TIMES OF ISRAEL
Former US president Donald Trump has told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he wants Israel to wrap up the war in Gaza by the time he returns to office if he wins the election, two sources familiar with the matter revealed to The Times of Israel this week.
The message was first conveyed when the Republican presidential nominee hosted the Israeli premier at his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort in July, according to a former Trump administration official and an Israeli official.
While Trump has publicly confirmed having told Netanyahu that he wants Israel to win the war quickly, the sources speaking to The Times of Israel are the first to reveal that a timeline was attached to that request.
The former US official stressed that Trump wasn’t specific in his appeal to Netanyahu and could well back “residual” IDF activity in Gaza, so long as Jerusalem has officially ended the war.
Netanyahu has long stressed that Israel will maintain overriding security control of Gaza for the foreseeable future after the war, and other Israeli officials have spoken about the IDF maintaining a buffer zone inside the Strip while regularly re-entering areas throughout the enclave when it detects Hamas trying to regroup.
But the prime minister indicated on Monday that Israel is not yet at the conflict wrap-up stage, telling Likud MKs in a quickly leaked recording from a faction meeting that he cannot agree to Hamas’s demand to end the war in exchange for the 101 hostages it still holds.
Trump in recent weeks has indicated that he’d give Israel freer reign to make decisions, slamming US President Joe Biden for trying to restrict the potential targets of Jerusalem’s retaliation to Iran’s October 1 ballistic missile attack.
The former US official clarified that the pre-inauguration day victory that Trump wants Israel to secure in Gaza also includes the return of the hostages.
Trump, himself, warned at the Republican National Convention in July that those holding American hostages abroad will “pay a very big price” if they aren’t released before he assumes office.
The Trump campaign and Netanyahu’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Trump and Netanyahu have spoken several times since their July Mar-a-Lago meeting, and Trump said last week that the prime minister had just called him two days in a row.
Earlier this month, two senior Israeli officials told The Times of Israel that they were concerned about Trump’s repeated calls for Israel to end the Gaza war quickly, fearing an inability to do so will lead to a clash if the former US president wins next week’s election and returns to office in January.
“There are internal political constraints to ending the war quickly,” one of the Israeli officials from the security establishment said at the time.
While declining to elaborate, he appeared to refer to the makeup of Netanyahu’s coalition, which includes far-right elements who have opposed hostage deal proposals conditioned on a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
There is also near-unanimity within the Netanyahu government against allowing the Palestinian Authority to play a role in the governance of Gaza. A second Israeli official said this has contributed to the war dragging on, as Jerusalem struggles to find a viable alternative to fill the power vacuum in Gaza, thereby allowing Hamas to regain its footing in areas where the IDF has left.
