Donald Trump, then the US president-elect, warned there would be “hell to pay” unless hostages went free by his 20 January inauguration.
Many in the region treated the inauguration as an unofficial deadline. The warning came as officials from Hamas and Israel held their most intensive talks for months with Qatari and Egyptian mediators in an effort to secure a ceasefire in Gaza.
The outgoing US administration called for a final push for an agreement before Joe Biden left office. Israel sent a team of mid-ranking officials to Qatar for the talks. David Barnea, the head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, led the Israeli negotiations, and some Arabic media reports said he was expected to join the team in Qatar.
The central divide remained unchanged. Hamas said it would release its remaining hostages if Israel ended the war and withdrew all its troops from Gaza. Israel said it would continue the war until Hamas had been dismantled and every hostage freed.
A Hamas official told Reuters on Sunday that the group had cleared an Israeli list of 34 hostages who could be released in the first phase of a truce, alongside Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
At a news conference in Algiers, Hamas official Osama Hamdan said the group’s terms were “a complete end to the aggression and a full withdrawal from lands the occupation invaded”. He said Israel had undermined every effort to reach an agreement. Asked about Trump’s threat, Hamdan said: “I think the US president must make more disciplined and diplomatic statements”.
Israel placed responsibility for the impasse on Hamas. Eden Bar Tal, director general of Israel’s foreign ministry, said: “Hamas is the only obstacle to the release of the hostages”.
The available account does not establish whether Trump’s warning changed either side’s position, or whether pressure from the Biden administration and the mediators carried greater weight. It does show that his impending return to the White House gave the talks a political timetable alongside the terms being negotiated.
Ten days after 29 September 2025, Trump announced that Israel and Hamas had “signed off on the first phase”. After the ceasefire was signed, twenty living Israeli hostages returned home, along with the bodies of twenty-eight others. Israel released 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences and another 1,700 Gazans detained after October 7.
A US-led Board of Peace, or BoP, was established as the main body for overseeing and speeding implementation of the ceasefire plan.
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