Steve Witkoff, U.S. President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, plans to return to the region later this week for talks on extending the current first phase of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire, he told CNN on Sunday.
“We have to get an extension of Phase 1, and so I’ll be going into the region this week, probably Wednesday, to negotiate that,” he told Jake Tapper on the channel’s “State of the Union” program.
“And we’re hopeful that we have the proper time … to begin Phase 2 and finish it off and get more hostages released,” Witkoff continued.
The first 42-day phase of the truce is set to end on March 1.
Witkoff said he believes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “well-motivated” to see the ceasefire continue.
“He wants to see hostages released, that’s for sure. He also wants to protect the State of Israel. And so he’s got a red line. And he said what the red line is, and that is that Hamas cannot be involved in a governing body when this thing is resolved,” Witkoff said of the upcoming talks.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar told reporters on Feb. 18 that the Israeli Cabinet has decided to start talks on Phase 2 of the ceasefire.
As part of the talks, Jerusalem will demand the complete disarmament of Hamas and other terrorist organizations in the Strip, Sa’ar stressed.
Jerusalem will reportedly also demand the release of all hostages in Phase 2, in addition to the expulsion of the Hamas leadership from Gaza and the dismantling of its terrorist army. Officials in Jerusalem believe that Hamas is likely to reject these demands.
Witkoff told CNN that while “at this point, for sure, they [Hamas] can’t be any part of governance in Gaza. As to existing, I’d leave that detail to the prime minister.”
“I don’t think Phase 2 is realistic on either side,” Religious Zionism lawmaker Ohad Tal told JNS on Sunday. “For Hamas, Phase 2 means they have to bring back all the hostages and lose all their leverage; I don’t see them doing that.”
As for Israel, he said, “I don’t think we will go to Phase 2 because it means keeping Hamas in power and withdrawing from the perimeter while allowing them to rearm regroup, [to] go back to the same place they were on Oct. 7 [2023], and this is not a reality that people in Israel would be willing to accept.”
What’s in the interest of both sides at the moment, he continued, is an extension of Phase 1. Israel will get more hostages back, while an extension “will buy them [Hamas] more time and allow Arab countries to try and put pressure on Trump to withdraw his ideas regarding the Gaza Strip,” he said.
Religious Zionism lawmaker Simcha Rothman told JNS on Saturday that Israel should never have agreed to Phase 1, “and should definitely not go to Phase 2.”
The right approach, he continued, is that proposed by Trump: “To demand the return of all the hostages and not negotiate with the devil.”
Trump said on Friday that it is for Jerusalem to decide whether to resume the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip or join the second round of talks to free additional captives. Asked by Brian Kilmeade on Fox News whether he was “okay either way,” Trump answered, “I am.”
For Hamas, the ceasefire “is an opportunity for psychological warfare and unimaginable cruelty towards the hostages, the hostages’ families and the entire state of Israel,” Rothman told JNS.
“When you are facing this kind of evil, people who praise and chant when they see the coffins of babies murdered with bare hands, you don’t negotiate with them, you destroy them and make sure that they will have more to lose by not releasing hostages than anything they can gain from keeping them or from a deal,” he added.
Likud lawmaker Dan Illouz concurred, telling JNS on Sunday that while “the hostages must come home—every single one of them,” the only way to ensure their safe return “is not through endless negotiations with genocidal terrorists, but by forcing Hamas to its knees in complete and utter defeat.”
Anything less that this, he continued, “means that more Israelis—more children like Ariel and Kfir Bibas, more fathers, mothers and grandparents—will be taken hostage in the future. Hamas has no mercy. They murdered the Bibas family in cold blood, including the baby, simply because they could. They are not a rational negotiating partner; they are savages who only understand one thing—power.”
A ceasefire “only extends their reign of terror, allowing them to regroup, rearm and take more innocent lives,” he added. “Israel will stop at nothing to bring our people home, and that means ensuring Hamas’s total surrender. Anything less is a betrayal of those still in captivity and those who have already been murdered,” he said.
Israel redeemed six living hostages from Hamas captivity in the Gaza Strip on Saturday: Eliya Cohen, 27, Avera Mengistu, 39, Hisham al-Sayed, 36, Omer Shem Tov, 22, Tal Shoham, 40, and Omer Wenkert, 23.
According to official estimates, 63 hostages remain in Hamas captivity in Gaza more than 500 days after the terrorist group’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, only 27 of whom are believed to be alive.