Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is heading to the United States on Sunday, making him the first world leader to meet with President Donald Trump since his return to the White House two weeks ago.
The visit comes after President Trump invited the Israeli prime minister to the White House last week as he embarks on his historic second term.
The meeting will take place in the backdrop of Israel releasing hundreds of Palestinian terrorists in return for 33 hostages, only 25 of whom are presumed to be alive, in the first phase of the U.S.-brokered three-phase hostages-for-terrorists deal. Israel has also enacted a ceasefire in Gaza and southern Lebanon despite repeated violations by Iran-backed Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups respectively.
Last week, President Trump urged Jordan, Egypt, and other neighboring Arab states to accept Palestinian refugees, displaced in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 terror attack on Israel. Jordan, a majority Palestinian state, was carved out of the British Mandate for Palestine in 1946, and Egypt had occupied Gaza till the Six-Day War of 1967.
Despite an initial rejection by both Jordan and Egypt, President Trump was optimistic that they would agree to his resettlement proposal, especially given their reliance on the U.S. for their military and other strategic needs. “They will do it. They’re gonna do it, okay?” he said responding to a reporter’s query at an Oval Office photo-op on Thursday. “We do a lot for them, and they’re gonna do it.”
The news agency Reuters reported ahead of the visit:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepared to leave Israel on Sunday for a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, looking to strengthen ties with Washington after tensions with the previous White House administration over the war in Gaza.Netanyahu, the first foreign leader to visit Trump since his inauguration last month, leaves with the ceasefire in Gaza still holding and negotiations aimed at a second phase expected to begin this week.”The decisions we made in the war have already changed the face of the Middle East,” he said at the airport before his departure.”Our decisions and the courage of our soldiers have redrawn the map. But I believe that working closely with President Trump, we can redraw it even further and for the better.”Netanyahu, who faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court over allegations of war crimes in Gaza, had strained relations with Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden and has not visited the White House since returning to office at the end of 2022.
The Israeli prime minister’s office in a statement said that during the visit the two leaders will discuss “important issues, critical issues facing Israel and our region: victory over Hamas, achieving the release of all our hostages and dealing with the Iranian terror axis in all its components—an axis that threatens the peace of Israel, the Middle East and the entire world.”
“The fact that this would be President Trump’s first meeting with a foreign leader since his inauguration is telling,” the prime minister’s office declared. The meeting is a “testimony to the strength of the Israeli-American alliance,” the statement added.
President Trump’s first term was truly historic for Israel, which saw the U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish State and its sovereign right over the Golan Heights. In 2020, the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords framework established diplomatic relations between Israel and several Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco.
Israeli prime minister will be in Washington as a group of senior Hamas terrorists head to Russia, a key ally of Iran, the Gaza-based terror group’s paymaster. Since the October 7 massacre, President Vladimir Putin’s regime has been working behind the scenes to forge unity between Hamas and various Palestinian terrorist groups.
“The deputy head of the Hamas terror group’s political arm will lead a delegation to Moscow on Monday, the RIA state news agency reports, citing an unnamed source,” The Times of Israel reported. “Hamas politburo member Mousa Abu Marzouk and his delegation will hold negotiations at the Russian Foreign Ministry, the source in the delegation tells RIA.”
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