As Netanyahu and Trump meet in Washington, doubts remain about how much Israel’s leader wants to end the war
Freed Israeli hostages are holding emotional reunions and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are trying to restart their lives in obliterated Gaza communities, as the ceasefire deal announced Jan. 15 continues. But whether the tenuous calm comes to a crashing halt will hinge on key talks in Washington beginning Tuesday.
Benjamin Netanyahu will meet with U.S. President Donald Trump, and the outcome will be pivotal in determining whether the nearly 16-month war between Hamas and Israel moves to the next phase of the ceasefire, or if the fighting roars back to life.
“I think that actually there’s pressure being applied from D.C. on Netanyahu to get to Phase 2,” said H.A. Hellyer, a Middle East analyst with Britain’s Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
“The question will be how much leverage.”
Some Israeli families with loved ones still held hostage in Gaza fear whatever pressure the U.S. president is prepared to bring won’t be enough.
And they worry that Netanyahu may be deliberately setting up the ceasefire negotiations to fail to appease the far-right parties that keep him in power.
“Netanyahu and his associates haven’t stopped trying to sabotage the deal,” Dani Elgarat was quoted as saying by Israeli media, speaking at a Tel Aviv rally over the weekend. His brother, Itzik, is among the dozens of captives still held by the militant group, though he has said he believes his brother to be dead.
The families have cause to be worried, said Hellyer.
“I don’t think the Israelis want to end the war,” he told CBC News.
Hellyer said maintaining the status quo leaves a weakened Hamas in control of Gaza, but it also puts off having to make difficult decisions on how the territory is governed going forward.
In his public statements, Netanyahu has said any talk of sabotaging the ceasefire or abandoning the remaining Israeli hostages is nonsense.
As he left for Washington, Israel’s prime minister said his meetings with the U.S. president will focus on achieving “victory over Hamas,” the release of “all of our hostages” and to continue to “redraw” the map of the Middle East.
Trump, who has been busy launching trade wars against his closest neighbours Canada and Mexico, may have a somewhat different set of objectives in the Middle East.
Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak spoke to CBC News about some of the considerations in the Israel-Hamas ceasefire negotiations.
Saudi normalization
The U.S. president has long sought to broker a deal to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and two weeks into his term, he has indicated his desire to move forward quickly. The Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 derailed a previous attempt from the Biden administration to move forward on such a deal.
Last week, his Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff visited both Israel and Saudi Arabia, while also making a brief stop in Gaza.
Wikoff emerged as a crucial player in securing the initial ceasefire deal in January, reportedly pushing both Hamas and Israel to make concessions to get it done.
Saudi’s Crown Prince Prime Mohammed Bin Salman has repeatedly said there will be no rapprochement with Israel without a commitment to a Palestinian state. Representatives of several Arab nations made a similar statement this past weekend as part of a joint communique.
While Palestinians and their Arab supporters see a solution to the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an existential issue, for Trump, cementing the Saudi Arabia-Israel relationship is the main prize.
“Gaza is a stumbling block for that,” says Hellyer. “But I don’t think he sees Gaza as an issue in and of itself.”
Among Israelis, support for a “two-state solution” as a means of ending the 70-year conflict had already been slipping for years before the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023 that killed about 1,200 people.
Since then, most surveys suggest it’s at an all-time low.
A key member of Netanyahu’s cabinet, far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, said that while he supports a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia, it cannot be contingent on the creation of a Palestinian state.
Difficult compromises
Still, prominent Israeli supporters of the concept say Trump’s unpredictability, coupled with the prize of Saudi normalization, could end up pushing both Israel and Hamas to make compromises they might not otherwise be prepared to do.
While badly weakened by Israel’s incessant bombing attacks over the past year and a half, Hamas remains in control in Gaza, and its fighters staged brazen public appearances during the handover of the Israeli hostages over the past weeks.
“To the best of my judgment, he [Trump] is not looking for a new war, I think he looks at a much wider picture,” said Ehud Barak, 82, a former Israeli prime minister who tried and failed to negotiate a two-state solution with the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at Camp David in 2000.
“He may not be very tough with Netanyahu or Israel about details, but he may be quite rigid about the process he wants to lead.”
In an interview with CBC News at his home in Tel Aviv, Barak — a longtime political rival of Netanyahu — said he believes Israel will have to make concessions on how Gaza is governed in the future.
The Palestinian Authority, which currently serves as a form of municipal government in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has said it wants to take over from Hamas in Gaza — an arrangement Netanyahu’s government has adamantly rejected.
Replacing Hamas
Barak says Netanyahu may have little choice but to accept the PA in Gaza, if it means getting rid of Hamas. The Fatah-led Palestinian Authority lost control of Gaza to Hamas in the 2006 parliamentary election. Unlike the militant group, it has continued to advocate for non-violent confrontation and negotiations with Israel to secure a state.
“You have to replace Hamas with some other entity, another entity which is legitimate by international law and … by our Arab neighbours and by Palestinians themselves. And this entity cannot be but … a version of the Palestinian Authority,” he told CBC News.
Instead, many in Netanyahu’s government have been pushing to expand Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian areas by establishing settlements in Gaza and formally annexing large portions of the West Bank.
Barak says with either measure, Israel risks becoming either “non-Jewish” or “non-democratic,” as permanently denying Palestinians the same rights as Israeli Jews is not a democracy.
“For our own future, our own destiny, our own identity, we need to find a way to disengage the Palestinians — it’s not a subject to talk about in Hebrew right now, but it doesn’t cease to be the basic truth.”
Depending on the outcome of the Trump-Netanyahu discussions, negotiations over the details of Phase 2 could begin in Qatar later this week.
The goal is to have a deal on the future of Gaza along with the release of all the remaining Israeli hostages in place by Day 42, roughly 25 days from now.
In a commentary, Britain’s RUSI think-tank struck a positive note.
“With Saudi normalisation with Israel high on the U.S. wish list, and Saudi’s capacity to fund Gaza reconstruction, Saudi Arabia has what Trump craves in any deal — leverage.”