WASHINGTON/ NEW YORK: US President Donald Trump said he spoke with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday, with their conversation centering largely on trade.
“We talked about a lot of things, but mostly the world of trade,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.Meanwhile, US officials said the Trump administration’s strategy is to try to keep Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel from resuming an all-out assault against Hamas. The White House worked to hold together the Gaza peace deal on Monday as American officials said they were increasingly concerned that Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, could dismantle the U.S.-brokered agreement, the NYT reported.
Vice President JD Vance was headed to Israel, where he was to join Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East peace envoy, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, who were instrumental in brokering the deal. At the same time, President Trump warned that he would allow Israeli forces to “eradicate” Hamas if violence in the enclave continued.
Vance’s expected arrival was meant to add an extra symbolic layer to illustrate the administration’s commitment to keeping the deal intact. Several Trump officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, said there is concern within the administration that Netanyahu may vacate the deal. The strategy now, the officials say, is for Vance, Witkoff and Kushner to try to keep Netanyahu from resuming an all-out assault against Hamas.
Israel and Hamas have accused each other of violating the truce after repeated flare-ups of violence in recent days. But both sides have said they were still committed to maintaining the truce. Indeed, Trump has bucked Israeli declarations that Hamas had violated the agreement. On Monday, he characterized the current fighting in Gaza as a “rebellion” in Hamas that was not representative of the organization’s leadership. He said that some Hamas fighters “got very rambunctious,” but that if the violence continued, the United States would permit Israel to violently eliminate the organization.
Witkoff and Kushner acknowledge the situation is “very delicate” and the peace deal they negotiated is in danger of falling apart, according to a senior administration official. Their goals are to stabilize the situation, ensure the humanitarian aid is delivered in Gaza and make sure the remaining bodies of deceased Israeli hostages are returned to their families.
Witkoff and Kushner are also working on some of the trickier areas that were left undefined in their initial deal. Those include the creation of a stabilization force to be led by Egypt and beginning the demilitarization of Hamas, for which no timeline has been set.
One complication has been Hamas’s deadly crackdown on its rivals in Gaza since the deal, a development Trump at first praised as an effort to take out gangs but has since begun to question. Hamas must demilitarize as part of the deal, but getting to that point will be difficult. If Hamas appears to be backing off pledges to demilitarize, then Israel would have the full backing of the United States to violently eliminate the organization, Trump has said. The U.S. team is also working on bringing in developers to areas that Hamas no longer controls, creating tariff-free zones for rebuilding those parts of Gaza.