Benjamin Netanyahu met Donald Trump at the US president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Monday amid growing fears Israel could launch new offensives against regional enemies, potentially plunging the Middle East further into instability.
High on the agenda will be the ceasefire in Gaza, which in October halted the devastating two-year-long war. Though the terms agreed for an initial phase have been largely completed, with Israel’s forces pulling back to new positions and Hamas releasing all living and all but one of the dead hostages, immense challenges face the implementation of the second phase of the president’s 20-point plan.
After warmly greeting Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago, Trump told reporters that he hopes to reach phase two of the Gaza plan “very quickly” but warned “there has to be a disarming of Hama”. The president also lied by claiming that “just about” every hostage was released because of him and his team, whereas “none” was released during the Joe Biden administration.
There are fears Israel will launch new offensives against Hezbollah in Lebanon, breaking a ceasefire established more than a year ago, or against Iran, which it accuses of accelerating the manufacture of ballistic missiles in recent months.
Asked about the prospect of a fresh attack on Iran, Trump said: “I hear that Iran is trying to build up again, and if they are, we’re going to have to knock them down – we’ll knock them down, we’ll knock the hell out of them. But hopefully that’s not happening. I heard Iran wants to make a deal. If they want to make a deal, that’s much smarter. You know, they could have made a deal the last time, before we did a big attack on them.”
The Israeli prime minister is making his fifth visit to see Trump in the US this year. The leaders lavished praise on each other, signalling a desire to move past recent friction between the two countries. Netanyahu said: “We’ve never had a friend like President Trump in the White House. It’s not even close.”
Trump said Netanyahu had done a “phenomenal job” and “Israel wouldn’t exist without him”. He also claimed he had spoken to the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, who told him that a pardon for Netanyahu in his long-running corruption trial was “on its way”. Trump said: “He’s a wartime prime minister who’s a hero. How do you not give a pardon?”
Gershon Baskin, the co-head of the peace-building commission at the Alliance for Two States, who has taken part in back-channel negotiations with Hamas, said the timing of Netanyahu’s trip was “very significant” for Gaza.
“Phase 1 is basically over, there’s one remaining Israeli deceased hostage which [Hamas] are having difficulty finding,” he said.
Both sides accuse each other of ceasefire violations. Hamas has failed explicitly to commit to disarmament and has had considerable success in imposing its authority in the parts of Gaza where almost all the population is concentrated. Israel appears reluctant to withdraw from the 53% of Gaza it now controls or to allow free passage of aid into the territory.
“Phase 2 has to begin … and I think the Americans realise that it’s late because Hamas has had too much time to re-establish its presence and this is certainly not a situation that the Americans want to leave in place,” Baskin said.
More than 70,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, died in Gaza during the war and almost all the territory’s 2.3 million population was displaced. About 400 Palestinians have died in Gaza since the October ceasefire, and huge numbers continue to live in conditions of acute hardship.
In recent weeks, heavy rain and cold temperatures have compounded the suffering in Gaza, where most housing and infrastructure have been badly damaged or razed.
The war was triggered by a surprise attack by Hamas in southern Israel in 2023, in which 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed and 250 others abducted.
Under the next stages of Trump’s plan, an interim authority made up of nonaligned Palestinian technocrats is to govern the Palestinian territory instead of Hamas and an international stabilisation force (ISF) of thousands of troops is to be deployed.
Hamas’s armed wing reiterated on Monday that it would not surrender its weapons.
“Our people are defending themselves and will not give up their weapons as long as the occupation remains,” the new spokesperson for the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, who has adopted the name of his late predecessor Abu Obeida, said in a video statement.
US officials have suggested the composition of the new authority could be announced in January.
On Friday, the US news outlet Axios reported senior Trump officials were growing frustrated “as Netanyahu has taken steps to undermine the fragile ceasefire and stall the peace process”. Analysts in Israel and overseas agree.
“There are more and more signs that the American administration is getting frustrated with Netanyahu,” said Yossi Mekelberg, a Middle East expert at the London-based thinktank Chatham House.
“The question is what it’s going to do about it, because phase 2 is right now going nowhere,” Mekelberg added.
For Netanyahu, a priority will be convincing Trump to allow Israel to act to prevent Iran from repairing the damage inflicted on its nuclear programme in its short war with Israel and the US this summer, or building its ballistic missile capabilities.
The Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said on Saturday that his country was in a full-scale war with the US, Israel and Europe. He added that the conflict was “more complicated and more difficult” than the Iran-Iraq war, which left more than 1 million casualties on both sides.
Meanwhile, efforts to secure a security agreement between Israel and Syria have failed to make significant progress and will also be on the agenda at Mar-a-Lago, local media in Israel said. Israeli officials have also called for more effective efforts to disarm Hezbollah in accordance with the 2024 ceasefire in Lebanon.
Standing alongside Netanyahu on Monday, Trump commented: “The new president of Syria is working very hard to do a good job, he really is… You’re not going to get a choir boy to lead Syria … So, I hope they’re going to get along.”
Netanyahu faces an election within 10 months, and the looming polls will influence his agenda, Mekelberg said. “Everything is connected to [his] staying in power,” he said.
Polls show Netanyahu’s current coalition would struggle to form a government if elections were held now, with many voters angry over the failures that led to the Hamas raid of 2023, moves to continue the exemption of most ultra-Orthodox Jewish men from compulsory military service in Israel and a series of scandals among other issues.
A close relationship with Trump would reinforce Netanyahu’s appeal among undecided voters and his base, and this suggests any public disagreement between the two leaders is extremely unlikely, analysts said.
Netanyahu is expected to seek to convince Trump of the need for Israel, which relies on the US for many of its defence needs, to maintain a military technological edge over potential regional enemies. Many Israeli officials were shaken when Trump said this year that he would allow the sale of F-35 fighter planes to Saudi Arabia, which he described as a “great ally”. The state-of-the-art stealth aircraft was key to Israel’s successes against Iran in this summer’s war.
