A senior official in the Prime Minister’s Office stressed to The Times of Israel on Wednesday that the war in Gaza is still “not over,” despite US President Donald Trump’s insistence earlier this week that it is, and a letter from the government to hostage families saying that the war had ended.
“We are still in the first phase,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity while referring to the ceasefire and hostage release deal that halted two years of fighting. “We have to complete it. Without completing it, it’s not over.”
“Even Trump says it’s over — but he even said that Hamas needs to disarm, and if they won’t do it, ‘we’ll disarm them,'” the official added, quoting the US president’s words from a day earlier.
Trump’s 20-point plan, okayed by both Israel and Hamas, stipulates that the Palestinian terror group must be disarmed and Gaza demilitarized, with no weapons factories operating inside the Strip and no smuggling over its borders.
“We want to come to the end of this war,” the Israeli official continued. “No one wants to be in war. But we have to finish the war with the phases that are really defined in this plan.”
“Hamas will be disarmed,” promised the official.
Under the first phase of the deal, Hamas on Monday released the 20 remaining living hostages, and Israel freed some 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, including 250 terrorists serving life sentences.
Hamas initially only returned four of the bodies of the 28 dead hostages, prompting Israel to threaten sanctions. Hamas then turned over four more bodies on Tuesday night and promised more on Wednesday. However, Israeli officials determined that one of the bodies returned Tuesday was not that of a hostage, but a Palestinian man from the West Bank who was operating with Israeli troops in Gaza.
The PMO official on Wednesday also denied a report in The Wall Street Journal that Israel and Hamas have begun negotiating the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal, which concerns the terror group’s disarmament and the establishment of an alternative authority to administer Gaza.
“We are still in the first phase,” the official said. “We will talk about the second phase when we complete the first one.”
The official added that there are mid-level Israeli officials currently holding talks in Sharm el-Sheikh, but they are there to discuss the return of the remaining slain hostages and the full implementation of phase one.
Despite the assertion, as he flew to Israel on Monday for a lightning visit, Trump declared, “the war is over.” Also, a letter sent to the families of hostages before the ceasefire began expressed “sadness at the heavy price” they would have to pay for “the end of the war and the return of all the hostages.”
While Hamas has been greatly weakened, it has shown no signs of disarming so far, instead seeking to reassert its authority in the Gaza Strip by cracking down on groups that it sees as defying it. Hamas has killed at least 33 people in recent days, several of them in public executions.
A senior European diplomat told The Times of Israel on Wednesday that the US decision to prioritize the release of the hostages while holding off on reaching an agreement regarding the post-war management of Gaza has given time for Hamas to regroup.
The European diplomat clarified that the Trump administration’s decision was understandable, given the urgency of freeing the hostages and the likelihood that it would have taken longer to reach an agreement regarding the new governing and security bodies that will replace Hamas in Gaza, in addition to the disarmament of the terror group.
Accordingly, Washington decided to split Trump’s 20-point plan for ending the Gaza war into two, and managed to secure an agreement between Israel and Hamas on an initial ceasefire, Israel’s initial withdrawal, post-war humanitarian aid provisions, and the terms of a hostage-prisoner exchange — all of which have been branded as phase one.
“Hamas remains the most dominant Palestinian force in Gaza, and there isn’t really even any competition because an alternative has still not been presented,” the European diplomat lamented.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned in an interview with CBS News that if Hamas doesn’t agree to disarm, “all hell” will break loose.
Trump has said that if Hamas doesn’t uphold its side of the deal, “we will disarm them,” perhaps “violently.”
The war was triggered on October 7, 2023, when Hamas led an invasion of southern Israel that killed 1,200 people. The thousands of terrorists who burst into the country also abducted 251 people who were taken as hostages to the Gaza Strip.
During a weeklong ceasefire in November 2023, 105 hostages were freed, after four were released weeks earlier. Then, 30 hostages and the bodies of eight slain captives were freed as part of a deal in January and February 2025. Eight hostages were rescued from captivity by troops, and the bodies of 51 were recovered by soldiers from the Strip.