Trump pushes Israel, Hamas to strike deal with talks set to open

Ethan Bronner, Bloomberg News on Oct 5, 2025

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President Donald Trump is pressing Israel and Hamas to seal a settlement to the two-year conflict that’s devastated Gaza and destabilized the Middle East as the warring sides are set to begin mediated talks on Monday.

The first sign of whether the negotiations, being hosted by Egypt, are serious will be whether Hamas follows through on Trump’s demand to release all the remaining hostages, including those who died, in return for Israel releasing Palestinian prisoners.

U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner were traveling to Egypt to take part in the talks, which will be held in Sharm el Sheikh. An Israeli delegation led by Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer is set to take part in the indirect talks, while Israel’s Kan News reported Ghazi Hamad, Osama Hamdan and Muhamed Darwish will represent Hamas.

“It’ll last a couple of days,” Trump told reporters on Sunday. “We’ll see how it turns out but I hear it’s going very well.”

Trump, who has laid out a 20-point plan to end the war, has made it clear that he is losing patience with both Hamas and Israel, even as the militant group has yet to accept the full proposal, which would include its ultimate disarmament.

The U.S. president called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the weekend to celebrate Hamas’ apparent willingness to release the hostages, Axios reported Sunday, but the Israeli prime minister complained the offer was meaningless. Trump, according to the report, snapped at Netanyahu for being “negative,” and added, “This is a win. Take it.”

The Israeli military has assumed a defensive posture in Gaza City, while Hamas said airstrikes and shelling continued in the enclave’s de facto capital, killing dozens of people.

Over the weekend, Netanyahu said Israel’s military will redeploy within the territory. He also left open the option of disarming Hamas by force.

A swap of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners would happen immediately upon securing an agreement, while Hamas’ disarmament would come in a second stage, Netanyahu said.

“We are the closest we have been in a very long time,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on "Fox News Sunday."

But he added the hostage release and prisoner exchange was just the first — and perhaps easiest — step. Rebuilding Gaza and determining who will govern the region will be harder, he said.

“That’s the part that I think is going to be a little tougher to work through, but that’s what’s going to provide permanency to the end of the conflict. So we’re focused on those two phases,” Rubio said on ABC’s "This Week."

Details on what Trump’s plan would entail remain scarce, and his demand for an immediate ceasefire may still prove tricky for Netanyahu politically, given that some of his far-right cabinet members will be wary about striking a deal with Hamas. The group — designated a terrorist organization by the U.S., European Union and others — hasn’t yet agreed to some key stipulations in Trump’s plan, including that it disarm and have nothing to do with postwar governance in Gaza.

Iran-backed Hamas triggered the war by attacking Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and abducting another 250. Of those, 48 remain in Gaza and Israel says it believes around 20 are still alive. Israel has lost more than 450 soldiers in Gaza combat since.

More than 66,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in the territory. Israel’s war sparked a famine in parts of the enclave, according to a U.N.-backed body, and led another U.N.-backed panel to declare it a genocide.

The upcoming Egypt talks mark the most optimistic moment for diplomacy yet in the conflict, which will reach the two-year mark on Tuesday.

Israeli assets have jumped on the prospect of an end to the war in Gaza. The shekel was the best-performing of a basket of about 30 major currencies tracked by Bloomberg last week, rising 1.9% against the dollar to its strongest level since 2022.

For Trump, a truce in the coming days and the freeing of the hostages could boost his campaign to win the Nobel Peace Prize, with the next winner being announced on Oct. 10. Bloomberg has reported that the president’s public and behind-closed-doors push to get the award has intensified in recent days.

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