Hamas to Trump: We Are Ready to Release All Israeli Captives in Comprehensive Ceasefire Deal

Three weeks ago, Hamas agreed to a U.S.-Israeli-drafted ceasefire, but its offer was ignored. Now, the movement says it will accept a comprehensive deal in a renewed bid to end the genocide.

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U.S. President Donald Trump calls on a reporter during a cabinet meeting at the White House on August 26, 2025. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Hamas’s political leadership is reaffirming its willingness to make a deal that would see all Israeli captives released immediately in return for a ceasefire agreement that would bring an end to Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians of Gaza and a withdrawal of Israeli troops. “The movement reiterates its readiness to enter into a comprehensive deal under which all enemy prisoners held by the resistance will be released in exchange for an agreed-upon number of Palestinian prisoners held by the occupation,” Hamas said in a statement on Wednesday night. The statement added that Hamas has made clear its willingness to relinquish governance of Gaza to pave the way for “an independent national administration of technocrats to manage all Gaza Strip affairs and assume its responsibilities immediately in all areas.”

Hamas’s statement came hours after President Donald Trump posted a message on TruthSocial. “Tell Hamas to IMMEDIATELY give back all 20 Hostages (Not 2 or 5 or 7!), and things will change rapidly. IT WILL END!” Trump wrote.

Israel and the U.S. have both publicly dismissed the fact that, on August 18, Hamas agreed to a 60-day ceasefire deal presented by regional mediator Egypt that featured sweeping concessions from Hamas. The document, obtained by Drop Site, was endorsed by Hamas and a range of other Palestinian political parties and factions. The deal is a slightly modified version of the 13-point framework put forward by Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and drafted in coordination with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s top aide, Ron Dermer. That deal would have seen the release of ten living Israeli captives—half the number believed to remain in Gaza—in a 50-day period.

“We say to President Trump: Hamas agreed on August 18 to the proposal put forward by the mediators, which is originally based on the ‘Witkoff Proposal.’ Netanyahu has yet to respond to it,” said senior Hamas official Izzat Al-Risheq, a member of the group’s political bureau. “We have also expressed our readiness for a comprehensive deal in which all prisoners would be released in exchange for an agreed-upon number of our prisoners in the occupation’s prisons, in a way that would achieve a ceasefire and the withdrawal of the occupation.”

Trump’s post on social media came on a day when Palestinian-American businessman and unofficial Trump envoy in the Gaza negotiations, Bishara Bahbah, claimed he had delivered to Hamas a new U.S. concept for a comprehensive deal involving the release of all Israeli captives in exchange for the end of the war.

"When [Hamas] saw the president’s tweet, they were convinced that this was official,” Bahbah told Al Arabiya in an interview Wednesday evening. “Hamas’s reaction was almost immediate: They agreed to this deal. They wanted a comprehensive deal—let's hand over all the hostages and receive a certain number of Palestinian prisoners in return, and at the same time, the war should end.”

From the early days of the war, Hamas has indicated it was open to a deal to release all Israeli captives. Most recently, in April, its negotiators formally presented a plan to mediators for a long term truce that included the immediate release of all Israelis held in Gaza. Israel rejected it. Hamas, Bahbah said, also wanted a commitment for Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

In its statement Wednesday saying it would accept a comprehensive deal, Hamas asserted, "This agreement will end the war on the Gaza Strip, lead to the withdrawal of all occupation forces from the entire Gaza Strip, open the crossings to allow the entry of all Gaza Strip's necessities, and begin the reconstruction process."

Bahbah conceded that he could not guarantee that Israel would respect any agreement. “What I know is that the American side has increased its involvement in this process. And naturally, it all comes back to the kind and amount of pressure on Israel to strike any deal. Without American pressure, nothing will happen,” he said. “What’s on the table now is an American offer. Is America ready to clash with Israel to implement this American vision, or not? I don’t know. The president wants to end the war in Gaza. President Trump wants to end the war in Gaza.”

Bahbah said, “Cooperating with this administration means that when they show interest in a specific issue, you close it as quickly as possible.” He credited Hamas for what he said was a “quick response [that] was rational and responsible.” Pressed on what Witkoff said when Bahbah relayed Hamas’s reaction to the U.S. proposal, Bahbah said, “The response was: ‘This is a positive thing, let’s finish the process.’” No details of what the new U.S. proposal entails have yet been made public.

In an interview with Drop Site on August 12, senior Hamas official Basem Naim said that the movement’s message to Trump was that Hamas was prepared to make a fair deal and was open to either a phased or comprehensive agreement. “I think there is a great political opportunity today,” Naim said. “President Trump, if he's serious about his promises during the campaign, he has a chance to do it once and forever.”

Diana Buttu, a lawyer who has served as an advisor to Palestinian negotiators in previous deals, said that Hamas officials are operating in unprecedented diplomatic territory as they seek to reach an agreement with an adversary that constantly shifts the goalposts, while simultaneously waging an offensive war of annihilation against their people.

“The idea that Palestinians have to negotiate an end to genocide is so repugnant,” Buttu told Drop Site. “If you look at any other genocide, there's never been a situation where those who are being slaughtered have to negotiate with the people who are slaughtering them [to put] an end to their genocide,” she said. “The fact that they've been put in this position is absolutely horrendous.”

Hamas negotiators, Buttu maintained, “have shown such levels of flexibility to accept proposal after proposal after proposal, despite the vagueness that's embedded in each one of these proposals.” The offers Hamas has made for a comprehensive deal, according to which it would release all remaining Israeli captives, comes with a great risk, because the only force capable of preventing Israel from resuming the genocide would be its premier sponsor, the U.S., she said.

“For these [Palestinian] negotiators, they're looking at it from the perspective of what guarantees do we have that if the captives are returned all at once that there isn't going to be a further flattening of Gaza, and then we have absolutely nothing in our hands to be able to negotiate with,” Buttu said. “Those fears are legitimate.”

“The Israelis have spun this narrative that it's all about the captives when we know that it's not about the captives, because if it were, then there would have been a deal on the table from the first week,” Buttu added. “We know that this is about genocide and giving a pretext to genocide. And so the fear is that if they're all released in one go, then that pretext doesn't somehow go away, it just continues because [Israel] will turn it into something else.”

While Hamas officials continue to maintain contact with Bahbah, several Palestinians close to the negotiations have told Drop Site that they are skeptical Bahbah’s claims carry actual weight, saying that he has previously given the movement assurances about Trump administration promises that have turned out to be false, or that the U.S. ultimately reneged on them. Most prominent among these were the direct negotiations with the U.S. to release Israeli-American soldier Edan Alexander in May.

At the time, a senior Hamas official told Drop Site that Trump’s envoys assured Hamas that, in return for Alexander’s release, the U.S. would compel Israel to lift the Gaza blockade and allow humanitarian aid to enter the territory. Bahbah, according to a Hamas official, told the group that Witkoff also promised that Trump would make a public call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and for negotiations aimed at achieving a “permanent ceasefire.” None of that happened.

Israeli officials, who do not often directly respond to specific points from Hamas’s public statements, rushed to denounce the Islamic resistance movement’s public offer to enter into a comprehensive U.S.-initiated deal following Trump’s social media post. “Unfortunately, this is more spin by Hamas that has nothing new,” Netanyahu’s office asserted in a statement Wednesday night, adding that Israel would only end the war if all captives were released, Gaza was entirely demilitarized, and “Israel has security control in the Strip.” Israeli Finance Minister and member of Israel’s war cabinet, Bezalel Smotrich, referred to this as “long-term Israeli freedom of action in the Strip.”

Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz responded to Hamas’s statement by repeating his threat to enact the wholesale destruction of Gaza City. “Hamas continues to deceive and issue empty words, but it will soon understand that it must choose between two options,” he said. “Accepting Israel’s conditions to end the war, first and foremost, the release of all hostages and disarmament, or Gaza City will become like Rafah and Beit Hanoun. The IDF is fully prepared.”

Al-Risheq, the senior Hamas official, said, “We affirm that Netanyahu is the real obstacle to any prisoner exchange deals and a ceasefire.… He wants a war with no end.”

The U.S.-Israeli Deal Hamas Already Accepted

Among the concessions Hamas made in its August 18 acceptance of a two-month ceasefire framework was dropping its demand that Israel withdraw entirely from the Philadelphi corridor, running along the border with Egypt in southern Gaza, by the end of a two-month deal. Hamas also agreed to remove language that would have prevented the U.S.- and Israeli-imposed “aid” scheme run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) from remaining in Gaza after a ceasefire went into effect. Over 2,300 Palestinians have been killed seeking aid since the GHF took over distribution in May.

Additionally, Hamas consented to proposed Israeli “buffer zones” already encircling Gaza that would extend deeper into the enclave, in some cases agreeing to points that stretch 1,500 meters inside the territory. Hamas had originally demanded the release of 2,000 Palestinians snatched by Israel from Gaza after October 7th, 2023, but in the new offer, Hamas agreed to terms that would reduce the number of released captives from the enclave to 1,500. Since the start of the genocide, at least 6,000 Palestinian have been taken from Gaza and held in military sites where they have been subjected to abuse, torture, sexual assault, and extrajudicial killing.

A recent investigation by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian has revealed that only one in four Palestinians detained in Gaza since October 7 is registered as a military operative in the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate database. The remaining Palestinians, approximately 4,500 individuals, are confirmed to be civilians held under Israel's “Unlawful Combatants Law,” which permits indefinite detention without charge or trial. The Palestine Prisoner's Society recently stated that there are more than 11,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons as of the beginning of September 2025. This number does not include all detainees from Gaza held in camps affiliated with the Israeli army and classified as "unlawful combatants.”

After Hamas agreed to the terms, Mohammed Al-Hindi, the top political negotiator for Palestinian Islamic Jihad, told Drop Site, “If the Israeli government now refuses to accept the mediators’ proposal—which is fundamentally their own—it exposes the true nature of the Israeli position, shielded by the United States, regarding the entirety of the negotiation process: using it for stalling and gaining time to commit further crimes. There is no longer any room for concessions or futile negotiations.”

In an interview with Fox News on August 27, Witkoff said the official position of both Israel and Trump was that there would be no more partial, or phased, ceasefire deals. “It is Hamas now who’s saying we accept that deal, and I think in large part they’re saying that and changing their mind, because the Israelis are putting some very intense pressure on them,” Witkoff said.

But Israel’s Channel 13 reported Tuesday that Dermer “made it clear to the Qatari and Egyptian mediators that they should not be influenced by Israel’s public declarations regarding the negotiations for a deal, and that Israel ‘is not ruling out a partial deal.’” Witkoff has also reportedly been meeting with Qatari mediators and Dermer over the past day.

Qatar’s foreign ministry spokesperson Majed Al-Ansari estimated that what Hamas agreed to constituted 98% of the terms contained in the Witkoff framework, and he said Monday, “moving the goalposts at every segment of this crisis only makes it impossible to reach a deal.”

While refusing to offer an official response—or to authorize negotiators to reenter talks since Hamas accepted the deal terms—Israel instead intensified its genocidal war, launching an operation to seize the entirety of Gaza City and ethnically cleanse nearly a million Palestinians from the north of the Strip. The past three weeks have seen some of the most horrifying Israeli attacks of the past 22 months with relentless bombing, drone strikes, and tank attacks triggering another wave of mass displacement.

According to Israel’s Channel 12, Israeli military Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir is preparing to tell Netanyahu's government that if the assault to seize Gaza City proceeds, Israel will be left with no choice but to impose direct military rule over the entire Gaza Strip starting in November. Zamir had previously told the security cabinet that Israeli leaders appear to have no alternative plan for the period after the war.

“After the Palestinian side announced its acceptance of the Witkoff proposal, the people of Gaza hoped for a shift—a decrease in violence, perhaps even a chance to regain a sense of normalcy,” said Eyad Amawi, a representative of the Gaza Relief Committee and a coordinator for local NGOs inside Gaza. “Instead, they were stunned by the opposite outcome: the occupation announced an expansion of its military operation. What was expected to be a step toward calm quickly turned into a new phase of escalation.”

Amawi told Drop Site that Gaza is enduring “a slow, grinding process of depopulation. Gaza is being emptied piece by piece, not through one sweeping declaration, but through a strategy that combines technological warfare, psychological pressure, and humanitarian strangulation.” He said, “For many Gazans, this feels like part of a long-term plan to dismantle the fabric of society from within—destroying not only homes and infrastructure but also the very possibility of a stable future.”

Displaced Palestinians in northern Gaza on September 3, 2025. Photo by Hassan Jedi/Anadolu via Getty Images.

As Gaza Burns, Israel Forges Ahead with Plans to Seize the West Bank

With the Gaza ceasefire negotiations mired by Netanyahu’s insistence on sabotaging the process and proceeding with his genocidal onslaught—with full U.S. support—Israel has moved forward with what appears to be a campaign to officially annex the occupied West Bank.

Last month, Israeli authorities gave final approval for the “E1” settlement project—that has been on the table for over two decades—a plan that would connect Jerusalem and the existing illegal Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, effectively dividing the West Bank in two.

On Wednesday, Smotrich outlined a plan to annex 82% of the West Bank. “It is time to apply Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria and remove once and for all the idea of dividing our small land and establishing a terrorist state in its heart,” he said. “There will never, and can never be, a Palestinian state in our land,” he added. “If the Palestinian Authority dares to rise up and try to harm us, we will destroy them just as we do to Hamas.” Smotrich’s comments followed the Israel defense ministry formally declaring a large swath of the territory to be Israeli land.

Axios reporter Barak Ravid—one of the main conduits for strategic leaks from the White House and Israel—reported Wednesday that Secretary of State Marco Rubio “has signaled in private meetings that he doesn't oppose West Bank annexations and the Trump administration won't stand in the way.”

Some analysts have speculated that Trump may seek to offer Israel free reign to officially annex the West Bank as part of a deal to end the war in Gaza. But Buttu said that is unlikely, and that Israel has made clear it wants to eliminate any hope of a Palestinian state. At times throughout the war, Netanyahu has reportedly offered Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir more aggressive expansion of West Bank settlements in return for remaining in his governing coalition. “I don't think it's an either or exchange, one for the other. I think it's going to be exactly combined: that the Israelis get to take over Gaza, and they're going to be annexing the West Bank, and it's all going to be under the guise of ‘We need it for security,’” Buttu said. “I think it's going to be: ‘Continue Gaza and you get to do whatever it is that you want to do in the West Bank.’”

Since the onset of the genocide in Gaza in October 2023, Israel has aggressively ratcheted up its expansion of illegal settlements and the forced expulsion of Palestinians from their land in the occupied West Bank. Trump’s administration is stacked with Zionist officials, including U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who previously said there are no such people as Palestinians, and that the West Bank does not exist. In a recent meeting with senior rabbis in Israel, Huckabee said that Israelis were "the chosen people, given a chosen place, for a chosen purpose.”

A senior official from the United Arab Emirates said this week, “Annexation in the West Bank would constitute a red line for the UAE,” claiming it would “end the pursuit of regional integration.” The UAE was the premier signatory of Trump’s much-hyped plan, dating back to his first presidential term, to broker normalization agreements between Arab and other Muslim countries and Israel, known as the Abraham Accords.

Buttu said that, while Trump is still touting the agreements and claiming they will expand to include more nations, Israel has recognized over the past two years that it does not need the agreements, and has nothing to fear from Arab nations as it wages its wars across the region. “They've gotten everything that they've wanted. They don't care any longer about normalization. It's been proven in their minds that they can establish their military prowess, and do whatever it is that they want without having to make any concessions,” Buttu said. “They now view the world of us versus them, and the ‘them’ is anybody who sided with Palestinians and the ‘us’ is anybody who sided with the genocide.”