According to Israel’s Channel 12, a senior U.S. official revealed that the recent return of the body of Israeli officer Hadar Goldin could give Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the political space he needs to resolve the standoff involving Hamas fighters trapped in the tunnels of Rafah, in southern Gaza.
The official stated that the administration of President Donald Trump had applied pressure on Hamas over recent days to hand over Goldin’s remains, to pave the way for a broader agreement to end the crisis surrounding the fighters stranded underground.
He added that the framework envisioned by Washington involves Hamas first returning the Israeli body, after which the fighters in Rafah would surrender their weapons.
Under this arrangement, the official explained, those fighters would then be granted safe passage either to areas under Hamas control or to a third country.
Channel 12 also reported that in the second phase of the plan, the tunnels where the Hamas members are currently trapped would be demolished completely to prevent any further use.
U.S. Pressure and Israeli Hesitation
Meanwhile, the Israeli newspaper Maariv quoted an Israeli source saying that American pressure to allow the safe evacuation of the trapped Hamas fighters stems from Washington’s desire to preserve the fragile ceasefire in Gaza, which came into effect on October 10.
According to estimates from within the occupation state, roughly 200 Hamas fighters remain surrounded in a zone under Israeli control in Rafah.
However, resistance from Israel’s own military leadership appears to complicate the proposal. Channel 12 reported that Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, during a recent meeting of the Israeli security cabinet, opposed allowing the evacuation of the trapped fighters through any negotiated arrangement. He insisted the “crisis must end either with their death or their surrender.”
To Zamir, surrender means “they come out in their underwear, blindfolded and handcuffed, to be transferred to the Sde Teiman detention camp.”
He further warned against moving to the next phase of any prisoner exchange deal before retrieving the bodies of Israeli soldiers held in Gaza, stressing that no reconstruction should begin until the complete disarmament of the Gaza Strip is achieved.
A War Policy of Erasure
In parallel, Israel’s Minister of War, Israel Katz, announced that he had ordered the army to “destroy and erase” all of Hamas’s tunnels in the Gaza Strip — “until the last tunnel.” He wrote on his X account, “If there are no tunnels, there will be no Hamas.”
In earlier statements, Katz affirmed that the so-called “disarmament of Gaza” includes the total eradication of the tunnel network, calling it a central priority within the “yellow zone” — the area currently under direct Israeli occupation, which constitutes approximately 53% of the Gaza Strip.
Beyond the Headlines
The reported American initiative reveals the ongoing tension between U.S. political optics and Israeli military strategy. While Washington seeks to stabilise the ceasefire and project diplomatic control, the occupation government continues its policy of collective punishment and infrastructure destruction under the guise of “security.”
For the people of Gaza, these negotiations — whether labelled humanitarian or strategic — remain part of the same machinery that sustains the siege and dehumanisation of an entire population. Behind every so-called “deal” lies the same imbalance: a superpower dictating terms to a trapped resistance movement while turning a blind eye to the ongoing war crimes that make such deals necessary in the first place.
