US President Donald Trump declared Friday that Hamas isn’t interested in reaching a hostage deal and signaled backing for Israel advancing its military operations against the terror group.

“Hamas didn’t really want to make a deal. I think they want to die,” Trump told reporters outside the White House a day after the US and Israel announced that they were pulling their respective negotiating teams from Doha, where proximity talks with Hamas had been taking place for nearly three weeks.

Washington and Jerusalem fumed at Hamas over the response it submitted earlier Thursday to the latest proposal for a 60-day Gaza truce and hostage release deal. Egypt and Qatar took a more nuanced approach, arguing that the response indeed contained too many requests for changes to the proposal. However, they maintain that the gaps were bridgeable, an Arab diplomat and a source involved in the mediation effort told The Times of Israel on Friday.

Trump painted a far more bleak outlook and appeared to even accept that the US may not be able to secure the release of the remaining 50 hostages — 20 of whom are believed to still be alive.

“I said this was going to happen,” Trump told reporters, claiming to have predicted the current impasse.

“We got a lot of hostages out. But when you get down to the last 10 or 20, I don’t think Hamas is going to make a deal because that means they have no protection. And basically that’s what happened,” he said.

“I think what’s going to happen is they’re going to be hunted down,” Trump continued. “It got to a point where [Israel is] going to have to finish the job.”

“They’re going to have to fight, and they’re gonna have to clean it up. You’re gonna have to get rid of it,” he said, acknowledging that the situation is “sort of disappointing.”

What’s unclear is whether additional fighting will lead to the destruction of Hamas. The IDF has been fighting the terror group for nearly 22 months, and Israeli officials insisted that Trump’s entry to the Oval Office would allow for the IDF to deliver a knock-out blow.

Trump allowed Israel to collapse the previous hostage deal instead of entering the second phase that included a permanent end to the war.

Israel then launched and is now nearing the conclusion of a new offensive aimed at occupying 75 percent of the Strip in order to pressure Hamas.

For nearly three months, Israel blocked all aid from entering the Strip, in what aid organizations say helped create the current famine crisis.

The US then helped Israel establish the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was designed to try and box Hamas out of the aid distribution process when Israel finally began to allow aid again into Gaza in late May. But GHF was quickly marred by near-daily reports of shootings of Palestinians seeking to pick up boxes of food.

The US- and Israeli-backed organization still touts its delivery of roughly 90 million meals, but the boxes of aid it distributes are dry food products that need to be prepared elsewhere in the Strip where clean water, cooking gas and kitchen equipment are increasingly scarce. Moreover, GHF doesn’t track who is picking up its aid, so there is no way to confirm that Hamas fighters aren’t benefiting from it as well.

On top of the guardrails that Trump removed regarding Israel’s military campaign, the US also adopted Netanyahu’s approach for a phased hostage deal.

Hamas has offered to release all of the hostages in one batch in exchange for Israel agreeing to permanently end the war, but Netanyahu has refused, arguing that doing so would leave Hamas in power.

Instead, the sides have been engaged in months of painstaking negotiations during which Hamas has agreed to release roughly half of the hostages in exchange for a temporary ceasefire, but in return has demanded a long list of conditions that make it difficult for Israel to resume fighting even after the truce expires.

Trump’s comments on Friday indicated that he had all but given up on the negotiations in Doha — a major shift for the US president, who for months has expressed his desire to end the war and who just a week earlier prematurely announced that 10 hostages would soon be released.

Israel was quickly falling in line, with Netanyahu’s office issuing a statement Friday that said Jerusalem and Washington were “considering alternative options to bring our hostages home.”

The statement echoed one issued a day earlier by US special envoy Steve Witkoff.

But a senior Israeli official told The Times of Israel Friday that there are no new ideas for securing the release of the hostages and that the only military strategies that haven’t been pursued would put the captives at risk.

Earlier Friday, the families of several hostages still in Gaza met with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the White House in order to receive an update regarding the negotiations.

One hostage relative told The Times of Israel that during one of their earlier meetings this week with Trump officials, the families were assured that the decision to withdraw the US negotiating team from Doha was a “muscle flex” tactic aimed at coaxing Hamas to come down from some of its demands, particularly ones regarding the number of Palestinian security prisoners it wants released in exchange for the 10 living hostages and 18 bodies of slain hostages who will be released in five batches during the two-month ceasefire under discussion.

When the hostage families pressed Trump aides as to why they weren’t promoting a comprehensive deal, as opposed to the staged framework on the table, the US officials insisted that the administration is committed to securing the release of all hostages, the relative said, confirming a Channel 12 report.

Meanwhile, Egypt and Qatar issued a joint statement asserting that they are continuing their mediation efforts to secure a ceasefire, explaining that the US and Israel had merely recalled their negotiators “to hold consultations before resuming dialogue,” adding that the practice is “normal in the context of these complex negotiations.”

The two Arab countries insisted that some progress was made in the last round of negotiations and that they remain committed to securing a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal.

However, the source involved in mediation efforts and the Arab diplomat denied that hostage negotiations were scheduled to resume next week.

Egyptian media reported earlier Friday that talks would still pick back up next week, and Hamas official Bassem Naim told reporters the same.

But the two sources said nothing has been scheduled yet and that Egypt and Qatar are still waiting for directions from Witkoff.