The talks are to be held from tomorrow or Monday, with the presence of Hamas and Israeli delegations, US special Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, and possibly President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the report says. The presence of the Americans underlines the US determination to ensure the deal proceeds as planned, the source says.
The unnamed senior Israeli official says that the current fast-moving developments have been “fully coordinated” between Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and that the two leaders spoke by telephone yesterday before Trump declared that he believes Hamas is “ready for peace” and told Israel to “immediately stop the bombing of Gaza, so that we can get the hostages out safely and quickly.” The IDF, indeed, shifted overnight to defensive operations in the strip.
The source, evidently close to the prime minister, hailed the progress toward the potential imminent release of all the hostages as a “great achievement” for Netanyahu and Israel, since it represents “the possibility of getting all the hostages back home without Israel having capitulated to the Hamas demand for a full withdrawal from the Strip, as Hamas had demanded” for the past two years.
“No such deal was on the table until now,” the senior source tells Channel 12. “Until now, Hamas demanded that Israel fully withdraw [from Gaza] and only then would the final hostages be freed.”
Under the terms of the Trump proposal now to be finalized in Egypt, the source says, Israel will carry out “a tactical withdrawal,” but the IDF will remain deployed in most of Gaza even as all the hostages go free.
The source claims Hamas has agreed to this arrangement, including the near-immediate release of all hostages, in part because of Trump’s relentless pressure, and thanks to pressure “from the Arab world,” which feared that Israel would indeed move to complete the takeover of all of Gaza, and was “catalyzed” by Israel’s controversial and unsuccessful attack on Hamas leaders in Qatar last month.
The Americans decided to “put their foot down,” Channel 12 says, with Trump determining that “we’re ending this now.”
Recognizing that Hamas was more susceptible to pressure than in the past, and with Turkey playing an important role, the source says, “a new proposal was put together to secure the release of all the hostages before anything else.”
If and when the hostages are freed, in exchange for large-scale releases of Palestinian terrorists and other prisoners, “there will then be discussions on Hamas laying down its arms, the demilitarization of the strip, and the ‘day after'” in Gaza.”
The sequencing of the Trump proposal gives Israel a “huge advantage,” the source says, since Israel will get back the hostages on the one hand, while, on the other, the IDF will remain in most of Gaza as the negotiations on future steps are held.
In terms of the Israel-US coordination, the source says the possibility that Hamas would respond to Trump’s proposal with a “yes, but,” as it did, was discussed between Netanyahu, Witkoff and Kushner in Washington, DC. When Trump and Netanyahu spoke yesterday, says the source, the president made plain that if Hamas does not release all of the hostages, Israel can resume fighting — as Trump said publicly when unveiling his proposal at the White House on September 29.
The source says the 72-hour deadline for Hamas to release all the hostages will begin as soon as the “technical talks” in Egypt are completed, although the 72-hours “might be extended a little in order for Hamas to locate all the slain hostages. Hamas officials have said the 72-hour window is “unrealistic” bercause it will take longer to locate all the slain hostages.
If the talks in Egypt play out as hoped, the bottom line is that “It will be possible to return the hostages within a few days,” Channel 12 quotes the source as saying.
Channel 12 also reports that Witkoff is heading to the region with detailed maps of the phased IDF withdrawal; on September 29, the White House issued a more illustrative map.
The US knows that far-right coalition party leader Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir are likely to oppose the deal and potentially seek to bring down Netanyahu’s government, Channel 12 says. It says opposition leader Yair Lapid reconfirmed to the US overnight that he will ensure the government does not fall.
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