After announcing a deal between Israel and the Palestinian terror group Hamas to end the war in Gaza after two years and free all the hostages, US President Donald Trump hailed the development as going beyond just the Strip and heralding “peace in the Middle East.”
In an interview with “Hannity” on Fox News on Wednesday night, Trump recounted his phone call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after announcing the deal.
“I spoke to Bibi Netanyahu just a little while ago,” Trump said. “He called. He said, ‘I can’t believe it. Everybody is liking me now,’ meaning him.”
“I said, ‘More importantly, they are loving Israel again,’ and they really are. I said, ‘Israel cannot fight the world, Bibi, they cannot fight the world.’ And he understands that very well. So it’s amazing the way it’s all come together.”
The American leader touted the “tremendous help” from members of his administration in getting the deal over the finish line, “with everybody from Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and Marco [Rubio], and we had everybody. JD [Vance], the whole, the whole group was just amazing. And the military was, as you know, very instrumental in getting this done. We have a great military with great leadership.”
“It’s a lot of talent involved, I’ll tell you. But there was a certain degree of luck, too. You know, you need luck also. There is such a thing as luck,” he added.
“The whole world came together, to be honest, so many countries that you wouldn’t have even thought of it, and they came together. The world has come together around this deal, and that’s something I would say that without it, that wouldn’t happen,” he added. “So many countries that you wouldn’t have thought of have wired their best wishes and their commitment to do whatever is necessary. The countries surrounding have all signed, I mean, they’re all signed up, and it’s been, it’s been really an amazing period of time.”
Trump also claimed that “this is more than Gaza. This is peace in the Middle East, an incredible thing.”
He added that there was a “set of circumstances” that allowed the deal to happen, including Israel’s and the US’s strikes in Iran in June that targeted the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.
The June war started with Israel’s June 13 opening strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, missile production sites and military leadership. Iran responded with drone launches and deadly ballistic missile strikes that wreaked havoc in Israeli cities and killed 29 people, almost all of them civilians. The war ended on June 24, two days after the US struck three key Iranian nuclear sites.
“Iran was about one month, maybe two months, away from having a nuclear weapon, and if I allowed that to happen, this deal would not have been possible,” he said. “Or if it was, it would have a tremendous cloud over it, because you’d have a country with a nuclear weapon that was not obviously very friendly.”
Lauding that the deal doesn’t have “a very dark cloud over it,” Trump said he believed “Iran is going to be, actually, a part of the whole peace situation” because “countries that frankly didn’t get along, they’re all involved, and it’s brought the whole world together.”
Iran’s leaders, like Hamas, are sworn to Israel’s destruction, and while the Islamic Republic claims its nuclear program has only civilian applications, it has enriched uranium to a level beyond what is needed for civilian use, and a short step away from weapons-grade, as it regularly threatens to annihilate Israel.
Trump announced the signing of the deal on Truth Social on Wednesday night after days of negotiations in Egypt. In his interview with Fox, the US president said the 48 hostages still held captive in Gaza would “probably be released on Monday.”




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