Tel Aviv, June 30: US President Donald Trump on Sunday urged progress in ceasefire talks in the 20-month war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, though some weary Palestinians were skeptical about the chances.

Israel has issued a new mass evacuation order for parts of northern Gaza.

Ron Dermer, a top advisor to Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was set to travel to Washington this week for talks on a ceasefire, an Israeli official said, and plans were being made for Netanyahu to travel there in the coming weeks, a sign there may be movement on a deal.

Netanyahu was meeting with his security Cabinet on Sunday evening, the official said on condition of anonymity, to discuss plans that hadn’t been finalised.

“MAKE THE DEAL IN GAZA. GET THE HOSTAGES BACK!!!” Trump wrote on social media early Sunday.

Trump raised expectations Friday by saying there could be an agreement within next week.

Some Palestinians doubtful of latest efforts

An eight-week ceasefire was reached as Trump took office earlier this year, but Israel resumed the war in March after trying to get Hamas to accept new terms on next steps.

“Since the beginning of the war, they have been promising us something like this: Release the hostages and we will stop the war,” said one Palestinian, Abdel Hadi Al-Hour.

“They did not stop the war.”

Meanwhile, Israeli attacks continued. An airstrike on Sunday evening hit a house sheltering displaced people in the Jabaliya al-Nazla area, killing at least 15, according to Fares Awad, head of the Gaza’s Health Ministry’s ambulance and emergency services in the territory’s north.

He said women and children made up over half the dead.

During a visit to Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet, Netanyahu said that the Israel-Iran war and ceasefire have opened many opportunities: “First of all, to rescue the hostages. Of course, we will also have to solve the Gaza issue, to defeat Hamas, but I estimate that we will achieve both tasks.”

Major sticking point for any deal

But talks between Israel and Hamas have repeatedly faltered over a major sticking point — whether the war should end as part of any ceasefire agreement.

Hamas official Mahmoud Merdawi accused Netanyahu of stalling progress on a deal, saying on social media that the Israeli leader insists on a temporary agreement that would free just 10 of the hostages. About 50 hostages remain, with less than half believed to be alive.

Netanyahu spokesperson Omer Dostri said that “Hamas was the only obstacle to ending the war”, without addressing Merdawi’s claim.

Hamas says it is willing to free all the hostages in exchange for a full withdrawal of Israeli troops and an end to the war in Gaza. Israel rejects that offer, saying it will agree to end the war if Hamas surrenders, disarms and goes into exile, something that the group refuses.

The war in Gaza began with the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in which militants killed 1,200 people and took roughly 250 hostage.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said that another 88 people had been killed by Israeli fire over the past 24 hours, raising the war’s toll among Palestinians to 56,500. The ministry, which operates under the Hamas government, doesn’t distinguish between militants and civilians in its count, but says more than half of the dead were women and children.

The war has displaced most of Gaza’s population, often multiple times, obliterated much of the urban landscape and left people overwhelmingly reliant on outside aid, which Israel has limited since the end of the latest ceasefire.

Fewer than half of Gaza’s hospitals are even partly functional, and more than 4,000 children need medical evacuation abroad, a new UN humanitarian assessment says.

“We are exhausted, we are tired. We hope to God that the war will end,” Mahmoud Wadi, a Palestinian, said.

New Gaza evacuations ordered

Israel’s military ordered a mass evacuation of Palestinians in large swaths of northern Gaza, home to hundreds of thousands who had returned during the ceasefire earlier this year.

The order includes multiple neighbourhoods in eastern and northern Gaza City, as well as the Jabaliya refugee camp. Palestinians in Gaza City began loading children, bedding and other essentials onto donkey carts, uprooted once more.

Trump slams Netanyahu trial

Trump also doubled down on his criticism of the legal proceedings against Netanyahu, who is on trial for alleged corruption, calling it a “POLITICAL WITCH HUNT”.

In the post Saturday evening, Trump said the trial interfered with ceasefire talks, saying Netanyahu “is right now in the process of negotiating a Deal with Hamas, which will include getting the Hostages back”.

Last week, Trump called for the trial to be cancelled. It was a dramatic interference in the domestic affairs of a sovereign state. It unnerved many in Israel, despite Trump’s popularity there.

The trial has repeatedly been postponed at Netanyahu’s request, citing security and diplomatic developments.

On Sunday, the court agreed to call off two more days of testimony by him scheduled this week.

Washington, June 29: President Donald Trump says he is not planning to extend a 90-day pause on tariffs on most nations beyond July 9, when the negotiating period he set would expire, and his administration will notify countries that the trade penalties will take effect unless there are deals with the United States.

Letters will start going out “pretty soon” before the approaching deadline, he said.

“We’ll look at how a country treats us — are they good, are they not so good — some countries we don’t care, we’ll just send a high number out,” Trump told Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures” during a wide-ranging interview taped Friday and broadcast Sunday.

Those letters, he said, would say, “Congratulations, we’re allowing you to shop in the United States of America, you’re going to pay a 25% tariff, or a 35% or a 50% or 10%.”

Trump had played down the deadline at a White House news conference Friday by noting how difficult it would be to work out separate deals with each nation. The administration had set a goal of reaching 90 trade deals in 90 days.

Negotiations continue, but “there’s 200 countries, you can’t talk to all of them,” he said in the interview.

Trump also discussed a potential TikTok deal, relations with China, the strikes on Iran and his immigration crackdown.

Here are the key takeaways:

Few details on possible TikTok dealA group of wealthy investors will make an offer to buy TikTok, Trump said, hinting at a deal that could safeguard the future of the popular social media platform, which is owned by China’s ByteDance.

“We have a buyer for TikTok, by the way. I think I’ll need, probably, China approval, and I think President Xi (Jinping) will probably do it,” Trump said.

Trump did not offer any details about the investors, calling them “a group of very wealthy people.”

“I’ll tell you in about two weeks,” he said when asked for specifics.

It’s a time frame Trump often cites, most recently about a decision on whether the US military would get directly involved in the war between Israel and Iran. The US struck Iranian nuclear sites just days later.

Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order to keep TikTok running in the US for 90 more days to give his administration more time to broker a deal to bring the social media platform under American ownership.

It is the third time Trump extended the deadline. The first one was through an executive order on Jan. 20, his first day in office, after the platform went dark briefly when a national ban — approved by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court — took effect.

Trump insists US obliterated’ Iran’s nuclear facilities

US strikes on Iran “obliterated” its nuclear facilities, Trump insisted, and he said whoever leaked a preliminary intelligence assessment suggesting Tehran’s nuclear program had been set back only a few months should be prosecuted.

Trump said Iran was “weeks away” from achieving a nuclear weapon before he ordered the strikes.

“It was obliterated like nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump said. “And that meant the end to their nuclear ambitions, at least for a period of time.”

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Sunday on X that Trump “exaggerated to cover up and conceal the truth.” Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Amir Saeid Iravani, told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that his country’s nuclear program is peaceful and that uranium “enrichment is our right, and an inalienable right and we want to implement this right” under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. “I think that enrichment will not — never stop.”

Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said on CBS that “it is clear that there has been severe damage, but it’s not total damage.”

Grossi also said the UN nuclear watchdog has faced pressure to report that Iran had a nuclear weapon or was close to one, but “we simply didn’t because this was not what we were seeing.”

Of the leak of the intelligence assessment, Trump said anyone found to be responsible should be prosecuted. Journalists who received it should be asked who their source was, he said: “You have to do that and I suspect we’ll be doing things like that.”

His press secretary said Thursday that the administration is investigating the matter.

A temporary pass’ for immigration raids on farms and hotels?

As he played up his immigration crackdown, Trump offered a more nuanced view when it comes to farm and hotel workers.

“I’m the strongest immigration guy that there’s ever been, but I’m also the strongest farmer guy that there’s ever been,” the Republican president said.

He noted that he wants to deport criminals, but it’s a problem when farmers lose their laborers and it destroys their businesses.

Trump said his administration is working on “some kind of a temporary pass” that could give farmers and hotel owners control over immigration raids at their facilities.

Earlier this month, Trump had called for a pause on immigration raids disrupting the farming, hotel and restaurant industries, but a top Homeland Security official followed up with a seemingly contradictory statement. Tricia McLaughlin said there would be “no safe spaces for industries who harbour violent criminals or purposely try to undermine” immigration enforcement efforts.

Status of China trade talks

Trump praised a recent trade deal with Beijing over rare earth exports from China and said establishing a fairer relationship will require significant tariffs.

“I think getting along well with China is a very good thing,” Trump said. “China’s going to be paying a lot of tariffs, but we have a big (trade) deficit, they understand that.”

Trump said he would be open to removing sanctions on Iranian oil shipments to China if Iran can show “they can be peaceful and if they can show us they’re not going to do any more harm.”

But the president also indicated the US isn’t afraid to retaliate against Beijing. When Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo noted that China has tried to hack US systems and steal intellectual property, Trump replied, “You don’t think we do that to them?”

New Delhi, Jun 29: Ukraine has confirmed the loss of an F-16 fighter jet and its pilot during efforts to repel a large-scale Russian air assault, amid continued heavy fighting in the fourth year of war reports Al Jazeera and International media.

The country’s air force said the aircraft was engaged in defending against a barrage of missiles and drones when it was damaged and lost altitude. Ukrainian air defences reportedly shot down seven targets before the fighter crashed overnight.

The pilot, identified as a first-class officer, was killed in the incident. The loss comes as Ukraine faces one of the most intense phases of Russian aerial attacks in recent months.

According to the Ukrainian military, Russia launched 537 aerial projectiles across the country, including Iranian-made Shahed drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles. Ukraine claimed to have intercepted 475 of them. Multiple regions reported explosions and damage, including the southern city of Mykolaiv, southeastern Zaporizhia, western Lviv, and central Cherkasy. This latest escalation follows Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent remarks signalling a potential reduction in military spending and an openness to renewed peace negotiations. However, with no let-up in hostilities and continued aerial bombardments, prospects for any ceasefire remain distant.