Gazans React to Trump’s Comments About Hostages

For more than a year, millions of Palestinians living in Gaza have been homeless, facing severe food and medical shortages and under enduring threat of Israeli airstrikes. Nearly 46,000 Gazans have been killed, local health officials said on Wednesday, in a landscape largely reduced to rubble.

So when President-elect Donald J. Trump vowed that “all hell will break out in the Middle East” if hostages taken from Israel during the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023 are not freed in the next two weeks, Gazans were left to wonder: if this is not hell, then what is?

“I am not sure he understands the situation here — it is already hell,” said Alaa Isam, 33, from Deir al Balah, in central Gaza.

Negotiations to end the war between Israel and Hamas are deadlocked, leaving civilians in Gaza caught in the crossfire with little hope for the future.

“We have been being killed for 15 months,” Mr. Isam said. “We have been through two cold winters in tents, two hot summers that ruined our food. We have been subject to starvation and people died out of hunger, in addition to the continuous brutal bombardment of everywhere.”

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t want to hurt the negotiation” for a hostage exchange and a cease-fire agreement that remain under discussion. Mr. Trump’s incoming top Middle East envoy, Steven Witkoff, is expected to join those talks in Doha, Qatar, later this week.