Trump’s Middle East envoy to enter Gaza as part of ‘inspection team’ | News about Donald Trump

Washington, DC – US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, has announced that he will visit Gaza in the coming days as part of what he called an “inspection team” to monitor the ceasefire agreement reached between Israel and Hamas last week.

During an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Witkoff said he will tour two Israeli-held Gaza zones as part of an upcoming trip to Israel.

“I will be part of the inspection team on the Netzarim Corridor and also on the Philadelphia Corridor,” Witkoff said. “You’ve got outside supervisors there, kind of making sure people are safe and that people coming in aren’t armed, and that nobody has bad motives.”

The Netzarim Corridor separates the northern and southern Gaza Strip and has been occupied by Israeli forces since they invaded the Palestinian enclave in late October 2023. The Philadelphia Corridor runs between southern Gaza and Egypt. The Israeli army took “operational control” of the area in May last year.

The trip will be the envoy’s first visit to the Middle East since Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire agreement on January 15. Witkoff, businessman s without previous diplomatic experiencehe previously joined the talks in Qatar that led to the deal.

It will also be Witkoff’s first trip since Trump took office on Monday. Since his inauguration, Trump has said he has little confidence that the deal will stick. The deal came into effect on Sunday, and the Israeli sniper did as well a day later killed the child in Rafah, in an incident captured on video.

“We have to make sure that the implementation goes well, because if it goes well, we’re going to go into the second phase and we’re going to get a lot more live bodies out,” Witkoff said, referring to the Israeli prisoners in Gaza.

“And I think that’s what the president has given me and everybody else who works in the US government on this.”

Agreement in three phases

There is a cease-fire agreement three phases. Only the implementation of the first phase has begun.

Over the next six weeks, that phase should see a lull in the fighting; the partial withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, including the Netzarim corridor; and an increase in aid to the enclave.

Fifteen months of war in Gaza left the enclave razed to the ground and the vast majority of its population displaced. The United Nations has repeatedly warned of an imminent famine in northern Gaza, and its experts are compared Israeli war tactics to genocide.

In all, there were at least 47,107 Palestinians killed in Gaza as of October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel killed 1,139 people and captured more than 200.

The first phase of the ceasefire is also intended to release 33 Israeli prisoners from Gaza and about 1,000 Palestinians from Israeli custody. So far, three Israeli prisoners and 90 Palestinian prisoners have been freed.

The second and third phases have been agreed in principle, but negotiations on the details are ongoing. In the second phase, the remaining Israeli prisoners are expected to be released in exchange for the “complete withdrawal” of Israeli forces from Gaza.

That goal would run counter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s previous pledges to maintain control of security in Gaza indefinitely after the war. Far-right members of Netanyahu’s government have also called for a return to fighting after the end of the first phase.

Details of the third phase are less clear, but reportedly include plans for a multi-year reconstruction of Gaza and the return of the bodies of prisoners.

The current deal does not include agreements on who will govern Gaza after the war.

‘I’m not sure’

Witkoff spoke to Fox News a day after Trump told reporters he was “not convinced” the ceasefire agreement would hold.

“It is not our war. It’s their war. But I’m not sure,” Trump told reporters during a photo opportunity at the White House. “I was looking at a picture of Gaza. Gaza is like a massive demolition site.”

The US president, whose first term runs from 2017 to 2021, has demanded a cease-fire agreement between Hamas and Israel before his inauguration day, promising “hell to pay” if he doesn’t get one.

It was not immediately clear how Trump would respond if Israel scrapped the deal.

Trump has generally been more amenable to Israeli interests than his predecessor, former President Joe Biden.

Still, the Biden administration has pledged “unwavering” support for Israel and refused to use the billions of dollars in military aid the US gives Israel in exchange for a ceasefire.

Both Trump and Biden took credit for reaching this month’s ceasefire agreement.

As he begins his second term, Trump is expected to expand US support for Israel. His administrationfor example, it is full of pro-Israel hawks, including supporters of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

It already is peeled back Biden-era sanctions on Israeli settler groups accused of violence against Palestinians.

Still, Trump has promised to be a global peacemaker and end conflicts abroad as part of his “America First” agenda.

Speaking Wednesday, Witkoff credited Trump’s “peace through strength” approach as the driving force behind the truce, while acknowledging that the new administration was not involved in the “math” that made up the terms of the deal.

A renewed push for normalization

Witkoff also said he hoped to restart the Israeli-Arab normalization efforts that Trump spearheaded during his first term, to make Israel less diplomatically isolated.

The so-called Abraham Accords established diplomatic ties with Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Sudan, but the negotiations have been widely criticized for sidelining Palestinian interests.

Experts also said that the future of Abraham’s agreement was thrown into doubt amid regional anger over the war in Gaza.

Still, Witkoff said he believes the long-elusive normalization deal with Saudi Arabia may yet be reached. He went further, saying he believed every country in the region could “join” such a deal.

“My own view is that the conditional precedent for normalization was a ceasefire,” Witkoff said. “We needed to make people believe again.”

Asked to name which other countries he thought would be open to a deal, Witkoff pointed to Qatar, praising its role as a mediator in the Gaza talks.

Qatar has repeatedly rejected the possibility of normalizing relations with Israel.