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 adds. “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 the alleged fact 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.”
“They [the hostages] are in a terrible situation there. They are deep, deep in the earth,” Trump said, referring to the Hamas tunnels under Gaza. “As we speak, so much is happening to get the hostages freed.”
“We think they will all be coming back on Monday… and that will include the bodies of the dead,” he added.
Terror groups in the Gaza Strip are holding 48 hostages, including 47 of the 251 abducted by Hamas-led terrorists on October 7, 2023. They include the bodies of at least 26 confirmed dead by the IDF. Twenty are believed to be alive and there are grave concerns for the well-being of two others, Israeli officials have said. Among the bodies held by Hamas is an IDF soldier killed in Gaza in 2014.
Hamas released 30 hostages — 20 Israeli civilians, five soldiers, and five Thai nationals — and the bodies of eight slain Israeli captives during a ceasefire between January and March 2024, and one additional hostage, a dual American-Israeli citizen, in May 2024 as a “gesture” to the United States. The terror group freed 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November 2023, and four hostages were released before that in the early weeks of the war. In exchange, Israel has freed some 2,000 jailed Palestinian terrorists, security prisoners, and Gazan terror suspects detained during the war.
Eight hostages have been rescued from captivity by troops alive, and the bodies of 51 have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the Israeli military as they tried to escape their captors, along with the body of a soldier who was killed in 2014.
Reuters contributed to this report.