US Secretary of State calls Trump Gaza plan ‘bold’ in Jerusalem talks

Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, held talks on the future of the Middle East with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Sunday in his first visit to the region since taking office.

Topics ranged from US President Donald Trump’s controversial plan to remove Palestinians from Gaza and redevelop the Strip into a “Riviera of the Middle East” to Iran.

The meeting took place as the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel entered its fifth week today following yesterday’s release by the terrorist group of three more Israelis held captive and the freeing of 369 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.

The ceasefire had appeared to be hanging on a thread in the middle of the week after Hamas threatened to delay the exchange, prompting President Trump to warn that “all hell will break lose” if it did not go ahead.

After the meeting, Netanyahu said, who is making his first visit to the Middle East since taking office last month, said, he and Trump were “working in full cooperation and full coordination” on Gaza.

“We have a common strategy and we can’t always share details of this strategy with the public,” the Times of Israel quoting him as saying, adding that he “can’t share when the gates of hell will be opened, as they surely will if all our hostages are not released until the last one of them”.

No issue was “more important than Iran,” Netanyahu said “Israel and America stand shoulder to shoulder in countering the threat of Iran. We agree that the ayatollahs must not be allowed to have nuclear weapons. We also agreed that Iran’s aggression in the region has to be rolled back.”

With Trump’s support, he said, “we can and will finish the job.”

Describing Trump’s Gaza vision as “bold,” Rubio said. “Not the same old tired ideas of the past. Something that is new, something that frankly took courage and vision in order to outline. It may have surprised and shocked many, but what cannot continue is the same cycle to repeat over and over again and wind up in the exact same place.”

Hamas had to be “eradicated, it must be eliminated, he said.

Yesterday’s return of Russian-Israeli Sasha Troufanov, 29, American-Israeli Sagui Dekel-Chen and Argentinian-Israeli Yair Horn, 46 brings to 19 the number of Israeli hostages freed since the ceasefire came into effect on January 19.

Under the first phase of the deal, 33 Israelis are due to be freed over the course of six weeks — but eight are believed by Israel to be dead. Seventy of the hostages seized by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza.

Five Thai nationals were let go by Hamas last week, while Israel has released nearly 1,100 Palestinians.

After the Israel leg of his trip, Rubio is due to go to Egypt and the United Arab Emirates amid widespread outrage in the Arab world over Trump’s Gaza plan. Egypt has indicated it has its own plan for the reconstruction of Gaza.

Earlier in the week, Rubio said “hopefully” regional leaders were “going to have a really good plan to present to the president, but right now the only plan — they don’t like it — but the only plan is the Trump plan, so if they’ve got a better plan, you know, now is the time to present it.”