US envoy tells Israeli hostage families he is working on plan to end Gaza war
Emily Rose
, Reuters
Families of Israelis held hostage in Tel Aviv square during US envoy Steve Witkoff's visit on 2 August 2025.
Photo:
Jack Guez / AFP
US President Donald Trump's Middle East envoy told families of hostages being held by Palestinian militant group Hamas that he was working with the Israeli government on a plan that would effectively end the war in Gaza.
Trump has made ending the conflict a major priority of his administration, though negotiations have faltered.
Steve Witkoff is visiting Israel
as its government faces mounting pressure over the deteriorating humanitarian conditions in the enclave.
In a recording of the Saturday (local time) meeting, reviewed by
Reuters
, Witkoff is heard saying: "We have a very, very good plan that we're working on collectively with the Israeli government, with Prime Minister Netanyahu ... for the reconstruction of Gaza. That effectively means the end of the war."
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on his remarks.
Witkoff also said that Hamas was prepared to disarm in order to end the war, though the group has repeatedly said it will not lay down its weapons.
Steve Witkoff arrives to meet families of Israelis held hostage as they demonstrate in Tel Aviv on 2 August 2025.
Photo:
AFP
In response, Hamas, which has dominated Gaza since 2007 but has been militarily battered by Israel in the war, said it would not relinquish "armed resistance" unless an "independent, fully sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital" was established.
Indirect negotiations between Hamas and Israel aimed at securing a 60-day ceasefire in the Gaza war and a deal for the release of half the hostages ended last week in deadlock.
On Saturday, Hamas released its
second video in two days
of Israeli hostage Evyatar David.
In it, David, skeletally thin, is shown digging a hole, which, he said in the video, is for his own grave.
"They are on the absolute brink of death," David's brother Ilay said at a rally in support of the hostages in Tel Aviv, where thousands gathered holding posters of those in captivity and chanted for their immediate release.
"In the current unimaginable condition, they may have only days left to live."
Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Gideon Sa'ar said the "world cannot remain silent in the face of the difficult images that are the result of deliberate sadistic abuse of the hostages, which also includes starvation".
Witkoff, who arrived in Israel with Benjamin Netanyahu's government facing a global outcry over the devastation in Gaza and the starvation growing among its 2.2 million people, met the prime minister on Thursday.
Afterwards, a senior Israeli official said an understanding between Israel and Washington was emerging that there was a need to move from a plan to release some of the hostages to a plan to release all the hostages, disarm Hamas and demilitarise the Gaza Strip, echoing Israel's key demands for ending the war.
On Tuesday, Qatar and Egypt, who are mediating ceasefire efforts, endorsed a declaration by France and Saudi Arabia outlining steps toward a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As part of it, they said Hamas must hand over its arms to the Western-backed Palestinian Authority.
The crisis in Gaza has also prompted a string of Western powers to announce they may recognise a Palestinian state.
On Friday, Witkoff visited a US-backed aid operation in southern Gaza, which the United Nations has partly blamed for deadly conditions in the enclave, saying he sought to get food and other aid to people there.
Dozens have died of malnutrition in recent weeks after Israel cut off all supplies to the enclave for nearly three months from March to May, according to Gaza's health ministry.
It said on Saturday that it had recorded seven more fatalities, including a child, since Friday.
Israel blames Hamas for the suffering in Gaza and said it is taking steps for more aid to reach its population, including pausing fighting for part of the day in some areas, air drops and announcing protected routes for aid convoys.
UN agencies have said that airdrops of food are insufficient and that Israel must let in far more aid by land and quickly ease access to it.
The Gaza war began when Hamas killed more than 1200 people and took 251 hostages in an attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, according to Israeli figures.
Israel's offensive has since killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials.
According to Israeli officials, 50 hostages now remain in Gaza, only 20 of whom are believed to be alive.
- Reuters
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
NZ Herald
6 minutes ago
- NZ Herald
AI bot Grok misidentifies Gaza photo as being from Yemen, sparks disinformation claims
In fact, the photo shows 9-year-old Mariam Dawwas in the arms of her mother Modallala in Gaza City on August 2, 2025. Before the war, sparked by Hamas' October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Mariam weighed 25kg, her mother told AFP. Today, she weighs only 9kg. The only nutrition she gets to help her condition is milk, Modallala told AFP – and even that's 'not always available'. Challenged on its incorrect response, Grok said: 'I do not spread fake news; I base my answers on verified sources'. The chatbot eventually issued a response that recognised the error – but in reply to further queries the next day, Grok repeated its claim that the photo was from Yemen. The chatbot has previously issued content that praised Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and that suggested people with Jewish surnames were more likely to spread online hate. Radical right bias Grok's mistakes illustrate the limits of AI tools, whose functions are as impenetrable as 'black boxes', said Louis de Diesbach, a researcher in technological ethics. 'We don't know exactly why they give this or that reply, nor how they prioritise their sources,' said Diesbach, author of a book on AI tools, Hello ChatGPT. Each AI has biases linked to the information it was trained on and the instructions of its creators, he said. In the researcher's view Grok, made by Musk's xAI start-up, shows 'highly pronounced biases which are highly aligned with the ideology' of the South African billionaire, a former confidant of US President Donald Trump and a standard-bearer for the radical right. Asking a chatbot to pinpoint a photo's origin takes it out of its proper role, said Diesbach. 'Typically, when you look for the origin of an image, it might say: 'This photo could have been taken in Yemen, could have been taken in Gaza, could have been taken in pretty much any country where there is famine'.' AI does not necessarily seek accuracy – 'that's not the goal', the expert said. Another AFP photograph of a starving Gazan child by al-Qattaa, taken in July 2025, had already been wrongly located and dated by Grok to Yemen, 2016. That error led to internet users accusing the French newspaper Liberation, which had published the photo, of manipulation. 'Friendly pathological liar' An AI's bias is linked to the data it is fed and what happens during fine-tuning – the so-called alignment phase – which then determines what the model would rate as a good or bad answer. 'Just because you explain to it that the answer's wrong doesn't mean it will then give a different one,' Diesbach said. 'Its training data has not changed and neither has its alignment.' Grok is not alone in wrongly identifying images. When AFP asked Mistral AI's Le Chat – which is in part trained on AFP's articles under an agreement between the French start-up and the news agency – the bot also misidentified the photo of Mariam Dawwas as being from Yemen. For Diesbach, chatbots must never be used as tools to verify facts. 'They are not made to tell the truth [but to] generate content, whether true or false,' he said. 'You have to look at it like a friendly pathological liar – it may not always lie, but it always could.' -Agence France-Presse
RNZ News
5 hours ago
- RNZ News
Gaza civil defence says 20 killed by overturned aid truck
A boy carries a box of relief supplies from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private US-backed aid group that has bypassed the longstanding UN-led system in the territory, on May 29, 2025. Photo: Eyad Baba / AFP Gaza's civil defence agency said on Wednesday that 20 people were killed when an aid truck overturned on a crowd of aid seekers in the central Gaza Strip. "Twenty people were killed and dozens injured around midnight last night in a truck carrying aid overturned... while hundreds of civilians were waiting for aid," the agency's spokesperson Mahmud Bassal told AFP. The incident took place near the Nuseirat refugee camp, as the truck was driving on an unsafe road that Israel had previously bombed, Bassal added. The Israeli military told AFP it was looking into the reports. Hamas accused Israel of forcing truck drivers to take dangerous routes to reach aid distribution centres, and to "intentionally engineer... starvation and chaos". Israel "forces drivers to navigate routes overcrowded with starving civilians who have been waiting for weeks for the most basic necessities", Hamas's media office said in a statement. "This often results in desperate crowds swarming the trucks," it added. -AFP
RNZ News
13 hours ago
- RNZ News
US envoy Witkoff meets Putin as clock ticks towards Trump's sanctions deadline
By Gleb Bryanski and Mark Trevelyan , Reuters US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff (L) and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Photo: EVELYN HOCKSTEIN and MAXIM SHEMETOV / POOL / AFP United States envoy Steve Witkoff held talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin on Wednesday, two days before the expiry of a deadline set by President Donald Trump for Russia to agree to peace in Ukraine or face new sanctions. Witkoff flew to Moscow on a last-minute mission to seek a breakthrough in the 3-1/2-year war that began with Russia's full-scale invasion. Russian state TV showed a brief clip of him shaking hands with Putin at the start of their meeting. Trump, increasingly frustrated with Putin over the lack of progress towards peace, has threatened to impose heavy tariffs on countries that buy Russian exports. He is exerting particular pressure on India , which along with China is a huge buyer of Russian oil. The Kremlin says threats to penalise countries that trade with Russia are illegal. It was not clear what Russia might offer to Witkoff in order to stave off Trump's threat. Bloomberg and independent Russian news outlet The Bell reported that the Kremlin might propose a moratorium on air strikes by Russia and Ukraine - an idea that was mentioned last week by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko during a meeting with Putin. Such a move, if agreed, would fall well short of the full and immediate ceasefire that Ukraine and the US have been seeking for months. But it would offer some relief to both sides. Since the two sides resumed direct peace talks in May, Russia has carried out its heaviest air attacks of the war, killing at least 72 people in the capital Kyiv alone. Trump last week called the Russian attacks "disgusting". Ukraine continues to strike Russian refineries and oil depots, which it has hit many times. Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said on Wednesday that a full ceasefire and a leaders' summit were required. "The war must stop and for now this is on Russia," he posted on Telegram. Putin is unlikely to bow to Trump's sanctions ultimatum because he believes he is winning the war and his military goals take precedence over his desire to improve relations with the US, three sources close to the Kremlin told Reuters. "The visit of Witkoff is a last-ditch effort to find a face-saving solution for both sides. I don't think, however, that there will be anything of a compromise between the two," said Gerhard Mangott, an Austrian analyst and member of a group of Western academics and journalists who have met regularly with Putin over the years. "Russia will insist it is prepared to have a ceasefire, but (only) under the conditions that it has formulated for the last two or three years already," he said in a telephone interview. "Trump will be under pressure to do what he has announced - to raise tariffs for all the countries buying oil and gas, and uranium probably as well, from Russia." The Russian sources told Reuters that Putin was sceptical that yet more US sanctions would have much of an impact after successive waves of economic penalties during 3-1/2 years of war. The Russian leader does not want to anger Trump, and he realises that he may be spurning a chance to improve relations with Washington and the West, but his war goals are more important to him, two of the sources said. Putin's conditions for peace include a legally binding pledge NATO will not expand eastwards, Ukrainian neutrality, protection for Russian speakers and acceptance of Russia's territorial gains in the war, Russian sources have said. Zelensky has said Ukraine would never recognise Russia's sovereignty over its conquered regions and that Kyiv retains the sovereign right to decide whether it wants to join NATO. Witkoff, a real estate billionaire, had no diplomatic experience before joining Trump's team in January, but has been simultaneously tasked with seeking ceasefires in the Ukraine and Gaza wars, as well as negotiating in the crisis over Iran's nuclear programme. Critics have portrayed him as out of his depth when pitched into a head-to-head negotiation with Putin, Russia's paramount leader for the past 25 years, and at times accused him of echoing the Kremlin's narrative. In an interview with journalist Tucker Carlson in March, for example, Witkoff said there was no reason why Russia would want to absorb Ukraine or bite off more of its territory, and it was "preposterous" to think that Putin would want to send his army marching across Europe. Ukraine and many of its European allies say the opposite. Putin denies any designs on NATO territory, and Moscow has repeatedly cast such charges as evidence of European hostility and "Russophobia". - Reuters
