US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he had communicated to Hamas that the militant group must disarm or it will be forced to.
On Monday, Hamas freed the last living Israeli hostages from Gaza, and Israel sent home busloads of Palestinian detainees under a ceasefire deal brokered by Trump, but Hamas has not publicly committed to putting down its weapons.
“If they don’t disarm, we will disarm them. And it will happen quickly and perhaps violently,” Trump said during a meeting at the White House with Argentine President Javier Milei.
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Trump said he communicated this to Hamas and they had agreed to disarm, as his 20-point peace proposal stated.
“I spoke to Hamas, and I said, ‘You’re going to disarm, right?’ ‘Yes, sir, we’re going to disarm.’ That’s what they told me,” Trump said, later clarifying that he passed the message through intermediaries.
The outlook for Trump’s peace plan has darkened since he returned from a visit to Israel and Egypt on Monday.
Israel restricted aid into Gaza and kept the enclave’s border shut on Tuesday, while re-emergent Hamas fighters demonstrated their grip by executing men in the street.
Trump endorsed Hamas killing members of other gangs as it reasserts its grip on security.
Israel told the United Nations it will only allow 300 aid trucks into Gaza – half the agreed daily number – from Wednesday, and that no fuel or gas will be allowed in, except for specific needs related to humanitarian infrastructure.
Three Israeli officials earlier said Israel had decided to restrict aid and delay plans to open the southern border crossing to Egypt because Hamas had been too slow to turn over bodies of dead hostages. The Islamist militant group has said locating the bodies is difficult.
Trump said on Tuesday that phase two of the ceasefire deal now begins, but also noted the delay in handing over the deceased.
“THE DEAD HAVE NOT BEEN RETURNED, AS PROMISED! Phase Two begins right NOW!!!” he said in a social media post.
Meanwhile, Hamas has swiftly reclaimed the streets of Gaza’s urban areas, following the partial withdrawal of Israeli troops last week.
In a video circulated late on Monday, Hamas fighters dragged seven men with hands tied behind their backs into a Gaza City square, forced them to their knees and shot them from behind, as dozens of onlookers watched from nearby shopfronts.
A Hamas source confirmed that the video was filmed on Monday and that Hamas fighters took part in the executions. Reuters was able to confirm the location by visible geographic features.
Trump has given his blessing to Hamas to reassert some control of Gaza, at least temporarily. Israeli officials, who say any final settlement must permanently disarm Hamas, have so far refrained from commenting publicly on the re-emergence of the group’s fighters.
On Monday, the US president proclaimed the “historic dawn of a new Middle East” to Israel’s parliament, as Israel and Hamas were exchanging the last 20 living Israeli hostages in Gaza for nearly 2,000 Palestinian detainees and prisoners.
But so far, Hamas has handed over only four coffins of dead hostages, leaving at least 23 presumed dead and one unaccounted for, still in the Gaza Strip.
The group informed mediators that it will begin transferring a further four bodies to Israel from 10pm on Tuesday, an official involved in the operation told Reuters.
The ceasefire has stopped two years of devastating warfare in Gaza triggered by the October 7, 2023 attack in which Hamas-led gunmen killed around 1,200 people and took 251 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel’s military campaign in Gaza killed nearly 68,000 people according to local health authorities, with thousands more feared dead under the rubble.
Gaza’s Civil Defence Service said 250 bodies had been recovered since the truce began.
Swathes of Gaza are in ruins and the global hunger monitor said in August there was famine in the territory. Thousands of Gazans have been returning to homes since the ceasefire, many finding whole streets bombed into dust.
