FILE : Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and former president Donald J. Trump at the White House in 2020.Doug Mills/The New York Times
The Israeli leader is scheduled to visit Mar-a-Lago in Florida before he returns home.
By Ephrat Livni
Republicans in Congress applauded often when Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, spoke at the Capitol on Wednesday. But the Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump, appeared less impressed with Israel’s messaging the next day.
Israel must end the war in Gaza “and get it done quickly,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News on Thursday. He argued that Israel was “getting decimated” by negative publicity over its conduct of the war, set off by the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel. Since then, more than 39,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza’s health authorities, and the war has wreaked widespread disease, hunger and destruction.
“Israel is not very good at public relations,” Trump said.
The comments came a day before a scheduled meeting on Friday between the former president and Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private residence and club in Palm Beach, Fla. But it is not clear that the Israeli prime minister — who praised the former president in his congressional address — would agree with Trump about wrapping up the conflict.
In his speech to U.S. lawmakers, Netanyahu vowed that Israel would fight until Hamas was eradicated. He did not say what many Israelis, especially the relatives of hostages in Gaza, wanted to hear: that he would close a cease-fire deal with Hamas to end the war and return about 115 people taken from Israel on Oct. 7 who remain in Gaza, several dozen of whom are believed to be dead
On Monday, the Israeli military announced that two of the remaining hostages were dead. On Thursday, the Israeli military announced that five hostages’ bodies had been found in tunnels in an operation in Khan Younis and returned to Israel from Gaza.
The steady drumbeat of bad news about the captives underscores the urgency of a deal for the hostages’ relatives, some of whom met with Netanyahu in Washington this week, including at a gathering with President Biden at the White House on Thursday. They expressed optimism about the possibility of a deal when they emerged from the meeting, and told reporters in a briefing that Netanyahu understood the urgency of the need for a cease-fire.
It is a point that Trump may make at Mar-a-Lago, too, telling Netanyahu what he told Fox News: “Finish up.”
But Netanyahu appeared to be in no hurry for truce . He reportedly is seeking changes to a plan for a Gaza truce and the release of hostages by Hamas, complicating a final deal to halt nine months of combat that have devastated the enclave, according to a Western official and a Palestinian and two Egyptian sources.
There are unconfirmed reports that Netanyahu may make an announcement about the truce following his meeting with Trump to boost Trump’s chances in the presidential race after VP Harris told Netanyahu to end the war and the suffering of the Palestinians and that she won’t me silent on the matter
NY TIMES/ YA LIBNAN
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