Israel’s Netanyahu heads to U.S. to discuss ‘victory over Hamas’ with Trump
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TEL AVIVl — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that he would 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 reasserted control over Gaza since the cease-fire began last month, has said it will not release the hostages 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.
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.
It’s unclear where Trump stands. He has been a staunch supporter of Israel but 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 led to the release of 18 hostages, 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.
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’
Before his departure 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 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 about 250 hostage. More than 100 hostages were freed during a weeklong cease-fire in November 2023; eight have been rescued; 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 about 90% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people.
Under the first phase of the cease-fire, Hamas is to release 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 recently 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 agree to such a deal only 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.
Relatives of hostages and many other Israelis are impatient. “The suffering that the families are going through as this drags on is inhuman,” the brother of newly released hostage Ofer Kalderon, Nissan Kalderon, said Sunday.
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 Tammun.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said a 73-year-old man was shot dead by Israeli troops in Jenin early Sunday. The military said a suspect was approaching soldiers as they operated in a combat zone and was “stopped,” and the incident was under review. 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.
Israeli forces on Sunday also carried out a wave of controlled demolitions that destroyed at least a dozen buildings in Jenin, taking down several multi-story residential structures. The military said it destroyed buildings used by militants.
The U.N. humanitarian agency last week said Israeli forces have severely damaged or demolished 120 houses in their ongoing raid, and Palestinian security forces have wrecked an additional 50.
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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