President Donald Trump’s foreign envoy Steve Witkoff said Tuesday that he’s hopeful to have a Gaza ceasefire deal by the end of the week, as negotiators make substantial progress working through remaining issues.
Trump told reporters he would meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House Tuesday to discuss “almost exclusively” the situation in Gaza. The meeting would be the two world leaders’ second in as many days – a sign of the intensifying effort to end the war between Israel and Hamas.
“He’s going to come over again tonight. We’re talking about Gaza, mostly Gaza right now,” Trump told reporters during a Cabinet meeting Tuesday. “We’re going to be talking about, I would say, almost exclusively, Gaza. We got to get that solved.”
Witkoff, who is expected to head to Qatar later in the week to participate in ceasefire talks that began Sunday, said negotiators have made progress in working through sticking points. He said as many as 10 living hostages and nine deceased hostages were expected to be released as part of the deal under discussion.
“We’re in proximity talks now, and we had four issues, and now we’re down to one after two days of proximity talks. So, we are hopeful that by the end of this week, we will have an agreement that will bring us into a 60-day Cease fire,” Witkoff said.
There has been no let up in the Gaza offensive, with the health ministry reporting hundreds of people killed in Israeli strikes over the past 12 days.
An Israeli source familiar with the matter said the outstanding issue was the withdrawal maps for the Israeli military once the ceasefire takes effect. The latest proposal called for the Israel Defense Forces to withdraw from parts of northern Gaza on the first day of a ceasefire and from parts of southern Gaza on the seventh day.
But the specific maps were left to negotiations between Israel and Hamas, a particularly difficult issue given the opposing positions. Israel has made clear it intends to have security control over Gaza in any day-after plan for the war, while Hamas wants an end to the war and a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from the besieged enclave. Israel wants to maintain a presence on the Philadelphi Corridor, which runs along the border between Egypt and Gaza, in order to control what enters the strip.
Trump met with Netanyahu for dinner Monday at the White House, and the Israeli prime minister was on Capitol Hill meeting with top lawmakers Tuesday.
“We have still to finish the job in Gaza, release all our hostages, eliminate and destroy Hamas military and governance capabilities, because Gaza must have a different future for our sake, for everyone’s sake, and no country will settle for less. We certainly will not,” Netanyahu told reporters after meeting with House Speaker Mike Johnson, adding, “These are all things that I discussed with President Trump.”
Hamas, meanwhile, has three main demands: a permanent end to the fighting, for humanitarian assistance to be carried out by the United Nations, and for Israel to retreat to the positions it held on March 2 this year, before it renewed its offensive and occupied the northern part of the Gaza Strip.
A senior Hamas official told CNN in late May that the group is “ready to return the hostages in one day – just we want a guarantee that war will not come again after that.” In response to the earlier Trump administration-backed ceasefire proposal in May, Hamas requested US assurances that permanent ceasefire negotiations would continue and that fighting would not resume after the 60-day pause.
Last week, Hamas said it had responded positively to the latest proposal put forward by Qatar. Bishara Bahbah, a Palestinian-American official who has been involved in the negotiations, said Hamas asked for minor adjustments to the text of the proposal. Israel called the adjustments “unacceptable” but sent a delegation to Doha anyway for negotiations, a major sign of progress as mediators tried to secure a ceasefire deal.
On Tuesday, Netanyahu said, “We think that we’ve gotten closer to it, and I hope we can cross the line. That is our purpose. But I think I speak about it publicly, the more likely that we might get it.”
A lasting resolution depends in large part on Netanyahu’s willingness to end the conflict entirely.
“It’s a tragedy and he wants to get it solved, and I want to get it solved, and I think the other side wants to get it solved,” Trump said Tuesday. “A lot of hate, long term hate, but we think we’re going to have it solved pretty soon, hopefully with a real solution, a solution that’s going to be holding up.”
CNN’s Kevin Liptak, Christian Edwards and Lauren Kent contributed to this report.
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