In Washington, Netanyahu announces he will nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize

U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met in Washington on Monday for the third time since the Republican president returned to power in January. The meeting took place amid renewed urgency by Trump to move forward with the peace agreement he proposed last week to end the war in Gaza. Trump received his guest in the Blue Room of the White House for dinner at a table where other diners included several members of the Trump administration, such as Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy, and Secretaries of State and Defense Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth. The Israeli delegation sat opposite. Netanyahu handed Trump a letter clearly intended to flatter him, in which he nominated the U.S. president for the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump has believed for years that he deserves the award.

“He’s forging peace, as we speak, in one country in the region after another,” the Israeli prime minister asserted before reporters, who were present for about 20 minutes before the closed-door dinner began. Netanyahu said he has sent the letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

It was the first time the two leaders had met since the U.S. president ordered a high-risk airstrike against three Iranian nuclear facilities, breaking with four and a half decades of U.S. containment policies toward its old rival. Both men agreed to sell the military operation as a shared success. It was also the first time both leaders were together since Trump announced a 60-day ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which he is pushing for both enemies to sign so he can score a diplomatic point.

Netanyahu asserted that he wants a peace agreement, but that it cannot include recognition of the Palestinian state. “We’ll work out a peace with our Palestinian neighbors—those who don’t want to destroy us. And we’ll work out a peace in which our security, the sovereign power of security, always in our hands. Now people will say, ‘It’s not a complete state, it’s not a state’… We don’t care.”

Trump, for his part, considered that “the situation in the Middle East is going to calm down considerably. [The countries in the region] respect us and Israel,” he added.

Among the topics planned for the White House dinner were, in addition to the war in Gaza, the status of Iran’s nuclear program following the end of the war launched by Israel, which Trump dubbed the “12-day war,” as well as the general situation in the Middle East. The U.S. president is confident that the show of force in Iran will force other countries to join the Abraham Accords, which allowed for the normalization of diplomatic relations between several Arab countries at the end of the Republican administration’s first term, during which Netanyahu visited the White House five times.

Netanyahu said the war against Iran, which he defined as an operation to remove “two tumors” that threatened Israel (the “ballistic” and the “nuclear” programs), could be the beginning of a historic expansion of the Abraham Accords. “Hezbollah has been brought to its knees. Iran is out of the picture. So I think this presents opportunities for stability, for security and eventually for peace,” Netanyahu added.

“I think we’re close to a deal on Gaza. Could have it this week,” Trump told reporters on Sunday. “We’ve gotten a lot of the hostages out, but pertaining to the remaining hostages, quite a few of them will be coming out.”

The president also said his administration is “working on a lot of things.” “One of them is ”probably a permanent agreement with Iran," referring to Iran’s nuclear program. He reiterated, despite the lack of evidence to support his assertion, that the U.S. attacks on the three uranium storage and enrichment facilities resulted in “total and complete obliteration” and that Iran “will have to start over from a different place.”

The meeting between the two leaders took place at the end of a day in which Israeli plans were revealed to establish a camp in the ruins of the city of Rafah, south of Gaza, to force the settlement of 600,000 Gazans. These facilities would initially be intended for Palestinians living in the Al Mawasi camp, in the southwest of the Strip and a frequent site of attacks by the occupation troops.

“If people want to stay, they can stay, but if they want to leave, they should be able to leave,” Netanyahu said in response to reporters’ questions about Trump’s plans for the future of Gaza, including the idea floated early this year of converting the territory into a luxury beachfront development. The Israeli prime minister said the U.S. president had a “brilliant vision,” ans especially praised suggestions that Gazans leave the territory entirely. “We are working with several countries to see if we can find those who will take them. We want to give the Palestinians a better future.” Trump then intervened to say that the U.S. is seeing ”great cooperation from several surrounding countries.”

A couple of hours before the dinner was due to begin, news broke of the deaths of several Israeli soldiers in an ambush in northern Gaza. Witkoff remarked that the event, which he described as “very tragic,” had been the focus of the evening’s early discussions. He said he hoped it would not hinder the ceasefire.

Before meeting with Trump, Netanyahu held meetings with Rubio and Witkoff, who, in addition to being Trump’s Middle East envoy, is the author of the ceasefire plan now on the table. The U.S. official is scheduled to travel to Doha, Qatar, on Friday to participate in talks on the peace agreement and the release of Israeli hostages still held by Hamas.

The meeting between Trump and Netanyahu was closely followed in Gaza, where the death toll from the Israeli military offensive has already exceeded 57,500, but also in Iran, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon, countries whose regional balance has been shaken, for various reasons, since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.

Trump’s proposal has the backing of Qatar and Egypt, both of which the U.S. administration relies on for its success. The starting point is a 60-day ceasefire during which an exchange of living and dead hostages still held by Hamas would begin in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. The process includes Israel’s withdrawal from several areas.

In exchange, Netanyahu will release a larger, yet-to-be-determined number of Palestinian prisoners. The proposal also stipulates, according to The Washington Post, that Hamas will not be allowed to televise the handover of the hostages, unlike in previous peace attempts, and that the U.S. president will be responsible for announcing the final ceasefire when it is reached.

The last truce was shattered last March after two months of calm, when Netanyahu ordered the renewal of attacks. In the background, the same red line remains for Israel: it wants a temporary truce and the return of the hostages, but its government refuses to commit to a definitive end to the war.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition