Only a few weeks ago, President Donald Trump seemed confident a deal was days away that would end the fighting in Gaza, secure the release of hostages and allow aid to flow into an enclave where people are starving to death.
Now, Trump’s optimism seems to have vanished. The president pulled back his negotiators from ceasefire talks this week after the US deemed Hamas neither “coordinated” nor “acting in good faith.” Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy, said he was looking into “alternative options” for getting the hostages out.
And Trump, rather than urging an immediate return to the negotiating table, signaled Friday it was time for Israel to escalate its military campaign, even as images of starving children in Gaza lead to mounting global outrage.
“I think they want to die, and it’s very, very bad,” Trump said of Hamas before leaving for a weekend trip to Scotland. “It got to be to a point where you’re gonna have to finish the job.”
Whether Trump’s shift in posture is a true reflection of the talks breaking down — or, as some Western officials suggested, a tactical step meant to jolt Hamas and break a deadlock — wasn’t clear.
But his words suggested he would do little to pressure Israel to pull back on its 21-month-long military campaign in Gaza, despite a growing humanitarian crisis that led one UN official this week to label Gazans “walking corpses.”
Trump declined to describe his recent conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — whose actions in Gaza and Syria this month have surprised and frustrated him — beyond calling them “sort of disappointing.”
“They’re gonna have to fight and they’re gonna have to clean it up. You’re gonna have to get rid of ‘em,” Trump said of Israel going after Hamas.
It was a stark acknowledgement from the president that his attempts to broker a new ceasefire — which seemed earlier this month in its final stages — had fallen off course. A failure to end the Gaza conflict, along with his parallel struggles to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, have proven frustrating for Trump as he jockeys for a Nobel Peace Prize.
His pessimism did not entirely match other signals emerging from the region. Egypt and Qatar said they would move forward in mediating for a lasting ceasefire in Gaza, calling the latest suspension in talks “normal in the context of these complex negotiations,” according to a joint statement posted by the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
A senior Israeli official told CNN that the talks have “not at all” collapsed, and said there is still an opportunity for the negotiations to resume.
And some US officials said they hoped both the president’s comments Friday, paired with the decision by Witkoff on Thursday to pull back from the ceasefire talks, would push Hamas into a more conciliatory negotiating stance.
Still, the United States’ sudden pull back sent shockwaves Thursday night through Doha, the Qatari capital where the negotiations have been taking place.
“This is an earthquake,” said one source with direct knowledge of the talks. “We’re dealing with the aftershock.”
As has been the case for months, the sticking points in the talks include how and when the war will end permanently, the number of Palestinian prisoners who will be released and where the Israeli military will redeploy in Gaza, according to people familiar with the negotiations.
Speaking to reporters Friday on the South Lawn as his helicopter awaited, Trump blamed the breakdown in talks squarely on Hamas, which he said had seen its leverage diminished after dozens of its hostages were either released or died in custody.
“Now we’re down to the final hostages, and they know what happens after you get the final hostages, and basically, because of that, they really didn’t want to make a deal,” Trump said, echoing a sentiment that one US official said Netanyahu conveyed when he met with Trump for dinner at the White House earlier this month.
Whether Trump’s comments will actually pressure Hamas into agreeing to the existing proposal to end the war remains to be seen, but they did appear designed in part to try to jog Hamas back to the realm of what is achievable.
In the wake of Witkoff’s Thursday statement, the senior Israeli official said Israel hopes Hamas will “reconnect itself to reality” so the remaining gaps can be bridged.
Speaking to CNN on Friday, State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce predicted Trump and Witkoff’s efforts would eventually yield results, though she declined to indicate what direction the talks would head next.
“We’ve tried. The world has watched this. What the options are — clearly there are many tools in President Trump’s tool chest, many options that Special Envoy Witkoff has,” Bruce told Kate Bolduan. “So, they are very smart, adept individuals who know the players. And I expect that we’ll have some success.”
Neither Bruce, nor Trump, nor any other administration official seemed willing to place a timeline on when that success might come, perhaps wary after Trump predicted in early July that a deal would be struck within a week.
But as the starvation crisis in Gaza spirals into a humanitarian catastrophe, urgency is growing to complete a deal. During a meeting in Tunis on Friday, Tunisian President Kais Saied presented Trump’s senior Africa adviser Massad Boulos — who is also the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Tiffany — with photos of malnourished children, desperate for food and eating sand.
“It is absolutely unacceptable,” Saied could be heard saying, according to AFP. “It is a crime against all of humanity.”
At the White House, Trump said it was Hamas that was preventing aid from being distributed. And he said the US hadn’t received enough credit for the help it had already provided.
“People don’t know this, and we didn’t certainly get any acknowledgement or thank you, but we contributed $60 million to food and supplies and everything else,” he said. “We hope the money gets there, because you know, that money gets taken. The food gets taken. We’re going to do more, but we gave a lot of money.”
An internal US government review found no evidence of widespread theft by Hamas of US-funded humanitarian aid in Gaza.
Meanwhile, top US allies have adopted a tougher stance on Israel’s military campaign. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whom Trump will meet in Scotland this weekend, on Friday said “Israel’s disproportionate military escalation in Gaza” was “indefensible.”
And French President Emmanuel Macron, in a surprise late night social media post, said France would move to recognize a Palestinian state at September’s United Nations General Assembly, a step that angered Israel and that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called “a slap in the face to the victims of October 7th.”
Trump sounded less troubled by the move, which he instead dismissed as pointless.
“The statement doesn’t carry any weight,” he said. “He’s a very good guy. I like him. But that statement doesn’t carry weight.”
CNN’s Jeremy Diamond and Jennifer Hansler contributed to this story.