00:00Now, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is vowing to totally eradicate Hamas.
00:05That even as the Palestinian militant group says it is discussing new proposals from mediators for a ceasefire in Gaza.
00:13The pressure on Hamas for an answer as Donald Trump has claimed Israel is backing plans for a 60-day truce.
00:19Netanyahu, of course, is due to visit the White House at the start of next week.
00:24Well, first of all, let's hear from him.
00:25I'm telling you, there will be no Hamas. There will be no Hamas stan.
00:32We're not going back to that. It's over.
00:35We'll release all our hostages and we will defeat Hamas.
00:39Benjamin Netanyahu there, where International Affairs editor Philip Tell is joining me here and says.
00:43So, Philip, could we be on the verge of a ceasefire deal, first of all, in Gaza?
00:47What's Israel reported to have agreed to?
00:50Yes, the thing is, Stuart, that we could be on the verge of a ceasefire deal.
00:55This is something that Donald Trump's been pushing for, that not only Donald Trump's been pushing for,
00:59but practically the rest of the world has been pushing Israel to try to work out some kind of ceasefire deal
01:05to end the appalling bloodshed in the Gaza Strip.
01:11This is the next step down the line where Donald Trump is stacking the pressure on both sides and particularly on Hamas.
01:18If you look at the quote that he's been saying over the past 24 hours,
01:24I hope that Hamas will take this 60-day ceasefire deal because it will not get better.
01:29And then in capital letters, it will only get worse.
01:33The problem is that there could be a 60-day ceasefire deal, but we don't know anything more than that.
01:40This is going to be a transactional ceasefire, transactional peace deal on the part of Donald Trump
01:46because what he wants is just all of this to be over so that he can move on to strike up business deals.
01:52On the part of the Israelis, we don't know anything about what's going to happen after the 60 days.
01:58Will there be a permanent ceasefire afterwards?
02:01Will Israel withdraw all its troops from the Gaza Strip?
02:04What will be the status of the Gaza Strip after that?
02:07Will there be an authority that will come in to take over control of that?
02:10Is Israel expecting itself to take control of that?
02:13We don't know anything.
02:14There's been nothing that's been hammered out so far.
02:16What we do know is that there are contradictory statements coming out from the Israeli government.
02:21We have Benjamin Netanyahu, as we were just hearing, saying that he will only accept the total obliteration of Hamas.
02:27But the foreign minister, Gideon Saar, has been saying, well, we could move forward with this.
02:34What we really want to obtain is the liberation of all the hostages.
02:37The hostages are a key element here because there are still at least 30 or so hostages believed to be alive in the Gaza Strip that the Israelis want freed.
02:48But in exchange for that, it means that Israel would have to leave Hamas in the Gaza Strip for those hostages to be released by Hamas.
02:54And that is something that obviously Benjamin Netanyahu has made it pretty clear that he's not willing to accept.
02:59So that's the situation as we have it right now.
03:01We could be moving little by little towards a ceasefire, but it's all very clear, unclear about exactly what that ceasefire means in the long run.
03:08So how much pressure then is Netanyahu under?
03:10He is under an awful lot of pressure, to put it mildly.
03:15First of all, from public opinion back home, if you look at one of the latest opinion polls for the Israel Democracy Institute with the question,
03:24do you trust Benjamin Netanyahu?
03:25Only 46% of Israeli Jews say they have confidence in him and only 5% of Israeli Arabs say they have confidence in the prime minister and his ability to end the war in Gaza and free the hostages from captivity.
03:40And I think there is growing feeling also in Israel that Benjamin Netanyahu is more interested in keeping his own political career alive and kicking than trying to get the hostages released or end the war in Gaza.
03:52So he's playing to the hands of the far right in Israel.
03:56And that has made things even more complicated for him because two far right politicians who are sporting the government of Benjamin Netanyahu,
04:04if they withdraw, the government would collapse.
04:06They are the national security minister, Itmar Ben-Gavir, and the finance minister, Betsar Smotrich.
04:11And they say that they are considering a joint action to thwart a possible ceasefire deal and a hostage release agreement because they want the war in Gaza to continue
04:21until Hamas is totally obliterated and Israel can take control of Gaza.
04:25And another element to make this even more complicated for the prime minister is 15 members of his own political party, Likud,
04:32have said they are signing a petition calling for the total annexation of the West Bank.
04:37And one of the signatories of that petition is the speaker of the Knesset, whose name is Amir Ohana.
04:43So Benjamin Netanyahu is going to Washington next week to meet Donald Trump.
04:47It's not going to be easy for him to come up with some kind of instructed argument in favour of a peace deal.
04:53Yeah, let's talk about that date in the diary, as it were, Philip.
04:55Any coincidence at all that Trump has made this announcement now?
05:00No, not a coincidence.
05:02If you think about what has just been happening recently in Iran, Israel started bombing raids against Iranian nuclear sites and in the capital, Tehran.
05:14That was backed up by the United States with these bunker-busting bombs to try to obliterate the nuclear programme in Iran.
05:22Donald Trump says that he does not have any problem with now trying to reach an agreement with Hamas in Gaza
05:30because Hamas has been severely weak and it's the time to go in there and to sign a peace deal following what's happened in Iran.
05:35I think there is a lot of pressure in Israel from the general public asking the question,
05:40well, Israel did not obliterate the Iranian regime, which they've been saying they wanted to do, but now they've stopped the war.
05:46Why can't they just stop the war and leave Hamas there for the time being and we can just move on?
05:50Hamas has been severely weakened, so they don't understand what Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to achieve.
05:55A second point is that Donald Trump wants a transactional peace agreement to move on.
06:00We don't really know what that means in the future.
06:02What he wants is to strike up business deals with American companies to come in to rebuild the Gaza Strip,
06:07possibly to build a Riviera there and to renew relations with other Arab states, particularly with Saudi Arabia.
06:14And the problem there is that Saudi Arabia said it will only go forward if there is a two-state solution that is acceptable.
06:22And for the moment, that is something that seems really too far down the line to even be imaginable.
06:27And last point, of course, Donald Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize and any peace agreement for him is good
06:32in his claim that he's been a great peacemaker and he can then hopefully obtain that prize at a later date.
