The Trump administration said Wednesday that it was putting the finishing touches on a peace proposal to end the war between Israel and Hamas.
Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff said President Trump would review the proposal before it is released.
“We’re on the precipice of sending out a new term sheet that hopefully will be delivered later today,” Mr. Witkoff told reporters in the White House. “I have some very good feelings about getting to a long-term resolution, temporary ceasefire and a long-term resolution, a peaceful resolution of that conflict.”
The deal would result in the release of 10 living Israeli hostages and an unspecified number of bodies of slain hostages in exchange for “an agreed-upon” number of Palestinian prisoners, the Times of Israel reported.
Hamas is reportedly still holding 58 hostages in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas reached an agreement with Mr. Witkoff on the general framework for a ceasefire and was awaiting the final response. A permanent ceasefire would mean the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, a restoration of humanitarian aid and a committee of “independent Palestinian technocrats” replacing Hamas to assume governing control over the Gaza Strip, the Times of Israel reported.
While the White House was finalizing peace proposals, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was telling lawmakers in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, that Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar had been killed in a May 13 airstrike.
He was the most recent in a long list of Hamas leaders killed by the Israel Defense Forces. Sinwar’s elder brother, Yahya Sinwar, was the mastermind of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack into southern Israel that killed at least 1,200 people and resulted in some 251 people taken hostage.
Yahya Sinwar was killed by the IDF in late October in southern Gaza.
“We changed the face of the Middle East. We pushed the terrorists from our territories,” Mr. Netanyahu said in his address to the Knesset. “We entered the Gaza Strip with force, [and] we eliminated tens of thousands of terrorists. We eliminated [Mohammad] Deif, [Ismail] Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Sinwar.”
Mr. Netanyahu was adamant that Israel would pursue “complete victory” against Hamas, despite protests calling for a comprehensive deal to end the fighting and free the remaining hostages.
“We will defeat Hamas, dismantle its leadership and demilitarize Gaza. That is what will happen,” he said.
United Nations officials said Wednesday that dozens of Palestinians had reportedly been shot and injured while attempting to collect humanitarian assistance at a distribution center run by a U.S.- and Israel-backed aid organization in the southern Gaza Strip.
The U.N. human rights office said it had reports that nearly 50 people were hurt at a distribution center in Rafah run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, part of the plan to wrest control of aid operations from organizations backed by the United Nations.
The number of injured could rise as authorities investigate, said Ajith Sunghay, head of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights office in the Palestinian territories.
“Our office has documented 26 incidents where the Israel Defense Forces fired shots while people were collecting humanitarian aid, causing casualties at Al Kuwaiti roundabout and Al Naburasi roundabout,” Mr. Sunghay said in a statement.
Israel Defense Forces officials said their soldiers had fired warning shots outside the distribution center as thousands of people began pushing through the lines.
“Control over the situation was established, food distribution operations are expected to continue as planned, and the safety of IDF troops was not compromised,” the IDF said on its Telegram social messaging page.
Mr. Netanyahu is also reportedly weighing military action to cripple Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities to prevent the creation of a nuclear weapon, which Israel considers an existential threat. However, Mr. Trump told the Israeli leader to stand down while his negotiators tried to hammer out a deal with Tehran.
He told reporters in the White House that an airstrike on Iran would be “inappropriate” because both sides were close to a solution.
“That could change at any moment. It could change with a phone call,” Mr. Trump said. “Right now, I think they want to make a deal, and if we can make a deal, it would save a lot of lives.”
A deal to eliminate the threat of a nuclear Iran could be reached over the next couple of weeks, Mr. Trump said.
The president spoke by phone with his Israeli counterpart last week. White House officials called the conversation “productive.”
“As the president told me and he told all of you, this deal with Iran could end in two ways,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “It could end in a very positive diplomatic solution, or it could end in a very negative situation for Iran.”
Iran and the U.S. have held five rounds of talks, all mediated by Oman.
Rafael Mariano Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. atomic watchdog, said Wednesday that “the jury is still out” regarding the negotiations between Washington and Tehran but any continuing talks should be taken as a good sign.
Tehran has threatened to break off any nuclear negotiations with Europe after the British envoy to Washington said Britain was fully aligned with the Trump administration’s position on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, asserting that it should be dismantled.
“Iran is vulnerable. But it still retains enrichment facilities that can produce a nuclear bomb. And we can’t accept that,” Ambassador Peter Mandelson said this week in an address to the Atlantic Council. “So Britain strongly supports [President Trump’s] initiative in negotiating away these enrichment and related facilities in Iran. We support what Steve Witkoff has been doing in his negotiations, which are making some progress.”
Iran is in talks with Britain, Germany and France to discuss possible limits to its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. Still, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the negotiations would be pointless if Britain insists on a complete end to the country’s enrichment program.
Tehran said it has the right to enrich uranium for civilian purposes under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Mr. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Iran deal in 2018.
“If the U.K. position is ‘zero enrichment’ in Iran, there is nothing left for us to discuss on the nuclear issue,” Mr. Araghchi wrote on social media.
• Vaughn Cockayne contributed to this report.
