United States President Donald Trump has met Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House for a second time in 24 hours to discuss a possible ceasefire deal in Gaza.
The unscheduled talks on Tuesday evening lasted just over an hour, with no media access, and came as Israeli forces killed at least 95 Palestinians in Gaza.
The two men had also met for several hours during a dinner at the White House on Monday, during Netanyahu’s third visit to the US since the president began his second term on January 20.
Ahead of the talks on Tuesday, Trump said he would be speaking with Netanyahu “almost exclusively” about Gaza.
“We gotta get that solved. Gaza is – it’s a tragedy, and he wants to get it solved, and I want to get it solved, and I think the other side wants to,” he said.
Al Jazeera’s Mike Hanna, reporting from Washington, DC, said “very little information” has come out from the latest talks, so “it has been difficult to ascertain exactly what’s going on”.
“But the fact that it was so hermetically sealed, the fact that there has been no clear readout of what was discussed, the fact that the meeting lasted just over an hour – all of it may indicate that there’s some kind of stumbling block, something that is clouding the optimistic position that the two leaders have adopted over the past 24 hours,” Hanna said.
Shortly before Trump met Netanyahu, his special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, suggested a ceasefire deal in Gaza is close and said Washington hopes to see an agreement finalised by the end of the week.
He said the issues keeping Israel and Hamas from agreeing had now dropped to one from four.
“We are hopeful that by the end of this week, we’ll have an agreement that will bring us into a 60-day ceasefire. Ten live hostages will be released. Nine deceased will be released,” Witkoff told reporters at a meeting of Trump’s Cabinet.
But Netanyahu, speaking shortly afterwards, during a meeting with the speaker of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, said Israel’s campaign in the Palestinian enclave was not done and that negotiators are “certainly working” on a ceasefire.
“We have still to finish the job in Gaza, release all our hostages, eliminate and destroy Hamas’s military and government capabilities,” the Israeli leader said.
Israel’s plan for Gaza
Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Jordan, said Israeli media claim Netanyahu is facing “extreme pressure” from Trump to reach a deal on Gaza.
“But still, there’s been no breakthrough,” she said from the Jordanian capital, Amman.
“Israeli media is also talking about a delay in the travel plans of Witkoff to Doha, although earlier in the night, he had sounded very optimistic about possibly reaching a deal. Because according to him, only one issue remained problematic – which is, ‘Where will the Israeli army redeploy to?’” Odeh said.
“Now, this is important, because Israel wants to maintain control over the city of Rafah in southern Gaza. According to the Israeli minister of defence, Israel plans to build a tent city in Rafah, where it will concentrate the population, control who enters, not allow anyone to leave, and then push the population out of Gaza to implement, according to the Israelis, the Trump plan of depopulating Gaza and taking over the enclave,” she added.
The plan outlined by the Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, calls for the initial forcible transfer of some 600,000 Palestinians to the tent city, followed by the remainder of the enclave’s 2.1 million people.
Critics say the plan would then lead to Palestinians being forcibly transferred to other countries.
Annelle Sheline, a research fellow in the Middle East programme at the Quincy Institute, described the tent cities as “concentration camps” and said the Trump administration is unlikely to intervene in the Israeli plan.
“Washington has significant influence over the details, although we did see Trump demure when asked if he would support the transfer of the involuntary transfer of Palestinians out of Gaza, saying that people should look to Nanyahu for that,” Sheline said.
“We know the people Trump surrounds himself with tend to be sycophants and people who tell him what he likes to hear. So I don’t anticipate there are many people in Trump’s orbit who are telling him, not only would this be a horrific crime against humanity, to not only facilitate genocide, but then transfer the survivors outside of their land,” she said, adding that all of it also does “implicate the United States”.
For his part, Trump has strongly supported Netanyahu, even wading into domestic Israeli politics by criticising prosecutors over a corruption trial against the Israeli leader on bribery, fraud and breach-of-trust charges, which Netanyahu denies.
Netanyahu has meanwhile praised Trump, saying that there has never been closer coordination between the US and Israel in his country’s history, and even nominated the US leader for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Israel’s war in Gaza has killed at least 57,575 Palestinians and wounded 136,879 others. Most of Gaza’s population has been displaced by the war, and nearly half a million people are facing famine within months, according to United Nations estimates.
An estimated 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, and more than 200 were taken captive.
Some 50 captives remain in Gaza, with 20 believed to be alive.
