Feb. 4 (UPI) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet Tuesday with President Donald Trump amid next steps of a fragile cease-fire pact.
The two are expected to touch on a number of topics during their hours-long meeting including ongoing negotiations for the next step of a critical cease-fire agreement with Hamas and Gaza, diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, Iran’s nuclear weapons program and a pending transfer to Israel of more than $8 billion worth of bombs, missiles, artillery and other weaponry amid a Biden-era freeze on weapon transfers, and growing anger over credible accusations of genocide.
“I have no assurances that it’ll hold,” Trump told reporters of the cease-fire Monday in the Oval Office. “And I’ve seen people brutalized. I’ve never, nobody’s ever seen anything like it,” he added.
The meeting will be Trump’s first official sitdown with a foreign leader since he returned to the White House on Jan. 20.
“The stakes are really high for the prime minister, to be clear,” Thomas R. Nides, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, told The New York Times. “President Trump is holding all the cards and is really clear he wants to see all the hostages come home,” Nides claimed.
Meanwhile, 18 hostages have been freed since the truce on Jan. 19 — a day before Trump became president for the second time — in a deal largely negotiated by the previous Biden administration.
“The discussions on the Middle East with Israel” and various other countries, Trump said over the weekend, “are progressing.” He added Netanyahu will be “coming on Tuesday, and I think we have some very big meetings scheduled.”
Netanyahu arrived at Blair House late Sunday in Washington, and is expected to stay until the end of the week to meet with lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
He said he expects to discuss with Trump “victory over Hamas, achieving the release of all our hostages and dealing with the Iranian terror axis in all its components.
The two last met at Trump’s Florida estate on July 26, 2024, where Netanyahu said he expressed hope at the time for a cease-fire and eventual release of hostages held by Iran’s terror syndicate.
Trump, however, suggested more than a week ago that Egypt and Jordan take in Palestinian refugees.
But the two nations rejected Trump’s far-fetched idea to “clean out” the enclave which originally housed 2 million civilians prior to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack which killed roughly 1,200 and took 250 hostages, some of whom were American citizens.
Meanwhile, Jordan’s King Abdullah II will meet with Trump at the White House next Tuesday.
This visit arrived one day after Hamas militants freed three hostages, including Israel-American national Keith Siegel and two other hostages for 187 prisoners.
Negotiations on the second phase of the Gaza cease-fire deal began Monday when Netanyahu met with Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.
“It’s holding so far,” Witkoff said Monday of the shaky deal. “We’re certainly hopeful, and that’s the president’s direction: Get the hostages out and save lives and come to, hopefully, a peaceful settlement of it all.”
In a statement following his meeting with Witkoff, Netanyahu’s office said Israel was prepping to send a working delegation to Qatar to review “technical details related to the continued implementation of the agreement.”
The right-wing Israeli leader will convene a security cabinet once home, according to the statement, “to discuss Israel’s overall positions regarding the second stage of the deal, which will guide the continuation of the negotiations.”
However, a foreign policy expert says Netanyahu “made this salami deal” in reference to the three-phase Hamas agreement.
“He’s always playing for time and kicking the can down the road,” Shira Efron, the senior director of policy research at the New York-based research group Israel Policy Forum, told the Times. “Something he is an expert in. Trump wants to cut to the chase and end the war,” added Efron.
