“There has never been in history an open war, a genocide broadcast on television like this war, a war in which starvation is used as a weapon, the killing of children is used as a weapon, and the blocking of medicine is used as a weapon. Is it possible that Trump is devoid of humanity to this extent? Is that possible?”
Amidst high-stakes talks underway in Egypt that will determine the future of the Gaza war, Mousa Abu Marzouk, an original member of Hamas who remains a senior official within the movement, is calling on President Donald Trump to block Israeli attempts to sabotage an agreement and to use his influence to bring an end to the two year genocide.
In an exclusive interview with Drop Site on Monday, Abu Marzouk said, “Stopping the war means a complete [Israeli] withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. I want Trump to fulfill his pledge and promise.” Addressing Trump, Abu Marzouk said, “Thank you for your efforts, and for your promise to stop the war and release the prisoners. We are committed to it. Just stop the war.”
Under Trump’s 20-point plan released last week during a joint appearance at the White House with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the initial phase of a ceasefire deal would require Hamas to release all Israeli captives remaining in Gaza within a 72-hour period. There are believed to be 48 in total—20 of them living and 28 deceased. In return, Israel would then free nearly 2,000 Palestinians—250 serving life sentences and 1,700 people, including all women and children, snatched from Gaza after the October 7 attacks.
Israel is insisting that it will not link its total withdrawal from Gaza to the exchange of captives and Netanyahu has said Israeli forces will remain entrenched in Gaza indefinitely. Hamas, recognizing that the Israeli captives represent its primary—if not exclusive—leverage in making any deal have said that the exchange must be linked to a clear roadmap to total Israeli withdrawal, an end to the genocide and the delivery of massive amounts of food and other life essentials.
In a wide-ranging interview with Drop Site, which is printed below in-full, Abu Marzouk discussed the core issues at the center of the indirect negotiations in Sharm El-Sheikh, Hamas’s view of Trump, and how he sees the future of Hamas. Abu Marzouk, who joined Hamas upon its founding in 1987, was the first head of the movement’s political bureau and has served in various senior posts in the ensuing decades. He said that Hamas recognizes the inherent risks that Israel would try to retrieve all captives held by Hamas in Gaza and then resume the genocide.
“We know that during the period of dialogues, discussions, and understandings, especially at this time, the Israelis will place many obstacles in front of it,” Abu Marzouk said. But he added that the blunt reality is that only Trump has the power to bring an immediate halt to Israel’s war. “This is a risk, but we trusted President Trump to be the guarantor of all the commitments made,” said Abu Marzouk. “Had there been no commitment from the American president, we would never have agreed to take the risk, because we do not trust Netanyahu or his extremist right‑wing team in the current Israeli government.”
Last Friday, after days of consultations with a range of Palestinian factions and leaders, as well as armed resistance commanders and the political leadership inside Gaza, Hamas delivered its official response to Trump’s proposal. The carefully-crafted text threaded a needle by affirming Hamas’s commitment to reaching a deal that would see all Israeli captives released and a clear commitment that Hamas would relinquish governing authority in the Gaza Strip. But the statement was not a wholesale embrace of Trump’s plan. Instead, Hamas indicated that it was authorized to negotiate an end to the war but did not have the mandate to unilaterally reach an agreement on issues that impact the future of Palestinian self-determination, governance and statehood.
“When we met the mediators and they presented the proposal, I told them right away that a large part of President Trump’s proposal is something Hamas is not authorized to agree to. We are not mandated to decide the Palestinian people’s future,” Abu Marzouk told Drop Site. “This strategy was developed to enable us to unite the Palestinian homeland so it can decide Gaza’s future,” he added. “All of this must be discussed because it belongs to all Palestinians, not just to Hamas.”
Trump responded enthusiastically to Hamas’s statement, writing in a post on Truth Social, “Based on the Statement just issued by Hamas, I believe they are ready for a lasting PEACE. Israel must immediately stop the bombing of Gaza, so that we can get the Hostages out safely and quickly!”
But as Trump administration officials conferred with Netanyahu’s team, it became apparent that the strategy heading into the talks in Egypt was to issue a set of directives to the Palestinian side rather than engaging in substantive negotiations on the central issues Hamas made clear would need to be addressed in any deal. These include a permanent ceasefire, a complete Israeli withdrawal guaranteed by Trump and Arab and Islamic countries, and unrestricted aid to Gaza. Hamas has called disarmament of the Palestinian resistance a “red line.”
Netanyahu has maintained that his goal is the total demilitarization of the Gaza Strip and to use the Trump framework to achieve what Israel has failed to do in two months of genocidal war, a surrender of the Palestinian liberation struggle.
“Frankly, statements of this kind are often rhetoric that does not reflect reality—rather, the purpose of them is to accept defeat in the battle. If you fought for two years against a resistance movement and still could not decisively end it, is it possible that you will get what you want at the negotiating table on this issue?” said Abu Marzouk. “If you have a pledge from a party that it will not use weapons, or that it is under a truce or a ceasefire, that should, without doubt, be more important than searching how many rifles Hamas has.”
The Israeli demand that Gaza be demilitarized and the resistance disarmed, Abu Marzouk said, is aimed at justifying the continued war of annihilation against Palestinians in Gaza. With the exception of its rockets, which have largely been depleted or destroyed over the past two years, the Palestinian resistance in Gaza overwhelmingly relies on homemade weapons and ammunition as well as repurposed Israeli ordnance used in Gaza.
“President Trump said 25,000 members of Qassam were killed,” he said, adding that this number is equivalent to public estimates of the total size of the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing. “Israel also recently announced that most of Hamas’s military capabilities were destroyed—they said 90% of Hamas’s capabilities were wiped out. So if they destroyed 90% of Hamas’s military capabilities and killed most of Qassam’s fighters, as President Trump says, whose weapons are you going to disarm and where are the weapons you claim you’ll remove when you already destroyed them?”
Leading the U.S. delegation to the talks in Egypt are Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff. Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s top advisor and minister of strategic affairs, will oversee Israel’s team. Hamas’s negotiators are led by Khalil Al-Hayya, who survived an Israeli assassination attempt in Doha, Qatar on September 9. Al-Hayya’s son was killed in the Israeli bombing and his wife, daughter-in-law and grandchildren were injured.
“We have come today to the city of Sharm El-Sheikh to conduct responsible and serious negotiations,” said Al-Hayya in a brief interview with Egyptian television on Tuesday. “We carry with us the concerns, pains, and sorrows of our people, and the sacrifices made: martyrs, destroyed homes, and devastation through a brutal war that lasted two years, waged by the Israeli occupation against our people. All of these pains we carry with us, and we also carry the goals and aspirations of our people for stability, freedom, the establishment of a state, and self-determination.”
Al-Hayya noted that since Hamas submitted its response to Trump’s plan on Friday, and Trump called for an end to the bombing, Israel had continued its deadly military assault on Gaza. He cited Israel’s long history of violating agreements, including the January 2025 ceasefire deal endorsed by Trump and former President Joe Biden.
“Therefore, we demand real guarantees from the international community, from President Trump and the United States, and from the sponsoring countries,” Al-Hayya said. “We are fully ready and positive to reach an end to the war, withdrawal, and a prisoner exchange—so that this war ends forever, and our Palestinian people may live in stability and peace, in accordance with their legitimate aspirations, like all other peoples of the region in which we live.”
Over the past two days, Trump has expressed confidence a deal will be reached within days, but sources close to the Palestinian negotiators have told Drop Site that a range of technical details need to be worked out. They also emphasized that Hamas is not going to simply agree to the dictates of Israel and will firmly assert its bottom line.
Qatar and Egypt have served as the primary regional mediators throughout the Gaza genocide and, in recent weeks, Turkey has played a significant role, particularly in the discussions with Hamas leading up to the movement’s response to Trump’s plan. “Negotiations are currently focused primarily on identifying the obstacles hindering the implementation of Trump’s plan and examining the practical details of its execution,” Qatar’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Tuesday. “The current moment is not suitable for discussing or speculating about the obstacles to implementing the plan.”
While Abu Marzouk said that Hamas is approaching the negotiations in Egypt in a spirit of flexibility and wants to achieve an agreement that ends a genocidal war during which Israel has killed well over 60,000 Palestinians, he cautioned that there are logistical challenges to a release of all Israeli captives.
“When President Trump said he wanted the prisoners released all at once—yes, it is possible the prisoners will be released over a defined period of time, because doing it all at once would be difficult,” Abu Marzouk said. He added that the bodies of many deceased Israeli captives are under rubble or in tunnels bombed by Israeli forces. “These are in areas where Israeli forces are currently present. Therefore, they must withdraw, and we will need time to search for them,” he added. “The Israeli army has altered the landmarks of the Gaza Strip through destruction, digging, searching for tunnels, and the destruction of all existing cemeteries. I am one of those people whose parents were buried in a cemetery that now lies under the road that was paved—the Philadelphia line. The entire cemetery is beneath that line.”
Hamas wants the Israeli forces to first withdraw from areas inside Gaza to facilitate recovery of bodies. “They must withdraw from populated areas. There cannot be an exchange [if the forces remain], and the process will not take place. This would mean that Israel does not want Trump’s plan to be implemented.”
Throughout the negotiations of the past two years, Hamas has fought to secure the freedom of as many Palestinians held by Israel in return for releasing Israelis held in Gaza. While the Trump plan framework provides for nearly 2,000 Palestinians to be freed, Netanyahu has refused to include the most high-profile Palestinian prisoners in any exchanges.
On Sunday, he reportedly promised Israel’s fanatical, right-wing interior minister Itamar Ben-Gvir that he would not release Marwan Barghouti and other revered Palestinian leaders who are serving life sentences in Israel. Barghouti is the single most popular Palestinian leader and public polls indicate he would be the top choice to serve as head of state of an independent Palestine. Ben-Gvir recently stormed Barghouti’s cell and verbally assaulted him. He has also been repeatedly subjected to beatings and other abuse in Israeli custody. Hamas is also demanding the release of Ahmad Sa’adat, Secretary-General of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Abdullah Barghouti, a senior commander of the Qassam Brigades, who was sentenced in 2003 to 67 life terms, the longest sentence ever imposed on a Palestinian by Israel.
“These individuals will be at the top of the priorities in the current talks. This is because they are a necessity for Palestinian unity and solidarity, and for their history and symbolism in the struggle. They must be among the prisoners to be released,” said Abu Marzouk. “The prisoners hold immense value for the Palestinian people. Therefore, it is impossible for [Marwan] Barghouti to spend his entire life in prison, having fought for his people, while people do nothing to save his life.”
Abu Marzouk has spent decades building Hamas as a resistance and political movement. In 1951, he was born a refugee in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, after his family was forcibly displaced from their land in 1948. An engineer by trade with a Master’s Degree from Colorado State University, he received his PhD from Louisiana Tech in 1991, the same year he was elected chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau. In July 1995, he was detained at New York’s JFK airport after his name came up on a “terror watchlist.” He spent 22 months in prison before being deported to Jordan in 1997.
In 2002, although he had left the U.S., Abu Marzouk was indicted by a federal grand jury in the U.S. on charges he and two other men conspired to illegally finance a terrorist organization. In 2004, he was hit with another indictment, in absentia, on charges he was organizing the financing of “terrorist activities in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”
During the interview with Drop Site, Abu Marzouk addressed the future of Hamas, saying that while Hamas will commit to stepping down from power in Gaza, Israeli claims that it will be wiped off the map are fantasy.
“Hamas is no longer a small organization that any great or small state can remove from Palestine,” he said. “Hamas is no longer [simply] an organization. Hamas is now hope. Hamas is an idea. So don’t be surprised that most Arab and Muslim masses chant for Hamas…. Hamas has become an idea present in the entire Islamic world, not only present in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank or occupied Palestine or abroad—it exists across the whole Arab‑Islamic world.”
He said that the U.S., Europe, and other nations should recognize Hamas as part of the fabric of Palestinian national identity and seek dialogue and diplomacy in a process that will ensure an independent state and enshrine the rights of Palestinians to self determination.
“The best way to deal with Hamas is to understand it and to deal with it responsibly,” he said. “Hamas still stands, does not raise the white flag, and will not raise the white flag.”