President Trump told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this weekend to “do whatever you want” after he vowed to “open the gates of hell” against Hamas if the Palestinian terror group doesn’t release all remaining hostages.
“I told Bibi, ‘You do whatever you want,” Trump, 78, told reporters after attending the opening of the Daytona 500 Sunday.
The president reiterated his support for the Netanyahu government and said the next step in the Middle East conflict was “up to Israel.”
Trump had warned last week that “all hell is going to break out” if Hamas did not release the dozens of remaining hostages captured in its Oct. 7, 2023, attack against the Jewish state.
The self-imposed deadline given by Trump for Hamas to return the last of the hostages was Saturday, which passed without any incident.
“My statement was they’ve got to come back,” the president told reporters at Palm Beach International Airport. “Now, the reason I made that statement was because they said they were not going to deliver … the people that they said they were going to deliver, that they agreed to deliver. And they did agree to do that, but they broke that agreement when I made the statement.”
“They delivered everybody, plus an American [Sagui Dekel-Chen]. Now the good news is they look like they’re in pretty good shape, because the people from the week before, it didn’t look like they were in good shape,” Trump went on. “They looked like Holocaust survivors, frankly, horrible. Whatever happened to them was horrible, but that will be up to Israel what the next step is, in consultation with me.”
Also Sunday, Netanyahu said he and Trump shared a strategy for the fate of the Gaza Strip after the president stunned the world by announcing plans for the US to take over the territory and redevelop it.
The drastic measure would see 2 million Palestinians removed from Gaza and sent to neighboring countries.
Trump added that the strategy, which the United Nations has described as “tantamount to ethnic cleansing,” and which both Egypt and Jordan have rejected, would see Gaza turned into a “Riviera of the Middle East.”
“It may have shocked and surprised many, but what we cannot continue is the same cycle where we repeat over and over again and wind up in the exact same place,” said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, addressing the controversy during a joint news conference with Netanyahu Sunday.
“This didn’t come as a surprise,” added the prime minister, saying Trump’s solution was “the only viable plan to enable a different future for the people of Gaza, for Israel, and for the region.”
