Hamas issued a statement this week saying that it was still waiting for an answer from the “Zionist enemy” regarding the terrorist organization’s claim that it had agreed to a hostage deal on August 18.
Local media reports have said that the government has not addressed the agreement. However, many in Israel support the discussion of a deal. Hamas's attempt to reinsert itself into the conversation is part of a wider war of words. Israel is threatening to destroy Gaza City in an offensive. Meanwhile, the US is saying that Hamas should release the living hostages.
The terrorist organization is trying to convince people that it is willing to discuss a comprehensive deal. Hamas wants the war in Gaza to end. It has several demands, such as getting Israel to withdraw from Gaza and open the border crossings. It also claims it will be flexible in terms of having a kind of national unity administration of Palestinian factions in Gaza, where “technocrats” would run the enclave.
It appears that the terrorist group is trying to appeal to US President Donald Trump as well. In a post on Telegram, Hamas claimed that it was reaching out to Trump, saying it had “agreed on August 18 to the mediator’s proposal, which is based originally on the proposal of [Steve] Witkoff.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has not responded to it yet,” Hamas added.
In the interim, Trump posted that he is telling Hamas to “immediately give back all 20 hostages (not two or five or seven) and things will change rapidly. It will end.”
Additionally, Adam Boehler, the US special envoy for hostage response, has also been posting on the social media platform X/Twitter, saying that Hamas should pay attention to Trump’s messaging.
He quoted a post on X on Thursday, for instance, regarding whether pressure on Qatar might lead to results. “Sounds right to me,” he wrote.
Defense Minister Israel Katz has a message for Hamas as well. He posted on Wednesday that “Hamas continues to close its eyes and utter empty words, but it will soon realize that it must choose between two options: accept Israel’s conditions for ending the war, primarily the release of all the hostages and disarmament, or Gaza will become a match for Rafah and Beit Hanun.”
The message is that Gaza City will be flattened as parts of Rafah and Beit Hanun were in the war. Recent footage of Beit Hanun shows that basically every house in the neighborhood was destroyed. Beit Hanun is a Gaza town near Sderot. Hamas terrorists were holed up there through July 2025, despite several efforts by the IDF to clear the area. It is now cleared and destroyed.
There is currently an impasse regarding what comes next in Gaza. It appears to boil down to different messaging and demands. Hamas has preferred staged or phased deals in which it releases a few hostages at a time and gets Israel to leave Gaza.
Hamas's goal: Attacking Israel, getting hostages, and repeating the process
Hamas has basically demanded this since its October 7 attack. Its goal was to attack Israel, massacre people, kidnap people, and then end the war and get Palestinian prisoners released. Hamas’s endgame was to leverage this to become more popular.
It was hoping it could then carry out another attack in a year and get more hostages, repeating the process. Israel’s appeasement of Hamas over the last decades, letting it run Gaza and enabling cash to flow to the Hamas-run enclave, convinced the group that this would work before October 7.
For example, it was already holding four hostages on October 6, 2023: two live Israelis and the bodies of two soldiers. It also held IDF soldier Gilad Schalit for five years. Hamas calculated that Israel would always let it take a few hostages at a time and keep them for some time.
By and by, Gaza had become a place that Israel was afraid to operate in, and thus, when Hamas was lucky enough to grab an Israeli, that person would be left in Gaza for years.
Case in point, after Hamas seized the four hostages in 2024, it held them for 10 years. The terrorist organization benefited throughout those years with millions of dollars in funding from Doha.
The more Hamas murdered people and attacked Israel, the more it got. This was its calculus.
However, 22 months of war have led Hamas to wonder if it can squeeze out the same concessions. Its messaging since August 18 is to try to get Israel to accept its terms.
Yet, Israel’s leadership has said it wants all the hostages released at the same time. This would include at least 20 living hostages and around 28 deceased hostages. Trump’s messaging is that Hamas must release the living.
What Hamas wants is for the war to end, Israel to leave Gaza, and it to get its autonomy back regarding the border with Egypt. It is unclear if this can be bridged because Israel has vowed “total victory” in Gaza and not to leave the Rafah border.
As such, any deal where Hamas appears to return to governing Gaza would not look like a victory. By saying that it will agree to a technocratic government, it seems that Hamas means that it will still be pulling the strings behind the scenes, using this as a way to also insert itself into governance in the West Bank.
Since November 2023, when the first hostage deal took place, Israel has believed that military pressure will bring hostage deals. It is not clear if this has worked. Threats to level Gaza City and destroy it “like Beit Hanun” may lead to international condemnation.
If Israel is perceived as primarily waging a war against civilian infrastructure, rather than Hamas, this will not help its already fraying foreign ties. With world leaders heading to the UN in New York, pressure will build on Israel in September. Hamas is banking on this.