With the US and Israel accusing Hamas of not wanting a truce deal and talking about pursuing “alternative options” to bring home the 50 hostages still held in Gaza, Hamas has taken steps to fend off possible military operations aimed at rescuing the remaining hostages, the London-based Arabic daily Asharq Al-Awsat reported on Saturday.

Hamas sources on the ground in Gaza told the Saudi outlet that the terror organization was taking additional precautionary measures to undermine potential efforts by Israeli special forces or others to rescue the hostages.

For example, Hamas has reinstated a policy to kill hostages if captors believe that Israeli forces are approaching. The policy had been canceled since the most recent ceasefire came into effect in March, the sources said.

The sources said Hamas was confident that such operations, if attempted, would not succeed.

Eight hostages have been rescued alive from captivity by troops. The bodies of 49 have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the Israeli military as they tried to escape their captors, and the body of a soldier who was killed in 2014.

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The rest of the nearly 200 hostages set free were released as part of the ceasefire deals.

Hamas officials expressed surprise on Saturday at US President Donald Trump’s accusation that it “didn’t really want” to reach a ceasefire and hostage release deal.

Trump made the allegation on Friday, a day after Israeli and American teams left indirect negotiations with Hamas in Qatar that had lasted nearly three weeks.

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“Trump’s remarks are particularly surprising, especially as they come at a time when progress had been made on some of the negotiation files,” Hamas’s Taher al-Nunu told AFP. “So far, we have not been informed of any issues regarding the files under discussion in the indirect ceasefire negotiations,” he added.

Nunu, who is close to Hamas’s most senior political officials, said he was “surprised” that Israel and the US had left the talks.

Announcing the recall of US mediators on Thursday, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff accused Hamas of not “acting in good faith.”

“We will now consider alternative options to bring the hostages home and try to create a more stable environment for the people of Gaza,” Witkoff said.

Though not part of the Hamas negotiating team, Hamas politburo member Izzat al-Rishq insisted the group had shown “flexibility” in the talks.

“The American statements deliberately ignore the real obstructionist to all agreements — Netanyahu’s government, which continues to place obstacles, deceive, and evade commitments,” he said.

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Both Hamas officials called on the US to be more even-handed in its role as mediator in the quest for a ceasefire after more than 21 months of fighting. “We call for an end to the US bias in favor of Netanyahu, who is obstructing any agreement,” Nunu said.

While Washington and Jerusalem fumed at Hamas over the response it submitted Thursday to the latest proposal for a 60-day Gaza truce and hostage release deal, Egypt and Qatar took a more nuanced approach. They indicated that the Hamas response indeed contained too many requests for changes to the proposal, but maintained that the gaps were bridgeable, an Arab diplomat and a source involved in the mediation effort told The Times of Israel on Friday.

Trump painted a far more bleak outlook and appeared to indicate that the US may not be able to secure the return of the remaining 50 hostages, 20 of whom are believed to still be alive.

“I said this was going to happen,” Trump told reporters, claiming to have predicted the current impasse.

“We got a lot of hostages out. But when you get down to the last 10 or 20, I don’t think Hamas is going to make a deal because that means they have no protection. And basically that’s what happened,” he said.

“I think what’s going to happen is they’re going to be hunted down,” Trump continued. “It [has] gotten to a point where [Israel is] going to have to finish the job.”

Israel is “going to have to fight, and going to have to clean it up. You’re gonna have to get rid of [Hamas],” he said, acknowledging that the situation is “sort of disappointing.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office issued a statement on Friday saying Jerusalem and Washington were “considering alternative options to bring our hostages home.”

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US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told former hostages and hostage families on Friday in Washington that the Trump administration needs to “rethink” its strategy regarding solving the war in Gaza, after being unable to end the conflict since coming into office in January, Channel 12 news reported, citing two unnamed sources who took part in the meeting.

Rubio said it was necessary to “come to the president with new options” on strategy regarding the war, the report quoted him as saying, without detailing what those options may be.

The IDF has been fighting the terror group for nearly 22 months, and Israeli officials had asserted that Trump’s entry to the Oval Office would allow for the IDF to deliver a knockout blow.

Trump allowed Israel to exit the previous hostage deal in March, rather than entering a second potential phase that would have included a permanent end to the war.

Israel then launched and is now nearing the conclusion of a new offensive aimed at occupying 75 percent of the Strip in order to pressure Hamas.

For nearly three months, Israel blocked all aid from entering the Strip, in what aid organizations say helped create the current hunger crisis.

The US then helped Israel establish the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was designed to try and box Hamas out of the aid distribution process when Israel finally began to allow aid again into Gaza in late May. But GHF’s work was quickly marred by near-daily reports of deadly shootings of Palestinians seeking to pick up boxes of food.

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The organization still touts its delivery of roughly 90 million meals, but the boxes of aid it distributes are dry food products that need to be prepared elsewhere in the Strip, where clean water, cooking gas and kitchen equipment are increasingly scarce.

Moreover, GHF doesn’t track who is picking up its aid, so there is no way to confirm that Hamas operatives aren’t benefiting from it as well.

On top of the guardrails that Trump removed regarding Israel’s military campaign, the US also adopted Netanyahu’s approach for a phased hostage deal in the latest negotiations.

Hamas has offered to release all of the hostages in one batch in exchange for Israel agreeing to permanently end the war, but Netanyahu has refused, arguing that doing so would leave Hamas in power.

Instead, the sides have been engaged in months of painstaking negotiations during which Hamas has agreed to release roughly half of the hostages in exchange for a temporary 60-day ceasefire, but in return has demanded a long list of conditions that aim to prevent Israel from resuming fighting even after the truce expires.

Maccabi Tel Aviv’s soccer game against Turkey’s Besiktas in the Europa League was played without incident before empty stands in Hungary, with the stadium closed to fans over security concerns following attacks on Israeli supporters in Amsterdam this month.

Maccabi won the game 3-1 on a cold and rainy evening in Debrecen, Hungary’s second-largest city. Groups of police patrolled outside the stadium but security levels did not appear overwhelming in the city of around 200,000 residents.

After the match, Maccabi coach Zarko Lazetic says that playing in front of an empty stadium without fans is always a struggle for the team.

“We play football because of the fans, to give them some pleasure, some excite[ment] and to be together,” he says.

Israel’s soccer teams play domestic games at home despite the Israel-Hamas war. But European soccer body UEFA has ruled that the war in Gaza means Israel cannot host international games.

The match was Maccabi’s first in Europe since its fans were targeted and assaulted in the Netherlands on November 7 this year, in attacks that were condemned as antisemitic by authorities in Israel and across Europe.

Answering questions from reporters, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel last week intercepted all of the drones Hezbollah fired at Israel last week. That’s not the end of the matter, he says, vowing to restore security to the north.

He rejects the assertion that the six hostages murdered by Hamas in Gaza last week were killed because of his insistence on sticking to his core demands for a deal. “We didn’t manage to extricate them. We were very close. It’s terrible,” he says.

“But it didn’t happen because of that decision [on the Philadelphi Corridor.] “It happened, first, because they (Hamas) don’t want a deal,” he says.

He also decries leaks from cabinet meetings and says angrily that “it is not okay that the military censor allows it. It’s not okay that there isn’t a polygraph law because we are stuck with an attorney general who won’t allow it. We must find legislation that will get over that problem.”

Turning to the terms of the hostage deal, Netanyahu says he is willing to agree to a 42-day lull in the fighting in Gaza. He says nobody is more committed to freeing the hostages than he is, and says he was wounded when freeing hostages. “Nobody should preach to me about this.”

“The formula I agreed to talks about a first stage of 42 days — after which we can go back to fighting, of course, if a solution is not found in negotiations. It’s our decision, I insisted on it. And if a decision is made for the long-term, and a permanent arrangement is found in the Strip where someone else can take care of the security mission and protect the borders, go ahead. I currently don’t see it on the horizon.”

He is asked why, if the Philadelphi Corridor is so important, he agreed to a withdrawal from Gaza in the May proposal, at a time when the IDF had still not even taken full control of the Corridor.

In response, he says he is willing to reduce forces on the Egypt-Gaza border because there is no need for troops “every meter.”

“We need to be at several locations, connected, at a certain distance from one another, with the ability to patrol along the entire road, and that is what is necessary for guarding against the terrorists, and also for protecting our troops, and also for making sure no one crosses with hostages above ground. Below ground, there is a solution.”

Netanyahu says that Israel cannot rely on sensors or others to guard the Philadelphi Corridor.

He is asked about the sense among some hostage families that an Israeli ethos has been broken in the failure to return all the hostages, and told that Rabbi Elhanan Danino, the father of Ori Danino, one of the six murdered hostages, said in an interview today that he didn’t feel Netanyahu had done everything possible to bring his son home alive.

Netanyahu says he will never judge any member of a bereaved family. As a member of a bereaved family himself, he says, he knows the unthinkable pain they endure.

Regarding the six, “we didn’t succeed” in getting them out alive. “We were very, very close. Not enough,” he repeats. “We are doing everything… I look for every means… to get them home.” He says he pushes to maximize the number of living hostages to be released in any deal.

Asked about the disunity between him and Defense Minister Gallant, he says the relationship can continue “so long as there is trust,” and stresses that all ministers must be bound by cabinet decisions. “That is what is being tested now.”

He laments the “considerable disinformation” about events leading up to October 7 — “so many lies” — and what happens in the cabinet. But he says he will not support a state commission of inquiry while the fighting is still taking place — so that soldiers and officers would not need to worry about finding lawyers.

“We don’t have a pressing need to do it now; we have a pressing need not to do it now. And at the end of the war, we will decide how we are doing it, when we are doing it.”

Answering a question about leaks from security officials attacking cabinet decisions, Netanyahu says that “the one who makes decisions is the government, and the army and other security agencies are required to follow those decisions. I don’t see another option.”

Asked what would define the end of the war, he says that will be “when Hamas no longer rules Gaza. We throw them out.” As was the case with the defeat of Nazi Germany, he says, that requires a military and a political victory — “we’re well on the way to achieving both.”

Finally, now in English, he returns to the pressure on Israel for concessions in the wake of the Hamas killings of the six hostages. “What has changed in the last five days? What has changed? One thing. These murderers executed six of our hostages. They shot them in the back of the head. That’s what’s changed. And now, after this, we’re asked to show seriousness? We’re asked to make concessions? What message does this send Hamas? It says kill more hostages, murder more hostages, you’ll get more concessions.”

He urges: “The pressure internationally must be directed at these killers, at Hamas, not at Israel. We say yes, they say no all the time. But they also murdered these people. And now we need maximal pressure on Hamas.

“I don’t believe that either President Biden or anyone serious about achieving peace and achieving their release would seriously ask Israel, Israel, to make these concessions,” he concludes. “We’ve already made them. Hamas has to make the concessions.”