President Donald Trump repeated his claims that the next phase of the Gaza ceasefire plan is imminent ahead of a highly anticipated meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday in Florida.

While progress on the U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel in October has been slow moving, with both Israel and Hamas accusing the other of failing to uphold their end of the bargain, Trump appeared eager to find ways to speed up the peace process as he stood beside Netanyahu Monday afternoon.

When asked by a reporter how quickly Trump hoped to move into phase two of the ceasefire plan, he replied “as quickly as we can” before stipulating that the next phase was contingent upon Hamas disarming.

But later, when asked by another reporter whether the reconstruction of Gaza will begin before Hamas is disarmed, Trump replied, “I think it’s going to begin pretty soon,” adding that he and Netanyahu were “looking forward to it.”

“Look what a mess it is, and it’s been a mess for centuries, really, it’s been a mess for a long time. It seems to be born for that, but we’re gonna straighten it out,” said Trump of the enclave. “We’re already starting certain things, we’re doing things for sanitary conditions and others, but Gaza is a tough place. You know the expression ‘it’s a tough neighborhood,’ it’s truly a tough neighborhood.”

At another press conference following the meeting, which lasted roughly two hours, Trump said that Hamas would be given “a very short period of time to disarm.”

“If they don’t disarm as as they agreed to do, they agreed to it, and then they’ll be held to pay for them, and we don’t want that, we’re not looking for that, but they have to disarm within a fairly short period of time, withdrawing its force,” said Trump. Later, Trump said that the other countries who backed the ceasefire deal would “wipe out Hamas” if the terror group does not disarm.

Following the meeting, Trump also appeared to revive his past proposal for Palestinians in Gaza to voluntarily leave the enclave, a plan that received a chorus of condemnation when he first broached the subject in February.

“I’ve always said it, I said if they were given the opportunity to live in a better climate, they would move,” said Trump, referring to Palestinians in Gaza. “They’re there because they sort of have to be. I think it would be, I think it’d be a great opportunity, but let’s see if that opportunity presents itself.”

Over two months after all 20 living hostages were returned to Israel as part of the first phase of the ceasefire deal, the remains of only one deceased hostage, Ran Gvili, remain in Gaza.

The next phase, which would include Israel and Hamas losing authority in Gaza and the establishment of a “Board of Peace” to oversee the enclave’s future, is expected to begin once Gvili is returned.

“It’s the only one left, and we’re doing everything we can to get his body back,” said Trump of Gvili. “And the parents just said, hopefully he’s alive. And I said I’d love you to think that way.”

Later, Trump also repeated his false claim that no hostages were released from Gaza under the Biden administration. In November 2023, 105 hostages, mainly women and children, were released during a temporary truce.

Beyond pressure from Washington to initiate the next phase of the ceasefire, the pair were also expected to discuss a host of other topics, ranging from Iran’s alleged nuclear capabilities to Israel’s relations with Turkey and Syria.

When asked whether Trump would ask Netanyahu to sign an agreement with Syria amid tensions between the two countries, Trump responded, “I hope he’s going to get along with Syria.”

Following the meeting, Trump said that the was “sure” that Israel and Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa will “get along,” an assertion that Netanyahu appeared to back.

“Our interest is to have a peaceful border with Syria,” said Netanyahu. “We want to make sure that the border area right next to our border is safe. We don’t have terrorists, we don’t have attacks.”

Trump also appeared to respond positively when asked whether he expected Turkish forces to be stationed in Gaza, a proposal that Israel has sought to block. (Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been overtly hostile to Israel over the course of the war in Gaza.)

“I have a great relationship with President Erdogan, and we’ll be talking about it, and if it’s good, I think that’s good, and a lot will be having to do with Bibi,” said Trump. “We’re going to be talking about that, but Turkey has been great.”

Later during the press conference, Trump expressed his openness to launching an assault on Iran amid reports that the gulf nation is seeking chemical and biological warheads for its ballistic missiles. In June, the United States joined Israel’s conflict with Iran and bombed three sites in the country, a strike that it claimed had “obliterated” its nuclear capabilities.

“Now I hear that Iran is trying to build up again, and if they are, we’re going to have to knock them down,” said Trump. “We’ll knock them down. We’ll knock the hell out of them, but hopefully that’s not happening. I heard Iran wants to make a deal. If they want to make a deal, that’s much smarter.”

When asked by a reporter whether he sought to “overthrow” the Iranian regime, Trump replied, “I’m not going to talk about overthrow of a regime.” But when asked by a reporter whether he would support an Israeli attack on Iran if the country continues to develop ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, Trump responded “absolutely.”

The meeting between Netanyahu and Trump also comes as Trump has called for Israeli President Isaac Herzog to pardon Netanyahu, who currently has three legal cases open against him, on charges of fraud, bribery and breach of trust.

Responding to a question about the potential for a pardon, Trump claimed that Herzog had said the pardon was “on its way.”

“He’s a wartime Prime Minister who’s a hero, how do you not give a pardon? You know, I think it’s a very hard thing not to do it,” said Trump. “I spoke to the president and he tells me it’s on its way. You can’t do better than that, right?”

Following Trump’s remarks, Herzog’s office issued a statement stating that there had been no talks between him and Trump since the American leader wrote to Herzog advocating for a pardon in November.

“There has been no conversation between President Herzog and President Trump since the pardon request was submitted,” Herzog’s office said in a statement.

At the end of the press conference, before the two leaders entered Mar-a-Lago in an embrace, Netanyahu responded to the only question posed to him: “What makes President Trump such a strong friend to the State of Israel?”

“I think Israel is very blessed to have President Trump leading the United States, and I’ll say leading the free world at this time,” said Netanyahu, reiterating his long-held praise for the leader. “I think it’s not merely Israel’s great fortune. I think it’s the world’s great fortune.”

Trump then took his turn at the question, telling reporters that the Israeli leader could be “very difficult on occasion.”

“Bibi’s a strong man. He can be very difficult on occasion, but you need a strong man,” said Trump. “If you had a weak man, you wouldn’t have Israel right now….Israel, with most other leaders, would not exist today.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Trump, hosting Netanyahu in Florida, says next phase of Gaza ceasefire plan will begin ‘as quickly as we can’ appeared first on The Forward.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying a new technique to avoid accountability for the Oct. 7, 2023 attack: pretending — but not very convincingly — to invite it.

Netanyahu has spent more than two years blocking the establishment of an independent inquiry commission led by a Supreme Court justice, a step that has been normative following calamities in Israel since 1968. After Hamas invaded and massacred close to 1,200 people, kidnapping some 250 to Gaza, Israelis almost universally assumed this path would be followed.

Instead, Netanyahu’s government has recently moved to establish a government commission that would have representatives from both the coalition and opposition,  politicizing a process that is supposed to be impartial. And amid these machinations came the most revealing and credible portrait yet of Netanyahu’s mindset immediately after the attack. Eli Feldstein, a former close aide and spokesperson to Netanyahu, said in a televised interview aired last week that right after the Hamas assault, Netanyahu’s first instruction to him was to figure out how he could evade responsibility.

“He asked me, ‘What are they talking about in the news? Are they still talking about responsibility?’” Feldstein, who now faces trial for allegedly leaking classified information, recalled. The “first task,” Netanyahu had in mind after the massacre, Feldstein said, was to stifle calls for accountability and craft messaging that would offset the media storm.

Even allowing for Feldstein’s legal complications, the story has the ghastly ring of truth— in part because of the entire inquiry farce.

A real inquiry would likely deliver harsh conclusions about Netanyahu’s misguided strategy of coddling Hamas; his failure to heed intelligence before Oct. 7; the staggering human cost of the war that followed; the failure to dismantle Hamas despite two years of brutal fighting; Israel’s growing international isolation; and Netanyahu’s repeated rejection of diplomatic exit ramps.

It is obvious that a commission dealing with such explosive matters must not be controlled by the very people it will judge. Yet that is exactly the system Netanyahu has engineered, while arguing that a state inquiry would be stacked against him. Most Israelis see the attempted whitewash clearly, and some three quarters of the public have consistently said they want a state commission.

Realistically, Netanyahu is hoping the opposition will refuse to appoint its own members or cooperate in any way, enabling him to campaign in the 2026 elections on the claim that his rivals blocked the inquiry. That is a shameless strategy — and entirely consistent with his system.

A complete failure

The facts that would confront any serious investigation are not controversial.

On Oct. 7, 2023, the Gaza border was left almost completely unprotected. This, even though warnings of an imminent attack were abundant. Senior security officials had grown alarmed amid multiple intelligence assessments suggesting Hamas could be planning an assault. In the weeks — and even days — before Oct. 7, Israel’s three top security chiefs sought urgent meetings with the prime minister. They wanted to warn him that the unprecedented internal rift he was driving through Israeli society with his judicial overhaul was inviting attack.

Netanyahu refused to meet with them.

Then terrorists breached the border with ease and overran communities. The state and military failed to respond in a timely or organized fashion.

What worked, in those first critical hours and days, was not the government. It was the efforts of citizens. Volunteers. Reservists who rushed south without orders. Individual officers who grasped the scale of the catastrophe and acted on instinct and conscience. For days, the country was in chaos. Many assumed the government would fall.

This was a total failure. And it was built on Netanyahu’s prior policy of deliberately empowering Hamas. For years, he facilitated Qatari funding into Gaza and treated its rule as strategically useful because it divided Palestinian leadership and weakened the Palestinian Authority. He aimed to ensure there would be no credible Palestinian interlocutor with whom the international community might pressure Israel to negotiate a two-state solution. The danger of Hamas controlling Gaza, he believed, was preferable to the risks that would be required to achieve peace.

Under those circumstances, the judgment of a serious inquiry, as regards the government, is not in doubt. That is why Netanyahu’s current strategy is not to totally avoid accountability, but rather to dissolve it — to spread guilt so thinly that it disappears.

A dangerous slide into surrealism

This is where the government’s current arguments slide from cynical to dangerous. Among the more surreal claims now circulating is the suggestion that Israel’s judicial system bears responsibility for Oct. 7.

On a recent television panel in which I participated, Environment Minister Idit Silman said, without the slightest shame, that the Supreme Court cannot be trusted to appoint a State Commission of Inquiry because the court itself must be investigated. He implied that the current president of the Supreme Court — appointed automatically by seniority, precisely to prevent politicization — is himself criminally suspect. This claim is absurd, unsupported and revealing. It exists for one reason only: to delegitimize the one institution capable of appointing an inquiry beyond the government’s control.

Netanyahu’s allies now argue that the public no longer trusts the courts, and therefore the courts lack legitimacy to appoint an inquiry commission. They are recasting past rulings that imposed even minimal ethical constraints on military conduct, or sought to prevent outright massacres of Palestinians, as contributing causes of Oct. 7.

The truth is that public trust in the Supreme Court, which historically ranked just below the military among Israeli institutions, only began eroding because of attacks by Netanyahu and his surrogates. Since a criminal corruption investigation against him was first announced, they have systematically attacked the police, prosecutors and the judiciary.

Now the government points to the damage it caused as justification for sidelining the court altogether. It is, quite plainly, sabotage of Israel’s democracy and rule of law.

An independent judiciary is a strategic asset. It is what allows Israel to argue credibly that it can investigate itself — and therefore that foreign courts need not intervene on questions of war crimes or human rights, which sadly abound. Undermine that credibility, and Israel weakens itself internationally.

But it’s not just the judiciary. The government also insists that the opposition must be investigated too, going all the way back to the 1993 Oslo Agreements that set up the Palestinian Authority — because they once sat in government. The civil service must be investigated as well — because it implements policy. Netanyahu-aligned social media accounts have been peddling absurd conspiracy theories about the Shin Bet helping Hamas on Oct. 7 in order to harm Netanyahu. The end message: Everyone must be investigated — which is another way of saying that since everyone is responsible, no one is especially responsible.

This is the classic trickery of liars and crooks: Everyone is guilty of something, so no one is uniquely guilty, especially not the leader who held power for most of the past 15 years. But the truth is that authority concentrates at the top, and so must accountability.

Netanyahu’s strategy rests on the assumption that he can fool enough of the people enough of the time to cling to power. It has often worked for him, to Israel’s great detriment. All we can hope is that this new scheme will be a bridge too far. If Netanyahu’s coalition is ousted in upcoming elections, the next government will establish a real inquiry. Justice, even if delayed, will ultimately be done.

The post It’s a classic trick of liars and crooks — and it’s shaping Israel’s response to war and disaster appeared first on The Forward.

Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens ramped up their anti-Israel and, in some cases, overtly antisemitic content over the last year, according to a new study, which tracked the prominent far-right podcasters’ disproportionate emphasis on attacking the Jewish state in 2025.

The Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), a think tank based in Israel, used artificial intelligence to analyze the transcripts from 3,000 videos posted to the YouTube channels of Carlson and Owens, each of whom has collected more than five million subscribers. JPPI researchers looked at keywords around Jews and Israel, comparing how the populist-nationalist presenters spoke about those subjects compared to other nations and peoples.

The report identified February 2025 as when Owens initiated her anti-Israel shift, while noting Carlson intensified his focus on disparaging the Jewish state in April.

“Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have significantly intensified their focus on Israel in recent months, accompanied by a marked escalation in anti-Israel rhetoric and, in the case of Owens, explicit antisemitism,” the research stated. “While both figures have long been known for their critical stance toward Israel, the study documents a sharp and recent increase in both the volume and intensity of negative content.”

The report described how for Carlson “the share of negative content about Israel rose sharply from 48.9% in the previous six-month period to 70.3% over the last six months,” while for Owens “the primary change in her case is quantitative — a substantial increase in the overall volume of such negative content.”

Specific instances of hate cited in the report included that “across multiple videos, both figures employ sharp rhetoric, including comparisons between Israel and Hamas, use of the term ‘genocide,’ accusations of deliberately killing children, and the circulation of conspiracy narratives alleging Israeli influence over the United States.”

Analysts deployed OpenAI’s o3 reasoning model to make the assessment regarding whether Owens or Carlson’s statements ran afoul of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, which has been widely adopted by hundreds of governing institutions, including the US State Department, European Union, and United Nations.

For Owens’ videos fed into the analysis, 45 percent initially came up as antisemitic. However, that number in the past six months “rose to roughly 75% — nearly double the rate for the previous six-month period.”

The report described how many of these videos by Owens described Jews as part of a “cult” or engaged in “Jewish supremacy.”

“Antisemitism on the American far right is now overt and out in the open,” JPPI Director-General Shuki Friedman said in a statement. “The data should serve as a flashing warning light for Israel and its leadership regarding the kind of support it can expect from the right, today and in the future. Only a determined effort to counter this extremism can help preserve this vital base of support in the United States.”

In November, The Algemeiner reported that Owens admitted she had become “obsessed” with the Jewish people.

A user asked Owens directly, “Why are you so obsessed with Jews?”

The longtime associate of Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, answered, “Because they are so obsessed with me. Feeling is mutual now.”

In March, Owens argued that Jeffrey Epstein-style blackmail plots undergirded the US-Israel relationship and that “this is the reason we don’t get to open the Epstein files, we don’t get to open the JFK files.” She asserted that a special relationship between the US and the Jewish state was actually “a form of gaslighting.”

In recent months, Carlson’s decision to platform white supremacist podcaster Nick Fuentes has roiled the American political right, prompting resignations within the Heritage Foundation following its president Kevin Robert’s choice to support his longtime friend’s decision to platform a vocal advocate of Adolf Hitler.

Carlson also provoked condemnations when appearing to suggest a Jewish hand behind the killings of both Jesus of Nazareth and conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

On Monday, the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) highlighted statements that Carlson had made during a Saturday interview with The American Conservative, the longtime paleo-conservative publication founded by perennial presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.

CAM described how in the interview, “Carlson described pro-Israel supporters as believing they are ‘specially chosen by God’ while viewing others as ‘sub-human.’ Such language echoes long-standing antisemitic stereotypes portraying Jews as inherently supremacist or morally corrupt. Carlson presented these claims as proof of Israel’s alleged ability to manipulate American public opinion. In doing so, he framed Jewish identity and support for Israel as tools of coercive power rather than political belief.”

Earlier this month, Carlson appeared at the Doha Forum in Qatar and announced his plans to purchase a home in the Arab monarchy which has long sponsored the Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian terrorist wing Hamas. His brother Buckley Carlson also suggested that the recent Islamist terrorist attack in Bondi, Australia which left 15 Jewish people murdered, was a false flag incident.