PM meets Witkoff on talks logjam as Trump says Hamas surrender will end Gaza’s woes

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met on Thursday with United States special envoy Steve Witkoff to discuss the ongoing war in Gaza and stalled hostage talks, as US President Donald Trump urged Hamas’s surrender to ease the humanitarian crisis in the Strip.

The Prime Minister’s Office published a pair of pictures of Netanyahu and Witkoff speaking at the premier’s office in Jerusalem, but did not immediately release details on the meeting.

Trump, Witkoff, and Netanyahu have all blamed Hamas’s intransigence for the impasse in the talks mediated by the US, Qatar, and Egypt. Nonetheless, the US envoy is expected to press Netanyahu for concessions in hopes of putting negotiations back on track.

After pulling their negotiators from talks in Qatar last week, US and Israeli leaders promised to explore new ways to bring home the 50 hostages still held in Gaza, 20 of whom are believed to be alive.

Among the potential options floated is the annexation of parts of the enclave, a move that would be difficult to reverse in the future. Under Israeli law, withdrawing from territory that has been formally annexed requires either the support of 80 lawmakers in the Knesset or a national referendum.

The White House announced later that Witkoff and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee will enter Gaza on Friday in order to tour food distribution sites ahead of the rollout of a new US plan for getting aid into the Strip. It appeared to be referring to distribution sites run by the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

Witkoff and Huckabee held a “very productive” meeting with Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials on the topic of getting aid into Gaza, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a press briefing.

During Friday’s visit the two senior US officials will “inspect the current distribution sites [to] secure a plan to deliver more food and meet with local Gazans to hear firsthand about this dire situation on the ground,” Leavitt said.

Immediately after their visit, Witkoff and Huckabee will brief Trump “to approve a final plan for food and aid distribution,” the White House press secretary said, adding that more details will be provided once the plan is approved.

Trump announced on Monday that new food centers would be established in Gaza to alleviate the hunger crisis. He provided few details on the matter, other than saying that there would be no fences at the sites so that Palestinians wouldn’t be blocked from accessing food.

On Tuesday, he said that Israel would be responsible for managing the sites — something that the IDF has been reluctant to do, fearing that it would put troops in danger.

It wasn’t clear whether Trump was referring to GHF that would run the sites. Israel has contracted the American organization to run food distribution centers for the past two months, as it tries to box Hamas out of the process.

It would mark Witkoff’s second trip to Gaza this year, after he visited the Netzarim Corridor area in the Strip in late January, becoming the most senior US official to visit the territory in over a decade.

After blocking all aid from entering the Strip between March and May, Israel has relied heavily on the GHF, which was created to avoid aid being diverted to Hamas, for distribution.

However, GHF sites have seen near-daily incidents in which IDF troops have shot at Gazans, in what the military has presented as deadly crowd control incidents. The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 1,000 people have been killed near the GHF sites, though Israel says the toll is exaggerated.

Meanwhile, Trump said Thursday that, in order to end the ongoing hunger in Gaza, the Hamas terror group should surrender and release the 50 hostages it is holding, 49 of whom were kidnapped during the October 7, 2023, massacre that sparked the war in Gaza. The other is an IDF soldier killed in Gaza in 2014, whose body has been held by Hamas since then.

“The fastest way to end the Humanitarian Crises in Gaza is for Hamas to SURRENDER AND RELEASE THE HOSTAGES!!!” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.

The comments marked a change in tone compared to those he made earlier this week, when he said that Israel could do more to bring food into Gaza and that he was not convinced by Jerusalem’s claims that there was no starvation in the Strip.

Israel has said there is no widespread famine in Gaza, asserting that the photos are of isolated cases or are misleading, but still started earlier this week to pause all fighting in large swaths of the Strip for 10 hours each day, while facilitating a surge of aid by land and air.

Israel has denied using hunger as a weapon of war and has accused the United Nations and other aid agencies of failing to pick up and distribute supplies delivered to Gaza’s border crossing points.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot on Thursday blasted the GHF and urged it to cease activity due to the reported bloodshed within the vicinity of its centers.

“I want to call for the cessation of the activities of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the militarized distribution of humanitarian aid that has generated a bloodbath in distribution lines in Gaza, which is a scandal, which is shameful, and has to stop,” Barrot told reporters after meeting his Cypriot counterpart in Nicosia.

The comments came as Israel’s European allies have been searching for ways to pressure Israel to alleviate the humanitarian situation in Gaza and to end the war. Several have said they will soon unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state.

The ongoing war began with the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, massacre, in which invaders killed some 1,200 people in southern Israel and took 251 hostages.

The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says at least 60,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified. As of January, Israel said it had killed some 20,000 combatants in battle, and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 onslaught.

Israel says it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques. Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 459.