United States President Donald Trump has threatened to endorse renewed Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip, if the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas continues to target gangs backed by the Israeli regime.
“If Hamas continues to kill people in Gaza, which was not the Deal, we will have no choice but to go in and kill them,” Trump wrote in a social media post on Thursday.
He later made clear that US forces would not be entering Gaza.
“It’s not going to be us,” Trump said. “We won’t have to.”
“There are people very close, very nearby that will go in and they’ll do the trick very easily, but under our auspices,” Trump said, in an apparent reference to Israeli forces.
His threat marks a sharp escalation of his rhetoric against Hamas, just three days after a Gaza ceasefire deal was signed in Egypt.
It also signals an about-face from Trump, who earlier this week backed Hamas’ crackdown on gangs in the strip.
“They did take out a couple of gangs that were very bad, very, very bad gangs,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “And they did take them out, and they killed a number of gang members. And that didn’t bother me much, to be honest with you. That’s OK.”
On Tuesday, the Deterrent Force, affiliated with the security forces in Gaza, announced in a brief statement that its members had “seized bastions of armed militiamen, mopped up terrorists of various neighborhoods, and carried out operations aimed at hunting down elements involved in the shooting and killing of displaced persons.”
In June, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted that the regime had been arming and supporting Daesh-associated militiamen to"counter the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas."
Also on Thursday, Trump warned that Hamas would ultimately have to disarm.
“They will disarm, and if they don’t do so, we will disarm them, and it’ll happen quickly and perhaps violently,” Trump told reporters.
Hamas’ mop-up operations come as a fragile ceasefire, brokered by the United States, has taken effect in Gaza, after more than 67,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s genocide since October 2023.
Since coming into effect on Saturday, Israel has repeatedly violated the deal, killing Palestinians daily under the pretext of approaching areas controlled by the Israeli military, which are not clearly marked.
