Respecting ceasefire is only way to bring Israeli captives home, Hamas official says

Trump, a close ally of Israel, said in response that Hamas should release all the captives held by the Palestinian group by midday on Saturday or he would propose cancelling the Israel-Hamas ceasefire, which took effect on 19 January.
“Trump must remember there is an agreement that must be respected by both parties, and this is the only way to bring back the (Israeli) prisoners. The language of threats has no value and only complicates matters,” senior Hamas official, Sami Abu Zuhri, told Reuters.
Trump has enraged Palestinian and Arab leaders and upended decades of US policy that endorsed a possible two-state solution in the region by trying to impose his vision of Gaza, which has been devastated by an Israeli military offensive and is short of food, water and shelter, and in need of foreign aid.
He has said the United States should take over Gaza and move out its more than 2 million Palestinian residents so that the enclave can be turned into the “Riviera of the Middle East“.
The forcible displacement of a population under military occupation is a war crime banned by the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
Palestinians fear a repeat of what they call the Nakba, or Catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven out during the 1948 war that accompanied Israel’s creation. Israel denies they were forced out.

UN Chief warns of ‘immense tragedy’

The Gaza war has been paused since 19 January under the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas that was brokered by Qatar and Egypt with support from the United States.
More than 48,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, the Gaza Health Ministry says, and nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million population has been internally displaced by the conflict, which has caused a hunger crisis.
Some 1,200 people were killed in the 7 October, 2023 Hamas-led attack on southern Israeli communities and about 250 were taken to Gaza as hostages, Israeli tallies show.
However, since then, it has been revealed by Haaretz that helicopters and tanks of the Israeli army had, in fact, killed many of the 1,139 soldiers and civilians claimed by Israel to have been killed by the Palestinian Resistance.
Trump’s ideas have introduced new complexity into a sensitive and explosive Middle East dynamic, including the shaky ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
Trump was to meet Jordan’s King Abdullah on Tuesday for what was likely to be a tense encounter over the President’s Gaza redevelopment idea, including a threat to cut aid to the US-allied Arab country if it refuses to resettle Palestinians.
For Jordan, Trump’s talk of resettlement comes dangerously close to its nightmare of a mass expulsion of Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank, echoing a vision of Jordan as an alternative Palestinian home that has long been propagated by ultra-nationalist Israelis.
Amman’s concern is amplified by a surge in violence on its border with the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Palestinian hopes of statehood are being eroded by expanding Jewish settlement.
United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, said on X on Tuesday that a resumption of armed conflict should be avoided at all costs because that would lead to “immense tragedy”.