Israel's Netanyahu heads to US to discuss 'victory over Hamas' with Trump

[February 03, 2025]  By TIA GOLDENBERG

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — 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 Donald 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 a ceasefire agreement to wind down the 15-month war in Gaza.

Hamas, which has reasserted control over Gaza since the ceasefire began last month, has said it will not release hostages in the second phase without an end to the war and Israeli forces' full withdrawal.

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 committed to victory over Hamas and the return of all hostages captured in the militants' Oct. 7, 2023, attack that triggered the war.

It's unclear where Trump stands.

He has been a staunch supporter of Israel, but has also pledged to end wars in the Middle East and took credit for helping to broker the ceasefire agreement. The deal has led to the release of 18 hostages as well as hundreds of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.

An Israeli airstrike on a vehicle in central Gaza wounded five people Sunday, including a child who was in critical condition, according to Al-Awda Hospital. Israel's military said it fired on the vehicle because it was bypassing a checkpoint while heading north in violation of the ceasefire agreement.

Netanyahu embraces Trump's call for ‘peace through strength’

Ahead of his departure, 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, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking around 250 hostage. Over 100 were freed during a weeklong ceasefire in November 2023, eight have been rescued alive and dozens of bodies have been recovered by Israeli forces.

Israel's air and ground war has killed over 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.

Under the ceasefire's first phase, Hamas is to release 33 hostages, eight of whom Hamas says are dead, in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. Israeli forces have pulled back from most areas and allowed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to return to devastated northern Gaza while aid flows in.

Negotiations on the second phase, which would end the war and see the remaining 60 or so hostages returned, are set to begin Monday with mediators the U.S., Qatar and Egypt.

“We started already engaging with the parties in order to define the agenda and to start engaging in those discussions," Qatar's Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani said Sunday, adding that "we hope that we start to see some movement in the next few days.”

Aspirations for a bigger deal

Trump's Mideast envoy, Steve Witkoff, joined the yearlong ceasefire negotiations last month and helped push the agreement over the finish line. He met with Netanyahu in Israel last week and they were expected to formally begin talks on the second phase on Monday.

Smoke rises following an explosion detonated by the Israeli army, which said it was destroying buildings used by Palestinian militants in the West Bank Jenin refugee camp, Sunday, Feb. 2, 2025. (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed)

Trump, who brokered normalization agreements between Israel and four Arab countries in his first term, is believed to be seeking a wider agreement in which Israel would forge ties with Saudi Arabia.

But the kingdom 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.

On Sunday, Jordan said its king had been invited to meet with Trump at the White House on Feb. 11. Jordan also supports Palestinian statehood and has rejected Trump's suggestion to relocate Palestinians from Gaza there and to Egypt.

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

While the Gaza ceasefire has held for two weeks, Israel has increased operations in the occupied West Bank. On Sunday, the military said it was expanding an operation focused on the volatile city of Jenin to the town of Tamun and said it has killed over 50 “terrorists” so far.

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 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 Gaza ceasefire in 2023 — in an airstrike on a village near Jenin. It said the two were planning an imminent attack, and that additional strikes targeted two other militant cells.

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 another 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.

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Associated Press writers Samy Magdy in Cairo; Omar Akour in Amman, Jordan, Natalie Melzer in Jerusalem and Isabel DeBre in Ramallah, the West Bank, contributed to this report.

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