The Israel government yesterday Friday warned the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas that it would either accept the US proposal for a ceasefire and the release of the hostages it has been holding since the October 7, 2023 attack or it will be “wiped out”, while US President Donald Trump assured that a ceasefire is “very close”.

Israel is facing mounting international pressure over the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip and the humanitarian situation in the Palestinian enclave, where the blockade for more than two months, although partially eased last week, has caused widespread shortages of food, medicine and other essentials.

In the middle of the month, the Israeli military further escalated its military operations, with publicly stated goals of releasing the remaining hostages, bringing the entire Palestinian enclave under its “control” and destroying Hamas, which seized power there in 2007.

Last night, the Israeli defense minister, Israel Kats, said his army was continuing its operations “with all its might”while “removing the local population from any battle zone,” in a statement threatening the Palestinian Islamist movement.

“The Hamas murderers must now choose: accept the terms of the ‘Whitcoff agreement’ for the release of the hostages – or perish,” Katz asserted, referring to the proposal by the US president’s special envoy for the Middle East, Steve Whitcoff.

“They are very close to an agreement on Gaza, Trump assured for his part during a press conference.

The Gaza Strip is“the most malnourished area in the world”, as “100% of the population is at risk of starvation”, Jens Lerke, the spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), stressed earlier in Geneva.

“A group of armed men stormed the campaign hospitals in Deir al-Bala, looting large quantities of medical equipment, supplies, medicines and nutritional supplements intended for children suffering from malnutrition, informed at the same time in New York the spokesman for the UN Secretary General, Stefan Dujarik.

Indirect negotiations aimed at declaring a ceasefire, which it is hoped will then lead to an end to the 20-month-long devastating war, have yet to bear fruit after the Israeli army resumed its offensive on the Palestinian enclave in mid-March, ending a two-month truce.

The night before last Thursday, White House spokeswoman Caroline Levitt said a new US proposal to declare a ceasefire had been approved by Israel and submitted to Hamas.

However, shortly afterwards, Bassem Naim, an exiled leader of the movement, told Agence France-Presse that the proposal does not meet basic Hamas demands, to the extent that it entails “essentially the perpetuation of the occupation, the continuation of the killings and the starvation.”

According to another French Agency source in Hamas, the movement notes a total absence of guarantees for the continuation of talks during the ceasefire, in view of a definitive end to the war.

Hamas, however, said yesterday that it is holding “consultations with Palestinian forces and factions”regarding the proposal “forwarded by Mr. Whitcoff through the mediators.”

Reacting to Hamas’s positions, Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been hostile to any compromise since the war broke out, demanded yesterday that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government use “all the force necessary” to “finish”the Palestinian Islamist movement.

On the ground, civil defense in the Gaza Strip said 45 people were killed yesterday (Friday) in attacks by Israel’s armed forces in various sectors of the coastal Palestinian enclave.

The unprecedented assault by Hamas terrorists on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, the trigger for the war, claimed the lives of 1,218 people on the Israeli side, the majority of them civilians, according to a French News Agency count based on official data. Of the 251 people kidnapped that day, 57 remain in the Gaza Strip, but at least 34 of them are dead, according to Israeli authorities. Hamas, moreover, still holds the body of an Israeli soldier killed in 2014 in a previous war in the enclave.

More than 54,321 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, have since been killed in the large-scale Israeli military retaliatory operations, according to figures from the Hama, which the United Nations describes as credible.

Alongside the military operations in the Gaza Strip, Israel has accelerated the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

The day after the Israeli government announced that 22 new Jewish settlements would be built in the occupied West Bank, Egypt denounced “the new defiant and flagrant violation of international law and Palestinian rights.”

Moreover, “Israeli settlements are a major obstacle to the realization of the two-state solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace,” Cairo said in a statement.

The 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which includes Egypt, also condemned the Israeli government’s decision.

For its part, Saudi Arabia made it known that the kingdom’s foreign minister will travel to Ramallah in the West Bank tomorrow, Sunday, in the first visit of this level to the Palestinian territories since the 1967 war.

But Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli authorities have no intention whatsoever of allowing either his visit or that of the heads of diplomacy of other Arab states, including those of Jordan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.

So far, neither the Israeli government nor those of the Arab states concerned have commented on the information.