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Donald Trump has given Hamas until Sunday evening to agree to his 20-point peace plan for Gaza, or else “all HELL, like no one has ever seen before, will break out”.
“THERE WILL BE PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST ONE WAY OR THE OTHER,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social social platform on Friday.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Arab leaders signalled this week that they agreed with the premise of the plan unveiled by Trump and his advisers on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York.
Arab leaders have pressured Hamas, which triggered the two-year conflict with its October 7 2023 attack on Israel, which killed 1,200 people, to accept the proposal. It stipulates that the militant group completely disarms and has no future role in governing the enclave, which it has controlled since 2007.
The plan also demands an immediate ceasefire, the partial Israeli withdrawal from parts of Gaza, and the release of all remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas. Trump would head a “Board of Peace” that would supervise a Palestinian committee to administer the strip.
Netanyahu said he supported the deal during a meeting with Trump at the White House on Monday, but he vowed that Israel would “finish the job by itself” in Gaza if Hamas did not comply with the proposal. Trump said that Israel would have his full backing to do so.
In his Truth Social post, Trump warned that most of Hamas’s remaining fighters were now “MILITARILY TRAPPED” in Gaza, “just waiting for me to give the word, ‘GO,’ for their lives to be quickly extinguished”.
Others would “be hunted down, and killed”, he added. He urged “all innocent Palestinians [to] immediately leave this area of potentially great future death for safer parts of Gaza”, without specifying where.
Israel’s military is carrying out a major ground offensive to take control of Gaza City, where as many as a million Palestinians have sought shelter.
Aid groups say hundreds of thousands have fled south in the past two weeks to a fetid “humanitarian” zone along the Mediterranean or into other overcrowded tent cities along the coast, as Israel has bombed high rise buildings in Gaza City that it claims are used by Hamas for vantage points.
Israel’s offensive has turned most of the Gaza Strip to rubble and killed more than 66,000 Palestinians since the conflict began, according to local authorities.
Israeli defence minister Israel Katz warned on Wednesday that all remaining civilians should flee south, and that any remaining Palestinians would be considered Hamas militants.
Israel’s military has been preparing for the complete invasion of Gaza City for weeks, calling up reserves and using warplanes to prepare the ground for a broader offensive.
Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed, and entire neighbourhoods abandoned as the Israeli military moves closer to the city’s centre.
Hamas officials had held meetings with Qatari and Egyptian mediators to discuss the proposal, said a person briefed on the talks.
The group wanted “clarifications, commitments and amendments” on several aspects of the plan, including a timetable for an Israeli withdrawal, guarantees on a permanent end to the war, and a definition of disarmament, Bishara Bahbah, who served as an unofficial negotiator for the Trump administration, told the Financial Times this week.
Additional reporting by Andrew England in London
