Israel’s Netanyahu heads to U.S. to discuss ‘victory over Hamas’ with Trump
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TEL AVIV, Israel — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday he will discuss “victory over Hamas,” countering Iran and expanding diplomatic relations with Arab countries in his meeting with President Trump.
Tuesday’s meeting at the White House will be Trump’s first with a foreign leader since returning to office. It comes as U.S. and Arab mediators begin the daunting work of brokering the next phase of an agreement to wind down the war in the Gaza Strip and release dozens of hostages held by militants.
Hamas, which has quickly reasserted control over Gaza since the cease-fire took hold last month, has said it will not release the hostages slated to go free in the second phase without an end to the war and the full withdrawal of Israeli forces.
Netanyahu is under mounting pressure from far-right governing partners to resume the war after the first phase ends in early March. He has said Israel is still committed to victory over Hamas and the return of all the hostages captured in the militants’ Oct. 7, 2023, cross-border attack that triggered the war.
It’s unclear where Trump stands.
Three hostages were handed over to Israeli forces — the first of 33 expected to be freed over the next six weeks in exchange for some 1,900 Palestinians. The deal follows months of negotiations.
He has been a staunch supporter of Israel, but has also pledged to end wars in the Middle East and claimed credit for helping to broker the cease-fire agreement pushed by the Biden administration. The deal has halted the fighting and led to the release of 18 hostages who had been held for more than 15 months, as well as hundreds of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.
On Sunday, amid the cease-fire, an Israeli airstrike on a vehicle in central Gaza wounded five people, including a child who was in critical condition, according to Al-Awda Hospital, which received the casualties. The Israeli military said it fired upon the vehicle because it was bypassing a checkpoint while heading north in violation of the cease-fire agreement. The military said it remains committed to the deal.
Eight hostages held by Hamas militants are returned to Israel as Palestinian prisoner releases proceed — but can the Gaza cease-fire hold?
Netanyahu embraces Trump’s call for ‘peace through strength’
In a statement released before his departure on Sunday, Netanyahu said he and Trump would discuss “victory over Hamas, achieving the release of all our hostages and dealing with the Iranian terror axis in all its components,” referring to Iran’s alliance of militant groups across the region, including Hamas.
He said that by working together, they could “strengthen security, broaden the circle of peace and achieve a remarkable era of peace through strength.”
The war began when thousands of Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking around 250 hostage. Over 100 hostages were freed during a weeklong cease-fire in November 2023, eight have been rescued alive and dozens of bodies have been recovered by Israeli forces.
Powerful forces in Middle East and, now, in Washington working against truce lasting beyond its first phase.
Israel’s air and ground war has killed more than 47,000 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, according to local health authorities who do not say how many of the dead were fighters. The war has left large parts of several cities in ruins and displaced around 90% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people.
Under the first phase of the cease-fire agreement, Hamas is to release a total of 33 hostages, eight of whom Hamas says are dead, in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. Israeli forces have pulled back from most areas and allowed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to return to devastated northern Gaza.
The second phase, yet to be negotiated, calls for the war to end and the remaining 60 or so hostages to be returned. If the United States, Qatar and Egypt are unable to broker an agreement between Israel and Hamas, the war could resume in early March.
Aspirations for a bigger deal
Trump’s Mideast envoy, Steve Witkoff, joined the yearlong cease-fire negotiations in their final weeks last month and helped push the agreement over the finish line. He met with Netanyahu in Israel last week and the two were expected to formally begin talks on the second phase in Washington on Monday.
Trump, who brokered normalization agreements between Israel and four Arab countries in his first term, is believed to be seeking a wider and potentially historic agreement in which Israel would forge ties with Saudi Arabia.
But the kingdom, which resisted similar entreaties from the Biden administration, has said it would only agree to such a deal if the war ends and there is a credible pathway to a Palestinian state in Gaza, the West Bank and east Jerusalem, territories Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war.
Netanyahu’s government is opposed to Palestinian statehood, and a key partner, far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, has threatened to leave the governing coalition if the war is not resumed next month. That would raise the likelihood of early elections in which Netanyahu could be voted out.
Violence in the West Bank
Even as the Gaza cease-fire has held, Israel has ramped up operations in the occupied West Bank. On Sunday, the military said it was expanding an operation focused on the volatile city of Jenin into the town of Tamun.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said a 73-year-old man was shot dead by Israeli troops in Jenin early Sunday. There was no immediate comment from the military. The ministry had earlier reported five killed, including a 16-year-old, in Israeli airstrikes overnight.
The military said it killed two militants — one of whom had been freed as part of the weeklong Gaza cease-fire in November 2023 — in an airstrike on a village near Jenin.
The West Bank has seen a surge in violence since the start of the war in Gaza, with Israel launching near-daily military arrest raids. There has also been a rise in settler violence against Palestinians and Palestinian attacks on Israelis.
Goldenberg writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Samy Magdy in Cairo contributed to this report.
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