President Donald Trump welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House on Monday for the first time since the U.S. and Israel took military action against Iran last month in an effort to dismantle the country’s nuclear capabilities.
The two leaders complimented each other on their alliance in the conflict, with Netanyahu presenting Trump with a letter he said he sent to the Nobel Prize committee, in which he nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize, a longtime ambition for the president. Israel would be the second country to nominate Trump for the award.
Trump told reporters that Iran wants to talk with the U.S. and that Washington and Tehran have scheduled talks. He declined to reveal the timeline for those talks, telling reporters, “I’d rather not say, but you’ll be, you’ll be reading about it tomorrow.”
Asked whether regime change should take place in Tehran, Netanyahu said that is “up to the people of Iran.”
While a ceasefire between Israel and Iran continues to hold after last month’s 12-day conflict, a similar agreement in Gaza is proving harder to achieve, despite the optimistic tone struck by Trump and Netanyahu in recent days.
Trump said Monday night that there was no “hold-up” in reaching a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. “I think things are going along very well,” he said.
Asked about possibility of a two-state solution, Trump yielded the question to Netanyahu, who said Palestinians should have the powers to govern themselves but “none of the powers to threaten us.”
“That means that certain powers, like overall security will always remain in our hands. Now, that is a fact, and no one in Israel will agree to anything else, because we don’t commit suicide,” Netanyahu said.
Shortly before the White House meeting, Netanyahu met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and separately with Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff. Rubio and Witkoff joined Monday’s dinner, along White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee.
Israel and Hamas appear deadlocked on whether a proposed agreement will lead to a permanent end to the fighting, which, barring a six-day pause in November 2023 and a 42-day ceasefire earlier this year, has raged for 21 months.
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