Egypt and Qatar are working to convince Hamas to accept Donald Trump’s ultimatum to end the war in Gaza, Egypt’s foreign minister has said, as Trump gave a Sunday deadline to reply.
Badr Abdelatty said the time had come for Hamas to disarm, and that Israel should be given no excuse to continue its offensive in Gaza, where it killed another 28 Palestinians on Friday.
“Let’s not give any excuse for one party to use Hamas as a pretext for this mad daily killings of civilians. What’s happening is far beyond the 7th of October,” Abdelatty said, referring to the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.
Speaking at the French Institute of International Relations in Paris, he said Egypt “is coordinating with our brothers in Qatar and with our colleagues in Turkey in order to convince Hamas to respond positively to this plan”.
He added that while there were “a lot of holes” in the Trump proposal, there was full agreement that “Hamas has no role in the day after”.
Trump has given Hamas until Sunday night to reach an agreement on his plan to end the war in Gaza, threateningthe group with “all hell” if it failed to do so.
The US president posted on his Truth Social platform on Friday: “An Agreement must be reached with Hamas by Sunday Evening at SIX (6) P.M., Washington, D.C. time. Every Country has signed on!. If this LAST CHANCE agreement is not reached, all HELL, like no one has ever seen before, will break out against Hamas. THERE WILL BE PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST ONE WAY OR THE OTHER.”
The group is split over how to respond, with an official telling Agence France-Presse on Friday that it needed more time to consider the deal, prior to Trump’s announcement of a Sunday deadline.
It would require Hamas to lay down its arms and exit politics, and return the remaining 48 hostages it has held since October 2023 – 20 of whom are presumed to be still alive – in return for nearly 2,000 Palestinians held in Israeli jails. Israel would gradually withdraw its troops from Gaza while an international force replaced it, governed by a transitional authority headed by Trump.
Most analysts agree the plan would spell an end to the group’s identity as an armed Palestinian resistance group, while Israel would make few concessions.
The head of Hamas’s military wing, Izz al-Din al-Haddad, has objected to the plan, which he saw as being designed to eliminate Hamas whether they agreed to it or not, according to the BBC. There is doubt that Israel will adhere to the terms of the plan, particularly after the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in a video that Israeli troops would remain in most of Gaza after the plan was implemented.
Trump said on Friday that if the group did not agree to his plan, Hamas members would be hunted down. “Most of the rest are surrounded and MILITARILY TRAPPED, just waiting for me to give the word, ‘GO,’ for their lives to be quickly extinguished,” Trump said. “As for the rest, we know where and who you are, and you will be hunted down, and killed.”
The plan places the onus on Hamas and relieves growing pressure on Israel to stop its military campaign. Israel has faced growing international condemnation of its conduct in Gaza in recent weeks, which has been deemed a genocide by the world’s leading association of genocide scholars.
Israel continued its Gaza City offensive and bombardment of the wider strip on Friday. Eleven of the 28 people killed by Israeli strikes were killed in Gaza City, while the rest were killed in southern Gaza, including three by an Israeli drone strike in al-Mawasi, which it had previously designated as a safe zone.
Israel issued its last evacuation order for Gaza City on Wednesday, with the defence minister, Israel Katz, saying that anyone remaining in the city would be considered a terrorist or terrorist supporter, a designation contrary to international law.
Hundreds of thousands of people remain trapped in the city, many of whom cannot afford the journey to southern Gaza, which reportedly costs more than $1,000 (£750). The Israeli military has said the coastal route to southern Gaza remains open.
“Many people are left to sleep along the roads until they can find shelter,” said Sarah Davies, a spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross. “There isn’t enough space or tents to house the people arriving from the north. The way evacuations are carried out matters.”
The UN said on Friday there was no safe place for people fleeing Gaza City to go because the areas Israel had designated as “safe zones” in southern Gaza were “places of death”.
“The notion of a safe zone in the south is farcical,” said James Elder, a spokesperson for the UN children’s agency, Unicef. “Bombs are dropped from the sky with chilling predictability; schools, which had been designated as temporary shelters, are regularly reduced to rubble, [and] tents … are regularly engulfed in fire from air attacks.”
Israel regularly bombs areas it has deemed safe zones. On Thursday it bombed a food store in al-Mawasi, killing nine people, including a grandfather, his four sons and grandson.
Al-Mawasi has become one of the world’s most densely populated places, the UN said, and is struggling to cope with the influx of nearly half a million people from Gaza City. Israel has said it has increased the flow of humanitarian aid to southern Gaza, but aid groups say it is not nearly enough to alleviate the famine afflicting parts of Gaza.
Basic services were overwhelmed with the needs of displaced people and residents. According to Davies, hospitals in southern Gaza were under “severe strain”, and the Red Cross field hospital in the area was operating at more than double its capacity to accommodate the injured.
On Thursday, al-Nasser hospital, one of the last remaining functional hospitals in southern Gaza, received 27 bodies of people shot dead by the Israeli military. When asked about the situation in the hospital, the head of paediatrics, Dr Ahmad al-Farra, said it was “very hard”.
Israel was continuing to target hospitals and medical workers, the UN said.
On Thursday, a nurse, Tasneem al-Hams, was “abducted” by Israeli special forces while travelling to work in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, the Gaza health ministry said. Hams’s father, Dr Marwan al-Hamas, a senior health ministry official, was detained by Israeli forces in July and is being held in an Israeli prison, as are at least 27 other doctors from Gaza, according to Palestinian Healthcare Workers Watch.
Israel has previously claimed that arrested medical officials had connections to Hamas, without providing evidence.
Israel’s war in Gaza has killed at least 62,622 Palestinians and wounded about 170,000, according to the Gaza health authority.
