Trump says he expects Hamas decision in 24 hours on 'final' peace proposal
The president also said he had spoken to Saudi Arabia about expanding the Abraham Accords, the deal on normalization of ties that his administration negotiated between Israel and some Gulf countries during his first term.
Trump said on Tuesday Israel had accepted the conditions needed to finalise a 60-day ceasefire with Hamas, during which the parties will work to end the war.
He was asked on Friday if Hamas had agreed to the latest ceasefire deal framework, and said: "We'll see what happens, we are going to know over the next 24 hours."
A source close to Hamas said on Thursday the Islamist group sought guarantees that the new U.S.-backed ceasefire proposal would lead to the end of Israel's war in Gaza.
Two Israeli officials said those details were still being worked out. Dozens of Palestinians were killed on Thursday in Israeli strikes, according to Gaza authorities.
The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered in October 2023 when Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages, Israeli tallies show.
Gaza's health ministry says Israel's subsequent military assault has killed over 56,000 Palestinians. It has also caused a hunger crisis, internally displaced Gaza's entire population and prompted accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice and of war crimes at the International Criminal Court. Israel denies the accusations.
A previous two month ceasefire ended when Israeli strikes killed more than 400 Palestinians on March 18. Trump earlier this year proposed a U.S. takeover of Gaza, which was condemned globally by rights experts, the U.N. and Palestinians as a proposal of "ethnic cleansing."
Trump made the comments on the Abraham Accords when asked about U.S. media reporting late on Thursday that he had met Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman at the White House.
"It's one of the things we talked about," Trump said. "I think a lot of people are going to be joining the Abraham accords," he added, citing the predicted expansion to the damage faced by Iran from recent U.S. and Israeli strikes.
Axios reported that after the meeting with Trump, the Saudi official spoke on the phone with Abdolrahim Mousavi, chief of Iran's General Staff of the Armed Forces.
Trump's meeting with the Saudi official came ahead of a visit to Washington next week by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
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Western Telegraph
26 minutes ago
- Western Telegraph
Israeli air strikes kill 38 Palestinians in Gaza
The strikes came as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was preparing to fly to Washington for talks at the White House aimed at pushing forward ceasefire efforts. Separately, an Israeli official said the country's security cabinet had, on Saturday night, approved sending aid into the northern part of Gaza, where civilians are suffering from acute food shortages. Meanwhile, in Yemen, a spokesperson for the Houthi rebel group announced in a pre-recorded message that the organisation had launched ballistic missiles targeting Ben Gurion airport overnight. The Israeli military said these had been intercepted. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was preparing to fly to Washington for talks at the White House aimed at pushing forward ceasefire efforts (Leo Correa/AP) US president Donald Trump has floated a plan for an initial 60-day ceasefire that would include a partial release of hostages held by Hamas in exchange for an increase in humanitarian supplies allowed into Gaza. The proposed truce calls for talks on ending the 21-month war altogether. Some 20 people were killed and 25 wounded after Israeli strikes hit two houses in Gaza City, according to Mohammed Abu Selmia, the director of Shifa Hospital that services the area. In southern Gaza, 18 Palestinians were killed by strikes in Muwasi, an area on Gaza's Mediterranean where many displaced people live in tents, officials at Nasser Hospital in nearby Khan Younis told The Associated Press. Five of the dead belonged to the same family, according to the hospital. The Israeli military made no immediate comment on the individual strikes, but said it had struck 130 targets across the Gaza Strip in the last 24 hours. It said the strikes targeted Hamas command and control structures, storage facilities, weapons and launchers, and that they had killed a number of militants in northern Gaza. The war began when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 others hostage. US president Donald Trump has floated a plan for an initial 60-day ceasefire (Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP) Israel responded with an offensive that has killed more than 57,000 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, according to Gaza's health ministry. The ministry, which is under Gaza's Hamas government, does not differentiate between civilians and combatants. The UN and other international organisations see its figures as the most reliable statistics on war casualties. The strikes occur as efforts to reach a ceasefire deal appeared to gain momentum. Mr Netanyahu's office said his government would send a negotiating team to Qatar on Sunday to conduct indirect talks, adding that Hamas was seeking 'unacceptable' changes to the proposal. The planned talks in Qatar come ahead of Mr Netanyahu's scheduled visit to Washington on Monday to meet Mr Trump to discuss the deal. It is unclear if an agreement will be reached ahead of the Israeli prime minister's White House meeting. Hamas has sought guarantees that the initial truce would lead to a total end to the war and withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza. Previous negotiations have stalled over Hamas demands of guarantees that further negotiations would lead to the war's end, while Mr Netanyahu has insisted Israel would resume fighting to ensure the militant group's destruction.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Is Trump's expansion of presidential powers setting the stage for future Oval Office holders?
Near corn dog and cookie vendors, Ray Seeman was washing his hands on a sweltering day. He had come to the rally in a Maga cap and a T-shirt that proclaimed: Cult 45: proud member. Is this a cult? 'It seems like it,' he laughed. 'It seems like you're either in or you're out.' A cult, perhaps, but not an imperial presidency, Seeman insisted, though he does understand Donald Trump's frustrations. 'I don't like executive orders,' he said. 'I like it to go through due process. But at the same time you've got to get stuff done sometimes.' A few thousand people had gathered at the Iowa state fairgrounds on Thursday to witness the president kick off a year-long celebration of the US's 250th anniversary of independence from a tyrannical king. No one here seemed concerned that the US might now be propping up a monarch of its own. But Trump's critics warn of an expansion of presidential power unlike anything seen in modern American history. In less than six months, Trump has taken a series of executive actions that have established new norms for the authority of whoever occupies the Oval Office. Longstanding mechanisms designed to limit executive power – Congress, the judiciary and internal safeguards – are being undermined or proving ineffective in restraining him. Last month, Trump ordered a military strike on Iran without seeking congressional approval. A solitary Republican, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, spoke out to describe the move as unconstitutional because only Congress has the power to declare war. Trump scorned him and, setting another dangerous precedent, imposed a limit on classified information shared with senators and representatives. Trump took unilateral action to impose tariffs under the cover of declaring a national emergency. He dismantled agencies, fired civil servants and froze spending that was approved by Congress and assumed to be protected by law; he has, for example, blocked more than $6bn in federal funding that helps fund after-school and summer programmes. Trump shattered another norm when he took control of California's national guard and deployed it to quell mostly peaceful protests over immigration raids in Los Angeles, despite opposition from state governor Gavin Newsom and other state officials. The president has breached the justice department's traditional independence, ordering it to scrutinise his political opponents and punish his critics through measures such as stripping their Secret Service protections. At the same time, he pardoned his supporters who took part in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, abandoning any notion that pardons be used sparingly. While courts have acted to block some executive actions, the US supreme court's recent ruling limiting nationwide injunctions and Trump's direct attacks on judges signal the weakening of another democratic guardrail. And even as Trump brazenly accepts gifts from foreign countries, seeks to profit from the presidency through a cryptocurrency venture and bullies law firms, media companies and universities – all unthinkable under his predecessors – there is only token resistance from Congress. Republicans hold the majority in both chambers and have a cultish devotion to Trump, or visceral fear of his wrath. On Thursday, they rammed through his 'big, beautiful bill' despite warnings that it will rip the social safety net from millions of Americans and add trillions of dollars to the national deficit. Hours later, a triumphant Trump was greeted in Des Moines, Iowa, by supporters in a car park festooned with 55 national flags. One man wore a T-shirt entirely covered with a photo of a bloodied Trump with fist raised after last year's assassination attempt. A bearded vendor in a red T-shirt, checked shorts and plastic flip-flops spread red Trump 2028 caps on the ground. Flags and T-shirts declared: 'Jesus is my savior. Trump is my president.' Michelle Coon, 57, a psychotherapist, denied that Trump is behaving like an autocrat. 'I don't think he has been given that kind of power,' she said. 'I see people in Congress having a voice. He's lucky enough to have both houses right now; he might not have that in two years. The supreme court has come down both on his side and against his perspective so I see it fairly balanced right now.' Coon added: 'He's a great leader but I don't think that's necessarily authoritarian. He's trying to gather a lot of people around him to get good wisdom from others. I don't think we have anything to fear here.' Josue Rodriguez, 38, a pastor who works for the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, was equally sanguine. 'We have a wonderful system called checks and balances where, if they feel that an individual has become all too powerful, too mighty, they have the right to take him to court and the supreme court will decide what is correct and not correct,' he said. Rodriguez also retains faith in political parties, saying: 'If they feel that the president is acting in a manner that goes against the American people or what is allowed legally, he will be challenged within his own party. At the end of the day, these people want to get re-elected and they're not going to allow things that will cause them to lose their re-elections.' But some analysts suggest that extreme partisanship is preventing effective congressional oversight, as members of the president's party are unwilling to challenge Trump's overreach. They are sounding the alarm about an erosion of democratic norms that could have lasting implications for future presidencies. Bill Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, this week initiated a new executive power project because he considers it the most important constitutional issue of the moment. 'It didn't start with President Trump but it may end there,' Galston said. 'It's hard to imagine a subsequent president seeking to advance executive power as a deliberate project to the extent that President Trump has been doing. 'This is not an accident. This was something that was carefully planned as both a political strategy and a legal strategy and I have to say I'm impressed with the administration's strategic focus on the issue of presidential power and the elimination of long-established limits to it.' Galston pointed to a drive to undermine the autonomy of so-called independent agencies. A legal challenge has been set in motion that will likely culminate in a supreme court decision next term that, Galston suspects, may effectively eliminate a 90-year precedent that guaranteed the independence of agencies. Trump is not the first American president to see how far he can go. In 1973, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr published The Imperial Presidency, acknowledging that, while he had cheered on Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the expansion of executive authority now threatened to 'override the separation of powers and burst the bonds of the Constitution'. The book was timely because the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam war saw a reassertion of congressional authority in the domestic and foreign spheres. Presidential power began to expand again, however, under Ronald Reagan. Galston noted: 'Young conservatives who came of age serving in the Reagan administration chafed more and more against congressional restraints, culminating in the publication in 1989 of a collection of essays by the American Enterprise Institute called The Fettered Presidency. 'So in 16 years, the adjective switches from 'imperial' to 'fettered' and I trace a lot of the modern conservative drive to expand the powers of the president at Congress's expense to that experience.' The trend accelerated with George W Bush's aggressive response to the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks. But other factors were in play: whereas divided government was once cause for negotiation, deepening polarisation between the parties made gridlock more likely, much to the frustration of the White House occupant. Barack Obama duly used an executive action to create the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) programme. He stepped up his use of such actions in 2014 as he became frustrated with how difficult it was to push legislation through Congress, saying: 'I've got a pen and I've got a phone.' Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: 'There's a long history here and it's not just Trump. Look at just this century. Bush expanded presidential powers in ways that Obama took advantage of and then Obama expanded presidential powers in ways that Trump then expanded on. 'You can think of this as a loaded gun that's left on the table in the Oval Office. It's quite alarming. The next president who comes in, whether Democrat or Republican, is going to see the office through the eyes of their predecessor, not through the eyes of George Washington, who was leery of using his powers.'
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
So big, so beautiful: Fox News ignores the critics and champions Trump's bill
Donald Trump's mega-bill has been widely criticized in the press. News outlets and Democrats have warned that millions of people could be stripped of their health coverage through cuts to Medicaid, that cuts to food programs would see children go hungry, and that the legislation would cause the deficit to balloon. Fox News sees it differently. 'This legislation is packed with massive, huge, important wins for you, the American people,' Sean Hannity told viewers on Monday, as US senators debated the bill in Washington. 'Here's what the bill doesn't do. It does not decrease Medicaid, Medicare, Snap or social security benefits,' Hannity continued, a claim that completely contradicted the assessment of the Congressional Budget Office, which estimates the bill will cut Medicaid across the US by 7.6 million to 10.3 million people. Hannity had more. 'The big, beautiful bill also does not increase the deficit. Instead, the deficit will go down around a little shy of $2tn – that's to begin with, according to estimates,' he said. 'Because guess what? That's what happens when you cut taxes. It stimulates the economy, creates jobs, gets people off the welfare rolls. Guess what? People are working, now they're paying taxes.' It was unclear where Hannity got his $2tn number from, because he didn't say. But the CBO says the bill would add at least $3.3tn to the national debt over the next nine years, while the tax cuts will benefit high earners more than others. Hannity held up Ronald Reagan's tax cuts in 1981 as an example of how the deficit will be reduced – a take that ignored that those tax cuts saw an increase of the deficit, and had to be reversed over the rest of Reagan's presidency. Still, Hannity was sold. 'The American people are on the verge of a level of prosperity they have never experienced before,' he said. Hannity's interpretation was starkly different from the one many Americans were seeing. Even Republican senators have been dubious about the bill's benefits, with three voting against it in the early hours of Tuesday morning, and House Republicans wavering on Wednesday. Yet, on Tuesday, Laura Ingraham largely ignored the bill – framing it only as Democrats losing a battle to 'derail' the legislation before going on a minutes-long riff about a 'slide in patriotism' in the US. She went on to offer complaints that there were 'more foreign flags waving' in America's streets and that leftwing politicians believe that 'America can only be redeemed when she's totally dismantled and then remade, with millions of new people from other countries'. Elsewhere, there were occasional, albeit small, concessions that the 'big, beautiful bill' might not quite be the masterly piece of legislation the White House would have people believe. 'It's not perfect, but it does need to pass if we want this tax cut,' Ainsley Earhardt said on Fox & Friends at the start of the week. Her co-host Brian Kilmeade at least presented some of the negative points in an interview with Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, on Tuesday, challenging him to address the claim that 'this is a tax break for the rich'. But Bessent didn't even attempt to address that, and Kilmeade was unwilling or unable to press him further. The best public interest journalism relies on first-hand accounts from people in the know. If you have something to share on this subject you can contact us confidentially using the following methods. Secure Messaging in the Guardian app The Guardian app has a tool to send tips about stories. Messages are end to end encrypted and concealed within the routine activity that every Guardian mobile app performs. This prevents an observer from knowing that you are communicating with us at all, let alone what is being said. If you don't already have the Guardian app, download it (iOS/Android) and go to the menu. Select 'Secure Messaging'. SecureDrop, instant messengers, email, telephone and post See our guide at for alternative methods and the pros and cons of each. Later that day, the theme continued. Trace Gallagher pulled up data from the Tax Foundation and the Tax Policy Center during his show, with a series of bullet points claiming that if Trump's bill failed it would lead to tax increases for families and small business owners. Gallagher left out the part of the Tax Foundation's analysis where the organization said the bill would reduce incomes by 0.6% and result in a nearly $3.6tn deficit increase, and ignored the Tax Policy Center's verdict that most of the tax cuts in the bill would go 'to the highest-income households'. His guests seemingly overlooked those bits, too, as they kept up the ruse. 'No bill is perfect,' Elizabeth Pipko, a former spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, told Gallagher, as she claimed 'the Democrats seem to have forgotten that' before accusing the mainstream media, with no irony, of not accurately representing the bill. Pipko added: 'I think it will pass, and I think it'll go down in history as again another false alarm from the legacy media, from the Democrats, and another victory for President Trump.'
