BREAKING: Hamas and Palestinian Factions Agree to Gaza Ceasefire Framework
“From our side, yes,” a senior Hamas official told Drop Site News.
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Hamas and other Palestinian factions agreed to a framework for the Gaza ceasefire deal on Wednesday evening, a senior Hamas official and a second source close to the Palestinian negotiating team told Drop Site. “From our side, yes,” the Palestinians reached an agreement, the Hamas official said, but added they needed to “finalize some points” with the mediators. Hamas has not yet officially confirmed any agreement, nor has Israel. “It’s over, it’s over. It’s been decided,” the second source said. “Everybody’s agreed on it. There are a few things that will be discussed, but it’s over.”
Mediators, the source close to the negotiators said, told the Palestinian side that President Donald Trump planned to personally announce a permanent ceasefire and had offered assurances that the U.S. would not permit Israel to resume the war after retrieving the Israeli captives.
“We have a great team over there, great negotiators. And there are unfortunately great negotiators on the other side also,” said Trump Wednesday. “But it’s something I think will happen—got a good chance of happening…. Our final negotiation is with Hamas and it seems to be going well.” Soon after he made those remarks, Secretary of State Marco Rubio walked up to Trump and handed him a sheet of paper. “I was just given a note by the Secretary of State saying that we’re very close to a deal in the Middle East and they’re going to need me pretty quickly.”
Multiple sources from Hamas and other Palestinian factions have told Drop Site that their central concern in these negotiations was that handing over all Israeli captives would remove nearly all of their leverage if it did not include a complete Israeli withdrawal. Israel has, as a matter of policy, systematically violated its ceasefire agreements with Hamas and also with Lebanon. In entering into these negotiations, Hamas negotiators accepted they were engaging in a high-stakes gamble.
“This is a risk, but we trusted President Trump to be the guarantor of all the commitments made,” said Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas leader, in an interview with Drop Site on Monday. “Had there been no commitment from the American president, we would never have agreed to take the risk, because we do not trust Netanyahu or his extremist right‑wing team in the current Israeli government.”
The Palestinian negotiators, after consultations with a range of factions, agreed to a deal that will keep Israeli forces in Gaza even after all Israeli captives are handed over to Israel. Throughout the negotiations over the past several months, Hamas has insisted it would not enter into a deal that did not include the complete withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces. “This is something they were not able to move,” the source said. While the exact lines that Israeli forces will redeploy to as part of the exchange of captives are still being worked out, Israeli forces will remain entrenched in Gaza.
The source close to the negotiators said “Trusting [Trump’s] word is the gamble they are taking. If it works, they will be considered geniuses. If it fails, they will be considered fools. It’s as simple as that.”
A senior Hamas official told Drop Site that the Palestinian negotiators have faced unprecedented pressure from Arab and Islamic mediators over the past 48 hours to make significant concessions and to quickly reach an agreement on the aspects of Trump’s plan that address the exchange of captives, a ceasefire, and the resumption of aid.
The source close to the negotiators said that as part of the agreement, aid deliveries will resume at levels consistent with the January 2025 ceasefire deal. Israel unilaterally abandoned that agreement in March when it imposed a full spectrum blockade on Gaza, resumed its campaign of terror bombings and subsequently unleashed a ground invasion of Gaza City in August. The source said 600 trucks of aid per day would enter Gaza under the agreement—what the United Nations has said in the past is the minimum amount needed in Gaza.
Israel will release roughly 2,000 Palestinians it is holding captive in its prisons and military camps. The bulk of these will consist of Palestinians taken from Gaza after October 7 and will include all women and children.
In Trump’s original plan presented on September 29, Israel would also free 250 Palestinians sentenced to life terms.There are ongoing negotiations over the exact number of Palestinians to be released and which, if any, of the most high-profile Palestinian resistance figures serving life sentences in Israel might be freed. Hamas has consistently demanded freedom for Marwan Barghouti, the single most popular Palestinian political leader whom Israel sentenced to five life terms in 2004. On Sunday, Netanyahu reportedly promised Israel’s fanatical, right-wing interior minister Itamar Ben-Gvir that he would not release Barghouti.
Hamas has also advocated for the release of Ahmad Sa’adat, Secretary-General of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Abdullah Barghouti, a senior commander of the Qassam Brigades, who was sentenced in 2003 to 67 life terms, the longest sentence ever imposed on a Palestinian by Israel.
In addition to the 20 living Israeli captives, there are believed to be 28 deceased. Hamas officials have said that some of these bodies are buried under the rubble of buildings or tunnels bombed by Israel or in areas currently under Israeli military control and that it will take time to retrieve them. The Hamas official told Drop Site that an agreement will be made that would provide more time to recover the bodies of deceased Israeli captives.
On Wednesday, Trump dispatched his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff to the Egyptian resort town of Sharm El-Sheikh to try to secure a deal. The Israeli delegation is headed by Ron Dermer, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s minister of strategic affairs. Trump said today, in anticipation of a deal, he will likely travel to the region, “maybe Sunday.”
Trump had given Hamas and Israel a deadline of Friday to complete negotiations. “He is very eager for the Nobel Peace Prize, and therefore he wants the problem solved today or tomorrow so that the vote… will be in his favor for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize,” Abu Marzouk told Drop Site.
Hamas leader Khalil Al-Hayya—who survived an Israeli assassination attempt in Doha, Qatar, on September 9—is heading Hamas’s negotiating team. The top political negotiator for Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Mohammed Al-Hindi, is also directly participating in the talks, as is a representative of the left-wing Party for the Liberation of Palestine. PIJ’s Saraya Al Quds force is the second largest armed resistance faction in Gaza holds an undisclosed number of the Israeli captives, along with those in the custody of Hamas’s Qassam Brigades.
Earlier on Wednesday, Ziyad Al-Nakhaleh, the secretary general of PIJ, appeared in a rare video address. “The resistance is engaged in a fierce negotiating battle under what is called the ‘Trump plan,’ which also carries within it the declaration that the Palestinian people should completely surrender to the enemy. Even so, the resistance has shown its willingness to negotiate on the basis that there are clauses that can be dealt with positively, first among them the prisoner exchange clause, which could be completed in the coming few days,” Al-Nakhaleh said. “But we must be prepared to confront the enemy’s possible attempts to turn the negotiations into an entry point for the surrender of our people and our resistance. The enemy and its allies must know that we cannot submit to their terms and dictates after all the price in sacrifices that our heroic people have paid.”
Hamas sources have made clear to Drop Site that they believe the only path to a brokered agreement to end the genocide rests with Trump. The alternative is an indefinite continuation of the armed struggle against a U.S.-backed Israeli military.
“There is no other deal to be taken. Either this or return to fight with full American support coupled with Arab and Islamic passivity and let-down,” said the source close to the negotiators. He said that while the deal is problematic, it contains some terms that Hamas and other Palestinian factions pushed for in their response to Trump, including deferring major issues that would alter the future of Gaza and Palestine itself. “No surrender, no disarming, no mass exile, but most of all a permanent end to the war to be announced by Trump.”
When Hamas offered its official response to Trump’s 20-point plan last Friday, the movement’s leadership took the position that it only had a mandate to enter into a deal on issues directly related to the Gaza war. But it asserted that negotiations on the bulk of Trump’s proposal—which contains sweeping terms that will impact the future governance of Gaza, including demilitarizing and disarming Gaza and the deployment of foreign troops—would require the involvement of all Palestinian factions, not just Hamas.
All of these issues, including Israel’s demand that Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups surrender their weapons and Gaza be fully demilitarized, will be deferred to future negotiations. “The next round of negotiations will be very tricky but going back to genocide will not be easy, even though it’s probable,” said the source close to the Palestinian negotiators. The internal calculus among the lead negotiators, he said, was “the cost-benefit analysis would favor accepting it. The next negotiations must be conducted in a very smart way.”
Drop Site News Middle East research fellow Jawa Ahmad contributed reporting.