate speech, or worse, and so there wasn't a lot of it about. In truth, though, a lot of people might have been uncertain. The IDF as metonym for any Jew is not a typical trope in the extremist's lexicon, and the circumstances of the Israeli military's assault on Gaza are the obvious, and urgent, locus of the chant's intended force. Nonetheless, Avon and Somerset police have now opened a criminal investigation. There are, to be sure, cogent objections to raise. Robinson-Foster described a record label boss as a 'Zionist', and while he noted that the executive 'would speak very strongly about his support for Israel', it is reasonable to accuse him of playing into a familiar antisemitic trope, particularly about the music industry. Meanwhile, some Jewish people already alert to a rise in racist hostility towards them may well have felt alarmed by the sight of a crowd chanting against the Israeli army. Sensible people will come to a range of conclusions about those points – but there has been no space for that discussion, because the IDF apparently represents Jewish people everywhere, and everything else gets lost in the shuffle. The death toll in Gaza now stands at more than 57,000, according to figures from the Gaza ministry of health; a robust independent survey recently put the count at almost 84,000. Israeli ministers and officials have given weight to allegations that a genocide is under way with assertions that starving two million Palestinians to death might be 'justified and moral' and descriptions of a forced 'deportation plan'. The amount of aid going into the territory remains a fraction of what is needed. At least 400 Palestinians have been killed recently in incidents involving the IDF while approaching food distribution centres; Haaretz reported that soldiers were ordered to fire on them deliberately, a claim denied by Israel as 'vicious lies'. Meanwhile, in the UK, the only adjacent story deemed worthy of front page attention is the conduct of an obscure punk-rap group from Ipswich. On 17 June, at least 59 Palestinians were killed after the IDF fired on a crowd waiting for flour trucks near Khan Younis. The next day's Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Sun and Daily Express featured no coverage of that story at all. Perhaps they would have done if the BBC had broadcast it live. It would be understandable, then, to conclude that the obsession with Bob Vylan – and Kneecap, and Palestine Action – matters mainly for its diversionary force. But there is something more at work here. It isn't just that people are angry that the catastrophe in Gaza isn't being given due attention: it is that their encounters with observable reality are being flatly denied. The choice framed by these stories is between being an anti-racist, or even an anti-terrorist, and being horrified by the slaughter of thousands of brown civilians in a military siege. For anyone who routinely sees videos of the aftermath of Israeli violence against civilians in their social media feeds, this is enough to make you feel crazy. Across the UK and the US, there is increasing evidence that people who object to what we might call the Vylanising of the Gaza discourse are finding their voice. In the general election last year, Labour lost five seats to pro-Gaza candidates, and forfeited about a third of its vote in some Muslim majority areas. In New York, Zohran Mamdani won an underdog victory in the Democratic mayoral primary despite attempts to caricature him as an advocate of 'jihad'. Some 55% of the British public opposes Israel's military campaign in Gaza, and 45% view Israel's actions as genocidal; less than half of Americans are now more sympathetic to Israel than to Palestinians, and almost 60% of Democrats are now more supportive of Palestinians. Among people under 40, those numbers only go up. Those people have been told that Gaza protests are hate marches; they can see it's not true. They have been told that US campus protesters are largely motivated by antisemitism; they can see it's not true. They have been told that Palestine Action is a terrorist organisation because it spray painted military aircraft; they can see it's not true. They have been repeatedly told, by Benjamin Netanyahu, that opposition to Israel's war is antisemitic; they can see it's not true. They have been told that the British government finds Israel's actions 'intolerable'; they can see it's not true. Now they are being told that opposing the IDF is antisemitic, that the Glastonbury crowd is more virulent than the one at Nuremberg, and that direct action is a form of terrorism. They can see all that's not true, either, and however far their view is from the front pages, they know that they are far from alone. Archie Bland is the editor of the Guardian's First Edition newsletter Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Iran's devastation has hardened hearts towards the west – even for those with no love of the state
A trembling ceasefire has brought a pause to what had become the familiar sounds of explosions over Tehran. I was born in 1988, a year before the Iran-Iraq war came to an end. For my generation, war was something that belonged to the past – an impossible event, until this summer. For 12 days, we lived in the capital under incessant Israeli attacks, and what we saw has changed us for good: dead neighbours, buildings gutted and worry – endless, deep-etched worry – on the faces of people. There is comfort in speaking of 'the Iranian people' as though we are one unified bloc. But like most societies, Iranians hold divergent views. When fighting first broke out, there were people who were glad to see a foreign power targeting the widely disliked Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) top brass, at least in the beginning. But others – though dissidents themselves – deeply resented the idea of foreign invasion. Some hardliners saw this war as a messianic mission to be carried through to the bitter end; others were numb to what was happening. But as the news filled with footage of civilian casualties, and the attacks grew harsher and less targeted, different social factions began to unite around the notion of watan, homeland. Patriotism gained new currency, and national pride was on most lips. Scenes of solidarity – whether lasting remains to be seen – abounded: landlords cancelling rent in light of the crisis; people outside Tehran hosting those fleeing the capital; no rush to grocery stores, no chaos, no panicked evacuations. In my view, the way European countries responded to Israel's onslaught played a key role in this shift. The E3, alongside other silent nations across the continent, supported the Israeli strikes, using all the usual justifications, from Iran's nuclear programme to its support for terrorism, all while the US president painted a rosy image of Iran's supposed greatness the 'day after'' on his Truth Social. But those of us in the Middle East know better. Images of fresh devastation in Gaza appear daily, and we remember the chaos in Libya, civil war in Syria, two decades of occupation in Iraq and the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan. There was no promise in these conflicts – no seeds of democracy being planted. Surely, the naked reality of Israel's aggression would register with the same powers that rightly condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine – so that yet another war would not crush the region once again. And surely, these attacks – brutal, unprovoked, deliberate – should have been met with a flood of condemnation and fury at the disregard for the UN charter. But none came. The silence was deafening. A reminder that Iranian lives, clearly, carry less worth than those of others. This, for many of us, was the main takeaway from the support western countries extended to Israel. The war was on Iran, but it was justified through the same old playbook: racism. The indifference and inaction of those with the power to intervene; the media's passive tone when referring to non-white casualties; the habitual disregard for their suffering; and the blase attitude towards attacks on lands outside the western orbit – with the German chancellor even saying: 'This is dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us.' Many Iranians are angry at this injustice – so much so that the idea of building a nuclear weapon, once confined to the radical fringes of politics, is now gaining traction among ordinary people. As one user put it on X: 'No one seems concerned about the state of human rights in North Korea,' implying that nuclear warheads remain the only reliable deterrent against aggression. It would be foolish to trust Israel with a ceasefire. The country has a track record of violating agreements with impunity. That means a Damoclean sword still hangs over Tehran, even as the sound of explosions fades. From afar, this city of over 10 million people may appear to have returned to its usual bustle. But uncertainty still hangs in the air, and what makes it worse is the absence of any credible broker capable of ending the war. For many here, the west's tacit, explicit or even active participation in the conflict disqualifies it from any role as a good-faith negotiator. From where I stand, once again, feelings of mistrust towards Europe are bedding in. Buildings will be rebuilt, infrastructure repaired. But what may be damaged beyond repair – perhaps irredeemably so – is the moral fabric on which Europe stands to preach to others. The double standards. The hypocrisy. The injustice of it all. The imperial mindset – still visibly alive and well – now casts a long shadow over how Europe is perceived. Not just for Iranians, I suspect, but for many people across the global south. These are hard times to live through. Whether the Islamic republic survives this moment, strikes a deal, or continues down its current path of retaliation, I do not know. But what is sure is that whoever governs Iran in the future will not forget what happened here. Hossein Hamdieh holds a joint PhD in Geography and Anthropology from Humboldt University of Berlin and King's College London. He is currently based in Tehran, where he works as a social researcher Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
