President Donald Trump has said he believes it is possible that a ceasefire in Gaza will be reached within a week.
Trump, at an Oval Office event celebrating a DRC-Rwanda peace accord on Friday, told reporters that he believes a ceasefire is close.
He said he had been just been talking to some of the people involved in trying to reach a ceasefire to hostilities between Israel and Hamas.
"We think even next week, we're going to get a ceasefire," Trump said.
Trump's remarks came after the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that nearly 100,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's genocide in Gaza, representing about 4 percent of the territory's population.
Palestinians have documented over 56,300 fatalities, mostly women and minors.
Some 11,000 Palestinians feared buried under rubble of annihilated homes, according to Palestine's official WAFA news agency.
Experts, however, contend that the actual death toll significantly exceeds what the Gaza authorities have reported, estimating it could be around 200,000.
Israel is said to have abducted some 11,000 Palestinians from Gaza and occupied West Bank since October 2023.
Study on Gaza fatalities
Haaretz said in addition to the high Palestinian deaths from Israeli attacks, many people also died from the indirect effects of the war such as hunger, cold and diseases amid a collapse of the health system in Gaza.
The daily said while Israeli spokespersons, journalists and influencers reject with knee-jerk disgust the death toll announced by Gaza's Health Ministry as exaggerated, more and more international experts "are stating that not only is this list, with all the horror it embodies, reliable – but that it may even be very conservative in relation to reality."
It cited a study conducted by Professor Michael Spagat, an economist at Holloway College at the University of London, a world-class expert on mortality in violent conflicts, about deaths in Gaza.
The study surveyed 2,000 households in the Palestinian enclave, comprising almost 10,000 people.
"They concluded that, as of January 2025, some 75,200 people died a violent death in Gaza during the war, the vast majority caused by Israeli munitions," it said.
