Trump's call coincided with the official announcement by Israeli Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir of the launch of Operation Gideon 2, which aims to occupy the entirety of Gaza City after encircling it and displacing Palestinians from it.
Trump tweeted on his Truth Social platform: "I am telling Hamas to return all 20 hostages immediately, not two, five, or seven, and things will change quickly, and it will end (referring to the war)."
Tel Aviv estimates that there are 48 Israeli detainees in Gaza, 20 of whom are still alive. Meanwhile, more than 10,800 Palestinians are languishing in its prisons, suffering torture, starvation, and medical neglect. Many of these Palestinians have been killed, according to Palestinian and Israeli human rights and media reports.
Recently, the families of the Israeli detainees have made several appeals to Trump, the most recent of which was on Tuesday, urging him to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to conclude a deal to return their relatives from the Gaza Strip, where Tel Aviv has been perpetrating a genocide with Washington's support for the past two years.
On August 18, Hamas agreed to a proposal by mediators for a partial ceasefire and prisoner exchange in Gaza. However, Israel did not respond to the mediators, despite the agreement's terms being identical to an earlier proposal put forward by US envoy Steve Witkoff, which Tel Aviv had accepted.
Instead, Netanyahu is pushing to occupy Gaza City under the pretext of releasing prisoners and defeating Hamas, amid widespread skepticism about the feasibility of this from opponents and former officials, and the Israeli military asserting that the operation would pose a threat to the lives of the prisoners.
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The "Gideon 2" vehicles, announced by Zamir earlier today, are a continuation of the "Gideon vehicles" deployed by the Israeli occupation army in the Gaza Strip between May 16 and August 6.
On Sunday, Channel 12 revealed a secret internal Israeli military document acknowledging the failure of Operation Gideon Armoured Vehicles to achieve its stated objectives, most notably defeating Hamas and returning Israeli prisoners from the Gaza Strip.
On Tuesday, the official Israeli Broadcasting Authority said that the cost of the Israeli operation to occupy Gaza City ranged between 20 and 25 billion shekels ($5.91-$7.38 billion).
The Authority revealed that "the Israeli army has recruited the largest batch of reserve soldiers, numbering more than 35,000, as part of Operation Gideon 2 to occupy Gaza City," indicating that "in the coming weeks, approximately 25,000 more reserve soldiers will join them, bringing the number of soldiers recruited to occupy the city to 60,000."
With American support, Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza since October 7, 2023, leaving 63,746 martyrs and 161,245 wounded, most of them children and women. Thousands remain missing, hundreds of thousands displaced, and a famine has claimed the lives of 367 Palestinians, including 131 children,
