US President Donald Trump said Israel has to settle its war on Gaza “soon”, even as he refused to criticise the US’s ally for its devastating genocide in the enclave.
“Right now they’re talking about Gaza City – there’s always talking about something,” Trump said in the Oval Office during a meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung.
“At some point, it’s going to get settled, and I’m saying you better get it settled soon. You have to get it settled soon.”
For the first time since taking office, Trump gave a specific timeframe for when he imagined the war’s end.
“I think in the next two to three weeks, you’re gonna have a pretty conclusive ending,” he said before adding, “It’s a hard thing to say because they’ve been fighting for thousands of years.”
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Trump is known for his impromptu style, and other deadlines he has given to enact tariffs have come and gone.
In general, the Trump administration has shown no urgency to end Israel’s genocide and has backed Israel’s decision to launch a new assault on Gaza City, experts say.
Speaking alongside Trump at the White House, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US wants the war to end, but the stipulation is the removal of Hamas. “We want it to end. It has to end with no Hamas,” he said.
Despite a 22-month Israeli offensive following the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 attack on southern Israel, the Palestinian group continues to launch guerrilla-style attacks on Israeli forces. US officials said in January that Hamas had recruited almost as many fighters as Israel has killed.
Over 62,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, according to Palestinian health officials, the majority of them women and children.
Lack of political will
Trump’s remarks on Monday were in response to questions over Israel’s devastating double-tap strike on Nasser hospital in southern Gaza that killed at least 20 people, of whom five were journalists, including Middle East Eye reporters Mohamed Salama and Ahmed Abu Aziz.
The second part of the strike was caught vividly on camera by a Jordanian news station. The footage showed the obliteration of unarmed Palestinian rescue workers in safety vests trying to retrieve wounded people from the hospital.
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Trump said he didn’t know about the Israeli strike but said, “I’m not happy about it. I don’t want to see it.”
Instead of addressing the deaths of Palestinians, however, Trump returned to talking about the Israeli captives still held in Gaza.
Israel says there are 20 captives still in the enclave – all military-aged men – but Trump has repeatedly said that number is less.
Experts say that Trump sees the negotiations solely through the prism of releasing captives and appears to have little interest in underwriting a broader ceasefire and political settlement in the Gaza Strip.
“The ceasefire for Trump, like most American politicians, has always been about the hostages. If Palestinian lives are saved as a result, that’s a good thing. If the war ends, that’s fine. But it’s not the goal. After all, they are only Palestinians. There is no payoff for Trump,” Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, previously told Middle East Eye.
Egypt and Qatar drafted a 60-day ceasefire proposal last week that would see Hamas release 10 Israeli captives in exchange for a truce and the release of Palestinian prisoners. Hamas agreed to the terms, but Israel rejected them.
Experts have said that with no US pressure to come to the table, Netanyahu’s government – which includes powerful ministers in finance and national security posts who want to re-settle Gaza – has no reason to cut a deal.
At the same time, the US has been participating in talks that might harden Israel’s position, with US officials seeking out third countries that would accept Gaza’s forcibly displaced Palestinians. MEE reported that the US has discussed the topic with Libya.
Trump said on Monday that a “very serious diplomatic push” to end the war was underway, but didn’t provide details.
“It’s got to get over with because, between the hunger and all of the other problems – worse than hunger, death, pure death – people being killed,” Trump said.
Gaza Humanitarian Foundation
The irony for Trump – a self-declared “America First” president – is that by failing to force an end to the genocide, he has had to step up the US’s involvement in Gaza with American mercenaries and a controversial US-funded aid group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), distributing food in the enclave.
“We’re sending a lot of food to Gaza and we’re feeding a lot of people, but with all that said, it’s a lot of people to feed,” he said.
A United Nations-backed watchdog officially declared last week that Gaza had entered a famine. The GHF has been widely discredited among aid organisations. Palestinians are regularly gunned down by Israeli and US mercenaries as they try to retrieve food from fortified GHF sites.
Over 900 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid at GHF sites, while the total number of deaths at combined aid sites across the strip is over 2,000.
