Politics
Why Hamas gambled on giving up Gaza hostages
Hamas has called Donald Trump a racist, a “recipe for chaos” and a man with an absurd vision for Gaza.
But one extraordinary phone call last month helped persuade Hamas that the US president might be able to hold Israel to a peace deal even if the group surrendered all the hostages that give it leverage in the war in Gaza, two Palestinian officials said.
In the call, widely publicised at the time, Trump put Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the phone after a meeting at the White House in September, to apologise to Qatar’s prime minister for an Israeli strike on a residential complex that housed Hamas’ political leaders in the emirate’s capital Doha.
Trump’s handling of the Qatar bombing, which failed to kill the Hamas officials it targeted, including lead negotiator Khalil al-Hayya, gave the group more faith that he was able to stand up to Netanyahu and that he was serious about ending the war in Gaza, the two officials said.
Now, after signing up to a Trump-brokered ceasefire on Wednesday, the resistance group has put further faith in the word of a man who only this year proposed expelling Palestinians from Gaza and rebuilding it as a US-controlled beach resort.
Under the deal, which took effect on Friday, Hamas agreed to give up its hostages without an agreement on full Israeli withdrawal. Two other Palestinian officials, from Hamas, acknowledged that was a risky gamble which relies on the US president being so invested in the deal he will not let it fail.
Hamas leaders are well aware their gamble could backfire, one of the Hamas officials said. They fear that once the hostages are released, Israel could resume its military campaign, as happened after a January ceasefire that Trump’s team had also been closely involved in.
However, gathered for indirect talks with Israel in a conference centre in the Sharm el-Sheikh Red Sea resort, Hamas was reassured enough by the presence of Trump’s closest confidants and regional heavy-weights to sign up to the ceasefire even though it leaves many of the group’s core demands unresolved, including moves towards a Palestinian state
Trump’s eagerness was felt “heavily” in the conference centre, one of the Hamas officials told Reuters. Trump personally called three times during the marathon session, a senior US official said, with his son-in-law Jared Kushner and envoy Steve Witkoff shuttling between Israeli and Qatari negotiators
No certainty for later phases
While it may pave the way to ending the war, which began with Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, there is no certainty that later phases envisaged in Trump’s 20-point Gaza plan will materialize.
But Trump’s handling of both the Qatar strikes and the ceasefire that ended Israel’s 12-day war with Iran in June gave the Hamas negotiators confidence that the US president would not just let Israel resume fighting as soon as the hostages are released, the two Palestinian officials and another source briefed on talks said.
They were among five Palestinian officials including three from Hamas, as well as two senior US officials and five other sources briefed on the talks who spoke to Reuters for this story.
Trump’s aides saw an opportunity to turn his anger at Netanyahu over the Qatar strike into pressure on the Israeli leader to accept a framework for ending the Gaza war, according to a source in Washington familiar with the matter.
Trump, who has cultivated ties with Gulf states important to a range of his wider diplomatic and economic policies, considers the Qatari emir a friend and did not like to see images of the strikes on television, a senior White House official said, calling the strike a significant turning point that coalesced the Arab world.
Trump’s public promise that no such Israeli attacks against Qatar would happen again lent him credibility in the eyes of Hamas and other regional actors, said a Palestinian official in Gaza briefed on the talks and mediation efforts.
“The fact that he gave Qatar a security guarantee that Israel would not attack them again, has increased Hamas’s confidence that a ceasefire will remain in place,” said Jonathan Reinhold of the Political Studies Department at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.
Hamas also took note of Trump’s public order for Iran and Israel to halt hostilities, said the Palestinian official in Gaza, singling-out Trump’s demand on his Truth Social platform that Israeli planes “turn around and head home” from a planned bombing raid on Iran hours after he had announced a ceasefire in their 12-day war in June.
“Though theatrical, he does what he says,” the official said, saying it showed Trump was willing to make Israel abide by a ceasefire.
Talks were stuck on Tuesday
Trump announced his overall plan on September 29, during Netanyahu’s White House visit, and Hamas gave its conditional agreement four days later, which the US president took as a green light.
As recently as Tuesday, talks on how to implement the plan looked stuck around issues including how quickly and how far Israeli troops would withdraw in Gaza to allow Hamas to gather and release the hostages, an official familiar with the talks told Reuters. Mediators from Qatar, Egypt and Turkey were unable to get things moving, the source said.
To break the deadlock, Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani on Tuesday decided he had to travel to Sharm el-Sheikh, the source said, while Witkoff and Kushner flew in on Wednesday morning, and the talks kicked off around noon.
The presence of Nato power Turkey’s intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin was also important because of Ankara’s strong ties to Hamas and President Tayyip Erdogan’s recent meeting with Trump, after which he said Trump had requested he help convince Hamas to accept the plan.
For two years Hamas has insisted it will only release the hostages in return for a full Israeli withdrawal and final end of the conflict. Israel has said it will only stop fighting when all hostages are returned and Hamas is destroyed.
Neither has totally got its way. Israel will remain in around half of Gaza for the foreseeable future, while Hamas survives as an organisation and a demand in Trump’s plan that it give up its weapons has been left for a later date. That dynamic in itself, with both sides needing further results, may help drive forward future talks, one of the sources briefed on the talks said.
An important development during the talks was the mediators’ success in convincing Hamas that its continued holding of hostages had become a liability for it rather than leverage, the senior US official and the Palestinian official in Gaza said.
Hamas came to a view that continuing to hold hostages undermined global support for Palestinians, and that without them, Israel would have no credibility to restart fighting, the Palestinian official said.
However, the group received no formal written guarantees backed by specific enforcement mechanisms that the first phase involving the hostage release, a partial Israeli pull-back and a halt to fighting, will progress to an envisaged wider deal that ends the war, two of the Hamas officials told Reuters.
Instead, it has accepted verbal assurances from the United States and mediators — Egypt, Qatar and Turkey — that Trump will see the deal through and not allow Israel to resume its military campaign once the hostages are freed, the Hamas sources and two other officials briefed on talks said.
“As far as we are concerned this agreement ends the war,” one of the Hamas official said.
The gamble could backfire
Hamas leaders are well aware their gamble could backfire, the Hamas official said.
Despite an agreement then for a phased hostage release to accompany Israeli withdrawals after the January ceasefire, Trump announced part way through the process that Hamas should free all its captives in one go or he would cancel the deal and “let hell break out”.
The deal broke down weeks later and the continued war resulted in more than 16,000 more Palestinian deaths according to Gaza health authorities, and an Israeli embargo on aid that led to the global hunger watchdog determining there was famine in the enclave.
Israel might be tempted to keep opportunistically striking Hamas, one regional diplomat said, especially if the group or its allies launch attacks such as rocket fire into Israeli territory.
However, things felt different this time compared to the earlier ceasefire, one of the Hamas officials said. The group felt the Israelis were coming with seriousness to reach a deal and that pressure by Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and the Americans on both sides was paying off, the official said.
Trump’s expected visit to the Middle East from Sunday for a victory lap will further help ensure it sticks, even with tough details still to be agreed, a source briefed on the talks said, describing the invitation from Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as “a very smart move”.
- Sri Lanka declares emergency and seeks global aid.
- Over 631 dead, 472 missing across Sumatra, Indonesia.
- Survivors describe sudden, tsunami-like flood waves.
Governments and aid groups in Indonesia and Sri Lanka worked to rush aid Tuesday to hundreds of thousands stranded by deadly flooding that has killed around 1,200 people in four countries.
Torrential monsoon season deluges paired with two separate tropical cyclones last week dumped heavy rain across all of Sri Lanka and parts of Indonesia’s Sumatra, southern Thailand, and northern Malaysia.
Climate change is producing more intense rain events because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, and warmer oceans can turbocharge storms.
The floodwaters have now largely receded, but the devastation means hundreds of thousands of people are now living in shelters and struggling to secure clean water and food.
In Indonesia’s Aceh, one of the worst-affected regions, residents told AFP that survivors who could afford to were stockpiling supplies.
“Road access is mostly cut off in flood-affected areas,” 29-year-old Erna Mardhiah said as she joined a long queue at a petrol station in Banda Aceh.
“People are worried about running out of fuel,” she added from the line she had been in for two hours.
The pressure has caused skyrocketing prices.
“Most things are already sky-high… chillies alone are up to 300,000 rupiah per kilo ($18), so that’s probably why people are panic-buying,” she said.
On Monday, Indonesia’s government said it was sending 34,000 tons of rice and 6.8 million litres of cooking oil to the three worst-affected provinces, Aceh, North Sumatra and West Sumatra.
“There can be no delays,” Agriculture Minister Andi Amran Sulaiman said.
Food shortage risk
Aid groups said they were working to ship supplies to affected areas, warning that local markets were running out of essential supplies and prices had tripled already.
“Communities across Aceh are at severe risk of food shortages and hunger if supply lines are not reestablished in the next seven days,” charity group Islamic Relief said.
A shipment of 12 tonnes of food from the group aboard an Indonesian navy vessel was due to arrive in Aceh on Tuesday.
At least 631 people were killed in the floods across Sumatra, and 472 are still listed as missing. A million people have evacuated from their homes, according to the disaster agency.
Survivors have described terrifying waves of water that arrived without warning.
In East Aceh, Zamzami said the floodwaters had been “unstoppable, like a tsunami wave.”
“We can’t explain how big the water seemed. It was truly extraordinary,” said the 33-year-old, who, like many Indonesians, goes by one name.
People in his village sheltered atop a local two-storey fish market to escape the deluge and were now trying to clean the mud and debris left behind while battling power and telecommunications outages.
“It’s difficult for us (to get) clean water,” he told AFP on Monday.
“There are children who are starting to get fevers, and there’s no medicine.”
The weather system that inundated Indonesia also brought heavy rain to southern Thailand, where at least 176 people were killed.
Across the border in Malaysia, two more people were killed.
Colombo floodwaters recede
A separate storm brought heavy rains across all of Sri Lanka, triggering flash floods and deadly landslides that killed at least 390 people.
Another 352 remain missing, and some of the worst-hit areas in the country’s centre are still difficult to reach.
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has declared a state of emergency to deal with what he called the “most challenging natural disaster in our history”.
Unlike his Indonesian counterpart, he has called for international aid.
Sri Lanka’s air force, backed by counterparts from India and Pakistan, has been evacuating stranded residents and delivering food and other supplies.
In the mountainous Welimada region, security forces on Monday recovered the bodies of 11 residents buried by mudslides, a local official said.
In the capital Colombo meanwhile, floodwaters were slowly subsiding on Tuesday.
The speed with which waters rose around the city surprised local residents used to seasonal flooding.
“Every year we experience minor floods, but this is something else,” delivery driver Dinusha Sanjaya told AFP.
“It is not just the amount of water, but how quickly everything went under.”
Rains have eased across the country, but landslide alerts remain in force across most of the hardest-hit central region, officials said.
WASHINGTON: The White House has said that President Donald Trump is in good health, even as people continue to question how his age may affect his performance as the country’s most powerful man.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday that a recent MRI conducted on President Trump was preventative in nature and revealed that he was in good cardiovascular health.
Speaking to reporters at a press briefing at the White House, Leavitt said men of Trump’s age benefited from such screenings.
‘President Trump’s cardiovascular imaging was perfectly normal, no evidence of arterial narrowing, impairing blood flow or abnormalities in the heart or major vessels,’ Leavitt said of the 79-year-old president.
‘The heart chambers are normal in size. The vessel walls appear smooth and healthy, and there are no signs of inflammation or clotting. Overall, his cardiovascular system shows excellent health. His abdominal imaging is also perfectly normal,’ Leavitt said.
Trump underwent a magnetic resonance imaging scan during a recent medical evaluation, but did not disclose the purpose of the procedure, which is not typical for standard check-ups. The lack of details raised questions about whether full information regarding the president’s health is being released in a timely fashion by the White House.
Trump is sensitive about his age and well-being. He personally attacked a female New York Times reporter on social media last week over a story she co-wrote examining the ways that Trump’s age may be affecting his energy levels.
Politics
Tajikistan says five Chinese nationals killed in cross-border attacks from Afghanistan in past week
Five Chinese nationals have been killed and five more injured in Tajikistan in attacks launched from neighbouring Afghanistan over the past week, Tajik authorities and China’s embassy in the Central Asian country said on Monday.
China’s embassy in Dushanbe, the capital, advised Chinese companies and personnel to urgently evacuate the border area.
It said that Chinese citizens had been targeted in an armed attack close to the Afghan border on Sunday. On Friday, it said that another border attack — which Tajik authorities said had involved drones dropping grenades — had killed three Chinese citizens.
Tajikistan, a mountainous former Soviet republic of around 11 million people with a secular government, has tense relations with the Taliban authorities in Afghanistan. It has previously warned of drug smugglers and illicit gold miners working along the remote frontier.
China, which also has a remote, mountainous border with Tajikistan, is a major investor in the country.
There was no immediate response on Monday from the authorities in Afghanistan to the Tajik statement.
But Afghanistan’s foreign ministry last week blamed an unnamed group, which it said was out to create instability, and said it would cooperate with Tajik authorities.
Tajik President Emomali Rahmon’s press service said on Monday that Rahmon had met with the heads of his security agencies to discuss how to strengthen border security.
It said that Rahmon “strongly condemned the illegal and provocative actions of Afghan citizens and ordered that effective measures be taken to resolve the problem and prevent a recurrence of such incidents.”
Tajikistan endured a brutal civil war in the 1990s after independence from Moscow, during which Rahmon initially rose to power. The country is closely aligned with Russia, which maintains a military base there.
Millions of Tajiks, a Persian-speaking nation, live across the border in Afghanistan, with Tajikistan historically having backed Afghan Tajiks opposed to the Taliban.
Meesho IPO Opens Tomorrow: From Price Band To Lot Size And More, Here Are10 Key Things To Know
Pakistan, China begin ‘Warrior-IX’ joint counterterrorism military exercise
North India cotton yarn prices steady on average demand
-
Sports1 week agoWATCH: Ronaldo scores spectacular bicycle kick
-
Entertainment1 week agoWelcome to Derry’ episode 5 delivers shocking twist
-
Politics1 week agoWashington and Kyiv Stress Any Peace Deal Must Fully Respect Ukraine’s Sovereignty
-
Business1 week agoKey economic data and trends that will shape Rachel Reeves’ Budget
-
Politics1 week ago53,000 Sikhs vote in Ottawa Khalistan Referendum amid Carney-Modi trade talks scrutiny
-
Tech7 days agoWake Up—the Best Black Friday Mattress Sales Are Here
-
Tech2 days agoGet Your Steps In From Your Home Office With This Walking Pad—On Sale This Week
-
Entertainment1 day agoSadie Sink talks about the future of Max in ‘Stranger Things’