Oklo Director Sold 50,000 Shares of Nuclear Start-Up Before Selloff
Key Points
- An Oklo director sold $6.8 million in stock on Sept. 22, one day before shares hit a record high and then declined.
- Oklo shares closed at a record $142.65 on Sept. 23, but subsequently fell 22% by the end of the week.
- The nuclear start-up, which went public in May 2024, has seen its stock increase by more than 400% this year.
An Oklo company director sold $6.7 million worth of stock while shares of the nuclear start-up were near all-time highs and before they got pummeled.
Michael Stuart Klein, a 10% owner and independent director of the company, sold 50,000 shares in two separate transactions on Sept. 22, according to a Form 4 filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Klein sold 40,000 shares at an average price of $133.40 apiece, then sold an additional 10,000 shares for $135.20 each. Following the transactions, he indirectly owned 150,000 shares through M. Klein Associates, Inc., an investment holding company of which he is the controlling stockholder. The holdings were valued at nearly $16.6 million as of Friday’s close.
Oklo told Barron’s that the company doesn’t comment on insider transactions.
Klein currently serves as a managing partner of M. Klein & Company, a strategic advisory firm he founded in 2012, as well as the CEO of blank-check company Churchill Capital Corp. IX.
Oklo closed at a record on Sept. 22 and again on Sept. 23. Then shares of Oklo and fuel-cell technology company Bloom Energy slumped as investors questioned both companies’ fundamentals. From Oklo’s record close of $142.65 through the end of Friday’s session, shares fell 22%. The stock is still up more than 400% this year.
The day of Klein’s stock sale, Oklo held a groundbreaking ceremony for its first power plant at Idaho National Laboratory. The start-up went public in May 2024 and has steadily attracted attention, including at the federal level.
Oklo was one of the companies selected for a pilot program under the Department of Energy, which aims to have at least three test reactors up and running at national laboratories across the country by July 2026, ahead of Oklo’s own timeline.
Oklo noted in its most recent quarterly filing with the SEC that it “continues to incur significant operating losses.” The company’s ambitious targets have also faced scrutiny. Oklo company says it remains on track to deploy its first Aurora powerhouse by 2027 or 2028, despite currently lacking an operating license.
South Korea’s Market Ignores Tariff Threats. AI Is Driving the Rally.
For investors in South Korea’s sizzling stock market, it’s the corporate governance, stupid. That and the microchips.
Last month’s massive U.S. immigration raid on a Hyundai Motor factory in Georgia threw a monkey wrench into Seoul’s vital trading relationship with Washington. President Lee Jae-myung announced that Korea, with about $415 billion in currency reserves, can’t afford to invest a promised $350 billion in the U.S. all at once.
U.S. counterpart Donald Trump insisted he wants the money “upfront.” Otherwise, Korean imports will return to their “reciprocal” tariff rate of 25%, instead of 15%. “Korea is in a pretty tough spot now,” says Darcie Draudt-Vejares, a fellow in Korean studies at the Carnegie Institute for International Peace.
Markets don’t care. The iShares MSCI South Korea exchange-traded fund has climbed 14% since the Sept. 4 raid, bringing its year to date gain to nearly 60%.
Investors are focusing instead on what Lee and his Democratic Party, who took power in June, are doing to improve the corporate governance regime at the heart of the traditional “Korea discount.” It took them a month to pass the most critical legislation, extending corporate directors’ fiduciary duty to shareholders.
Korea’s relatively new army of retail investors is mobilizing to defend its interests directly, adds James Lim, portfolio manager for Korea at Dalton Investments. The arcana of how KCC, a Hyundai-linked investment vehicle, deploys treasury shares, has become front-page news, forcing the company to back off maneuvers that benefited insiders.
Korean stocks stand to gain a lot more from global markets’ artificial intelligence mania than they do to lose from Trump tariffs. Hyundai, the top auto maker, accounts for 2% of the market index. Semiconductor powers Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix make up a third. Samsung shares have leapt nearly 30% over the past month as its most advanced high-bandwidth memory chip won approval from Nvidia for inclusion in cutting-edge AI hardware.
Both Samsung and the broader market have more room to run, says Jonathan Pines, lead portfolio manager for Asia ex-Japan at Federated Hermes. “Samsung has been the laggard of the global AI theme,” he says. “It still has a long way to catch up.”
The same goes for Korea writ large as governance reform continues, Dalton’s Lim argues. The legislature is mulling restrictions on, if not the outright liquidation of, treasury stock, which founding families use to maintain their sway over conglomerates. Lawmakers may also slash taxes on dividends from a maximum 50% to 25%, encouraging payouts to shareholders.
These and other improvements could drive Korean companies’ average price-to-book value ratio from 1.1 to Japan’s level of 1.6, Lim predicts, translating to another 40% climb in stocks. “We are invested across the Korean market,” he says.
Like other leaders around the world, Lee may be getting a boost back home from the Trump administration’s perceived disrespect.
His approval ratings are holding around 60%, high for a country that tends toward polarization, Draudt-Vejares says. The need for unity in the face of U.S. pressure may be muting resistance from the chaebols whose economic dominance Lee’s governance reforms are eroding. “Right now, it’s all hands on deck for negotiating these tariffs,” she says.
Investors sound more confident than Koreans themselves. “The tariff threats are a little bit of noise,” says Kimball Brooker, co-head of the global value team at First Eagle Investments. “Risk-return-wise, Korea is still one of the most attractive markets in the world.”
Jim Ratcliffe’s car group wants to make the Grenadier in the US
Billionaire pumped €600mn of debt into Ineos Automotive last year despite rising sales for Land Rover Defender rival
Ineos Automotive is searching for sites to move production of its flagship 4x4 vehicle from France to the US, as its billionaire owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe continues to pump cash into the struggling carmaker.
Chief executive Lynn Calder told the Financial Times the group aimed to start producing its Grenadier off-roader in America “as quickly as possible” to meet local demand.
The automotive division lost €290mn last year, down from €323mn in 2023, and has now been hit by President Donald Trump’s 15 per cent tariffs on European car imports.
Its parent company Ineos Industries Holdings, the chemicals giant owned by Ratcliffe, pumped nearly €600mn of debt into Ineos Automotive in 2024, pushing outstanding debt to more than €3bn, according to accounts published this week.
Ineos makes the Grenadier in a former Mercedes-Benz factory in Hambach, north-eastern France, that it bought in 2020, although most vehicles are sold in the US. The vehicle is pitched as a rival to the Land Rover Defender.
Calder said that the economics of producing cars in France to sell in the US was challenging: “Europe is a high-cost location to manufacture anything, quite frankly . . . and now you add the tariff on top of that, for sure, it’s made things a lot more challenging.”
She also warned that Europe’s car market faced an existential threat from Chinese electric vehicles. “Europe . . . has opened the door to cheap and impressive Chinese vehicles that, if we’re not careful, are going to take over,” Calder said. “Europe’s unique problem is one of the survival of the automotive industry.”
Grenadier sales jumped 40 per cent last year compared with 2023, with revenue rising 57 per cent to €789mn.
Calder said the company was now looking for a suitable US site to supply American buyers. Calder said she was open to all options, including building a factory or using other manufacturers’ excess capacity.
However, moving Grenadier production to the US will depend on clarity about the EU’s petrol engine ban that is due to take effect in 2035. Ineos cannot make such an investment before knowing it would be able to use the French plant to produce its new Fusilier.
It is being developed as both a pure electric model as well as one with a “range-extending” petrol engine that can charge the battery when needed — technology that would not be allowed after 2035 under existing EU regulations.
Calder said she was “hopeful” of a change in approach by the EU.
One union representative told the FT earlier this year of concerns over the sustainability of its French plant, which employs more than 1,000 workers, partly because of the threat of US tariffs on European car imports.
The struggling carmaker has faced a string of setbacks in the past year. In March, it recalled more than 7,000 Grenadiers because of a door problem, while it paused production at its French plant from September to December last year after a critical supplier went bust.
Ratcliffe’s empire is grappling with other challenges. Rating agency Fitch last month cut Ineos further into junk territory because of its high leverage levels. The billionaire has also shut down sites including an oil refinery in Grangemouth, Scotland, and cut staff at Manchester United, the Premier League football club that he co-owns.
Ineos Automotive also more than doubled its borrowings from banks to €232mn last year as its cumulative losses reached €1.4bn since it was founded in 2018.
Al Fayed payouts to former staff push Harrods into the red
Department store falls to £34.3mn loss as more than 100 victims of former owner’s alleged abuse seek redress
The cost of payouts to survivors of abuse allegedly perpetrated by Mohamed Al Fayed has pushed Harrods into the red, as the luxury department store group compensates more than 100 of its former owner’s alleged victims.
Harrods reported a pre-tax loss of £34.3mn in the year to February, compared with a profit of £111.5mn the year before, according to company accounts seen by the Financial Times. Revenues were broadly flat at just over £1bn against a backdrop of a slowdown in luxury spending.
The drop was driven in part by a £62.3mn provision for “employee welfare redress and related expenses on historic allegations”.
Harrods’ results come a year after the BBC broadcast claims of sexual assault, including rape, spanning decades against Al Fayed, who died in 2023 aged 94.
The Egyptian businessman owned Harrods, which trades from a vast flagship emporium in Knightsbridge, London, between 1985 and 2010. He then sold it to the Qatar Investment Authority, which has owned it ever since.
Michael Ward, who worked alongside Al Fayed for five years after joining Harrods as managing director in 2005, said more than 100 survivors had entered the redress process since it launched in March.
Victims stand to be paid general damages of up to £200,000. The compensation scheme also allows for other types of claims, such as work impact payments of up to £150,000 for loss of employment opportunities resulting from sexual assault. Individuals can apply for more than one form of compensation.
Ward, who has said he did not know of any abuse at the time of the alleged incidents, said in a statement that “awards and interim payments began being issued to eligible survivors at the end of April and the scheme will remain open until March 31”.
In June, Harrods asked the High Court to appoint special executors to the estate of Al Fayed in an attempt to open up another route for compensation.
The group, which also operates smaller stores at London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports, as well as a small chain of beauty stores, also blamed the drop in profits on weaker beauty trading and modernising some of its systems.
Despite this, Ward said he remained “confident in the strength of the business, and the resilience of the luxury sector”.
Harrods was one of a string of UK retailers, alongside Marks and Spencer and the Co-Op, to fall victim to a cyber attack in the spring. In its accounts the company said the attack “was promptly contained with no material impact on operations, systems or customer data”.
However, hackers stole details of 430,000 Harrods customers last month in an attack on a third party provider to the retailer. Harrods has said the data was limited to basic information and did not include passwords or payment details.
Epidemic of crack cocaine addiction sweeps Amazon basin
Traffickers target indigenous people to sell highly addictive drugs
“This is where the crack is sold,” says Josiane Otaviano Guilherme, picking her way down a litter-strewn alley between the encroaching vegetation and some wooden shacks, pointing to a cluster of huts. “It’s like a kind of street market. I once saw a mother feeding beer to her baby while the father took drugs.”
Otaviano is a community activist in Belém do Solimões, a small Brazilian town on the banks of the upper Amazon, where villagers have gathered to speak of their plight to visiting campaigners and researchers attending an indigenous summit in Tabatinga on the border with Colombia.
Some sobbed, and some shouted. But uniting the indigenous Amazon peoples at recent meetings was anger and alarm at how many of their children in one of the most remote areas of the planet were developing an addiction to crack cocaine.
Over the past decade, the Amazon river has become a major highway for the export of cocaine from Peru and Colombia to Europe and Africa. Traffickers press vulnerable indigenous communities into hiding stashes of drugs, smuggling them down river — and buying their own cocaine, often in the form of crack to smoke.
“Today we are asking for help,” said Carlos, one of the villagers. “We have people from the outside bringing in drugs and selling them in our community. We demand security but we have received no answers so far.”
Orlando Possuelo, an indigenous rights activist, recalled that on his first trip along the Amazon around 2001 he did not see drug use. “But I came a year or two ago and I was amazed,” he said. “Every single small town would have a party and at that party someone would offer you some kind of drug, usually cocaine. It’s affecting the whole Amazon river very badly.”
In one tragic recent case, Otaviano said, she was called to a house where the parents had lost patience with their addict son who was stealing to fund his habit. “The mother bought a big chain and tied his ankles with it to stop him going to the local crack den. He had been chained up for three months. It was a very sad scene.”
Brazil is the world’s second-largest consumer market for cocaine after the US. Law enforcement officials seized 128 tonnes of cocaine last year, according to shipping insurance claim handlers Proinde, but this figure represents only a fraction of the total smuggled.
Overstretched local police and security officials admit privately that they are fighting a losing battle against the well-resourced traffickers, who deploy speedboats equipped with radar, night-vision goggles and Starlink internet connections to ferry their valuable cargos down river.
“We have just 50 officers to patrol an area from here to Manaus, 1,100km away,” said one senior official. “We have no helicopters, so we patrol the rivers in boats but the traffickers have a web of informants, who tip them off long before we arrive.”
Francisco Gonçalves Peres, the local federal police chief, said well-organised gangs of drug traffickers, who had moved into the upper Amazon in recent years, found the indigenous populations an easy target.
“This contact of organised crime with the communities led to an explosion in drug consumption,” he said. “The communities are being used to store drugs, and drugs are also being sold to them.”
Police, who raided the village of San Rafael last year, he added, found four tonnes of cocaine being stored in a single house.
Brazil’s Amazon indigenous communities have no tradition of using cocaine, a highly concentrated drug extracted from the coca leaf that was traditionally grown in the Andean highlands and chewed for centuries by Incas or Aymaras to help them remain physically active at high altitudes.
In recent years, traffickers have developed strains of coca bush that can thrive in the lower-altitude, warmer and more humid environment of the Amazon. Large coca plantations and laboratories to process the leaf have sprung up across the border in neighbouring Peru.
In Atalaia do Norte, a Brazilian gateway town to the remote Javari lowlands that are home to the largest number of uncontacted tribes in the Amazon, locals have begun selling small quantities of drugs, according to Nelly Duarte, a representative of the government’s indigenous agency Funai. “They start selling in order to supplement their income and that starts to get people addicted,” she explained.
As the cocaine trade has mushroomed across a vast area of jungle where communities subsist on fishing and growing crops, the quick riches offered by traffickers — and the quick highs from the drugs they sell — are hard for indigenous populations to resist.
The traffickers, said community leader Higson Dias Castelo Branco, “offer a better quality of life, alleging that Funai doesn’t help the indigenous communities and that they are there to help by paying the indigenous people. And along with the offer to help with money, comes the consumption of drugs.”
“Things have been getting much worse in the last three or four years and we just don’t have the power to fight this kind of crime.”
Downstream from Tabatinga in the mainly indigenous riverside town of Feijoal, community leaders beg the visiting activists for action to protect their children from the ravages of the drug trade.
“Young people here don’t want to study, they just want to sell drugs,” said one woman, who declined to give her name. She sobbed, as she added: “We have 12-year-old kids here trying drugs.”
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s leftwing government has portrayed itself as a defender of native peoples and the environment, pledging to restore legal protections and enforcement agencies that were dismantled or cut back during the administration of his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro.
But in Tabatinga, a gritty riverside town bordering Colombia where vultures sit atop walls and decaying buildings are spray-painted with the initials of the Rio-based cartel Comando Vermelho, security officials complain that the Lula government has not delivered on many of its promises.
“Bolsonaro removed [police] but the Lula government has not made any effort to put them back” said Hueney Herlón Gomez, Tabatinga’s secretary of security. “That’s the criticism and that’s why people are demanding action.”
“In the absence of the state, organised crime has taken over,” he added. “What’s it all about? Dollars. A lot of money. And the people feeding this are addicts in Europe or America or Asia.”
This Cold-Storage Stock Looks Like a Hot Buy Right Now
Shares of Americold and Lineage, real estate investment trusts, have been beaten down. One looks like the better play.
Key Points
Americold Realty Trust and Lineage stocks are down 42% and 32% respectively this year due to soft customer demand.
Americold and Lineage offer dividend yields of 7.4% and 5.3%, with payout ratios around 65% of adjusted funds from operations.
Both companies trade at a significant discount to the average REIT valuation, at under 10 times and 12 times 2025 AFFO respectively.
Wall Street has put cold-storage warehouse companies Americold Realty Trust and Lineage into the freezer amid soft customer demand, and that has made their stocks a cool bargain.
Americold stock, at about $12.50, is down 42% this year and trades at its lowest price since its 2018 initial public offering. Industry leader Lineage, at $40, is off 32% in 2025 and fetching about half of its IPO price of $78 in July 2024.
The two real estate investment trusts operate warehouses where frozen and fresh food is stored on its way from farms, manufacturing plants, and meatpackers to grocery stores. That includes fruits and vegetables, eggs, dairy, fish, and meat. Customers include Kraft Heinz, Perdue Farms, General Mills, and Danone.
Lineage operates almost 500 warehouses globally and controls about a third of the North American market. Americold is less than half its size and has about a 20% share in North America. The business is seasonal, as food inventories rise in the fall ahead of Thanksgiving and Christmas and then decline early in the year.
The stocks now offer ample dividends, with Lineage yielding 5.3% and Americold, 7.4%. Both dividends look safe, says Baird analyst Nicholas Thillman. Payout ratios are about 65% of adjusted funds from operations, or AFFO, a key REIT financial measure.
While both stocks look inexpensive, Americold could be the better play. It has a lower valuation, higher dividend yield, a more digestible market value, no controlling shareholder, and a CEO transition.
These factors could make it more appealing for a potential acquirer. Americold is valued at $3.5 billion against $9.2 billion for Lineage. Bay Grove, an investment firm, assembled what is now Lineage over more than a decade and holds about 70% of the stock.
Cold-storage companies were pandemic beneficiaries as Americans stayed home and prepared their own meals, stocking up pantries and freezers. Americold peaked at more than $40 in April 2021, better than three times its current price.
There has been a fallout since then. Several factors have depressed the stocks. These include new cold-storage capacity, a reversal of pandemic-era pantry stocking, lower manufacturer inventories, and the impact of GLP-1 diet drugs that have reduced food consumption.
Some Wall Street analysts recently have issued negative reports or cut earnings estimates, citing weaker trends that could persist into 2026 or possibly 2027. Both companies modestly reduced financial guidance when they released second-quarter results in August, citing the demand and pricing outlook.
The bull case is that valuations are low, long-term trends of higher meat and fresh food consumption are positive, industry capacity additions are slowing, and the companies are valued at a deep discount to replacement cost and private-market values.
“The stocks are really cheap,” says Evercore ISI analyst Steve Sakwa. He says many investors are short-term focused and avoid companies with tough current fundamentals, regardless of valuation. “Investors have little confidence in the earnings trajectory,” he says.
He says patient investors could be rewarded. He has an Outperform recommendation on Americold with an $19 price target and an Inline rating on Lineage with a $45 price target.
Cold storage involves moving heavy pallets of food, and the companies are taking a page from Amazon.com by upgrading their facilities with robots. “The amount of automation and computerization is amazing,” says Alex Goldfarb, a Piper Sandler analyst who has an Overweight rating on Lineage with a $55 price target. Goldfarb was referring to Lineage warehouses.
Both companies say their stocks are cheap.
“Americold is currently trading far below its asset value, whether you look at capitalization rates, replacement costs, or cost-per-pallet basis,” said Americold Chief Financial Officer Jay Wells on the company’s second-quarter earnings conference call in August. The stock then traded around $14, about 12% above current levels.
It was a similar refrain on the Lineage call. CEO Greg Lehmkuhl said, “We’re trading at 55% to 60% of net asset value. We think it’s obviously undervalued.” His comment also came at a higher stock price than now.
It isn’t uncommon for companies to say their stocks are cheap, but there are numbers to back up those claims for Americold and Lineage.
REITs tend to get valued based on adjusted funds from operations, a cash-flow measure. Net income is less useful since it tends to understate core profitability because of significant noncash depreciation expense.
Americold trades for under 10 times adjusted funds from operation of $1.41 a share for 2025, and Lineage for about 12 times. REITs on average command more than 20 times estimated 2025 AFFO, making the cold-storage companies some of the cheapest stocks in the entire REIT sector.
One positive sign would be if the two companies back up comments about cheap stocks by unveiling stock repurchase programs. Their shares are more financially appealing investments than new cold-storage facilities or expansion.
Both companies have sizable—and manageable—debt, with Americold carrying $3.9 billion in net debt and Lineage, $5.7 billion. Both have investment-grade bond ratings.
Among the negatives of the cold-storage companies is that they are more operational intensive than many REITs due to higher labor and electricity costs. But they provide critical infrastructure to the food industry. Anything that isn’t boxed or canned generally passes through cold-storage warehouses.
The knock on the stocks is that fundamentals now aren’t great and that imminent possible catalysts are lacking.
But cheap stocks can create their own catalysts. Lineage said on its August call that cold-storage companies traded in public markets are at a discount to cold-storage operators held by private investors. That could create incentive for big private real estate investors like Brookfield and Blackstone to look at the sector.
Cheap real estate assets like Americold and Lineage often don’t go undiscovered too long. Their share prices are likely to warm up.
Hamas Is Still at War With Itself Over Terms of Trump’s Peace Plan
Political leaders in Qatar lean toward accepting President Trump’s plan, but military commanders in Gaza resist surrendering arms and giving up hostages
To the world, Hamas said it has accepted major parts of President Trump’s peace plan. Internally, Hamas remains bitterly divided over how to proceed.
On Friday, the U.S.-designated terrorist group said it was willing to release hostages and hand over Gaza, a landmark statement boosting Trump’s push for an end to the war. But Hamas used hedged language that some observers saw as problematic to clinching a final peace.
A big reason is that Hamas hasn’t reached consensus about disarming and under what conditions to let the hostages go, said Arab officials from countries mediating with Hamas. Those are the two most important demands in Trump’s plan.
Khalil Al-Hayya, Hamas’s top negotiator, and several other senior political officials support accepting the proposal despite significant reservations, Arab mediators said. But those Hamas officials, based outside Gaza, have limited sway over the group’s armed wing, which remains in the enclave.
Ezzedin al-Haddad, who rose to lead Hamas in Gaza after Israel killed Yahya and Mohammed Sinwar, has told mediators he is open to compromise. Mediators said Haddad is willing to give up rockets and other offensive weapons to Egypt and the United Nations for storage but wants to retain small arms such as assault rifles, which Hamas considers defensive.
But Hamas commanders inside Gaza fear they won’t be able to enforce compliance with disarmament demands among fighters if they accept a deal that amounts to surrender, the mediators said. The organization has recruited many young men since the war began, often those who saw their homes destroyed or family members killed. Such fighters might be unwilling to lay down their arms.
The plan’s most contentious points are requirements that Hamas disarm, hand over its weapons and release the 48 Israeli hostages it still holds—alive and dead—within 72 hours of agreeing.
Critics within the group dismiss the proposal as “a 72-hour truce” rather than a genuine peace agreement, reflecting their lack of trust in Israel. Hamas on Friday said it wanted more “negotiations to discuss the details,” which appears to include the release of hostages.
Trump weighed in Friday on social media, saying he believed Hamas “is ready for a lasting PEACE.” He called on Israel to “immediately stop the bombing of Gaza” to ensure safe conditions for hostages to be released. His statement reflected agreement in the White House that Hamas had accepted the plan.
But Hamas’s military leaders insisted that any release of hostages must be tied to a clear timeline for Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, mediators said. That was reflected in a caveat in Hamas’s response Friday, in which it said hostages would be released “with the provision of necessary field positions.”
Israel might be reluctant to end hostilities after Hamas left the disarmament issue unaddressed in its statement, and with significant conditions on the release of hostages.
On X, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) called Hamas’s response “unfortunately predictable. A classic ‘Yes, but.’”
“No disarmament, keeping Gaza under Palestinian control, and tying hostage release to negotiations, along with other problems,” Graham said. “This is, in essence, a rejection by Hamas of President Trump’s ‘take it or leave it’ proposal.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a qualified reaction of his own to Hamas’s response, saying Israel would begin preparations for the release of hostages held in Gaza and work with Trump to end the war—on Israel and the president’s terms.
Israel’s military didn’t specifically commit to stopping attacks but indicated it was moving to a more defensive posture, saying it would prepare for the release of the hostages and react quickly to any threat.
Some observers said Hamas’s statement was intended to buy time for the group to resolve long-running tensions between its political and military wings. Disagreements over strategy have dogged the group throughout its war with Israel, which began with Hamas’s deadly attacks on southern Israel and the kidnapping of about 250 hostages almost two years ago.
On the battlefield, Hamas is battered but still fighting. The armed wing has lost most of its senior leadership and thousands of experienced fighters. Many of its newer recruits lack training, and Israel’s tightened control over Gaza has strained the group’s ability to communicate and coordinate operations.
To adapt, Hamas has devolved command to smaller units, Arab mediators and Israeli military officials said. These units often act independently, making their own decisions about when and how to attack Israeli forces.
Israeli military officials say Hamas hasn’t given up the fight. They see the group’s command and control as shattered, with small groups acting independently through guerrilla warfare, mainly using explosives, snipers and rocket-propelled grenades.
Haddad and other senior leaders exercise limited control over these units, a problem exacerbated by a financial crunch that has hindered Hamas’s ability to pay salaries. The Wall Street Journal has previously reported that the cash shortage is weakening Hamas’s hold over its rank and file.
Israel has taken over large portions of Gaza City since launching its offensive in mid-September. Many of Hamas’s fighters have already fled southward and most civilians have evacuated. Israel’s key dilemma is what to do if it takes over Gaza City but Hamas refuses to surrender.
Several thousand Hamas fighters remain in Gaza City, a senior Israeli military official said. Those forces are constantly observing the Israeli troops and looking for vulnerabilities, the official said. Two weeks ago, the official added, an RPG killed a company commander.
The Israeli official described Hamas’s remaining forces as mostly young and inexperienced but still determined. Acts of surrender are rare and usually occur only when militants are surrounded, the official said.
“This is why these negotiations are starting to become real. Maybe it’s the first time throughout the war that Hamas is starting to understand that they will be eradicated,” said Amir Avivi, a former senior Israeli defense official.
Mediators warn that if Hamas’s leaders accept Trump’s plan, some fighters could defect to other Palestinian militant groups. Many have already threatened to join factions such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad or the Palestinian Liberation Front. Coordination among these groups has largely collapsed, leaving uncertainty over whether a deal with Hamas alone could halt the fighting.
Qatar, Egypt and Turkey have tried to pressure Hamas leaders, warning them that this is their last chance to end the war in Gaza, Arab officials say. They have told Hamas that if the group rejects the deal, they will no longer be able to continue providing them with political or diplomatic support, the officials said.
In his social-media post, Trump said: “We are already in discussions on details to be worked out. This is not about Gaza alone, this is about long sought PEACE in the Middle East.”