Israel’s Netanyahu heads to U.S. to discuss ‘victory over Hamas’ with Trump

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a press conference in Jerusalem, Dec. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo, Pool, File)

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 U.S. 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 an agreement to wind down the war in the Gaza Strip and release dozens of militant-held hostages.

Hamas, which has quickly reasserted its control over Gaza since the ceasefire 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, who is under mounting pressure from far-right governing partners to resume the war after the first phase ends in early March, has said Israel is still committed to victory over Hamas and the return of all the hostages captured in the militants' Oct. 7, 2023 attack that triggered the war.

It’s unclear where Trump stands in all this.

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 halted the fighting and led to the release of 18 hostages who had been held for over 15 months, as well as hundreds of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.

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

In a statement released ahead of his departure on Sunday, Netanyahu said they 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 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 people.

Under the first phase of the ceasefire agreement, Hamas is to release a total of 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.

Negotiations on the second phase, in which the war would end and the remaining 60 or so hostages would be returned, are set to begin Monday. 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 ceasefire 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 ceasefire has held for two weeks, 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 to 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 ceasefire in November 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.

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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Tia Goldenberg, The Associated Press