Trump’s Middle East envoy will enter Gaza as part of ‘inspection team’
Steve Witkoff says he seeks to assure the Gaza ceasefire deal will reach its second phase, despite Trump’s doubts.
Washington, DC – United States President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, has announced he will visit Gaza in the coming days as part of what he called an “inspection team” to monitor the ceasefire agreement reached between Israel and Hamas last week.
During an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Witkoff said he would tour two Israeli-held zones in Gaza, as part of an upcoming trip to Israel.
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end of list“I’m going to be a part of an inspection team at the Netzarim Corridor and also at the Philadelphia Corridor,” Witkoff said. “That’s where you have outside overseers, sort of making sure that people are safe and people who are entering are not armed, and no one has bad motivations.”
The Netzarim Corridor separates north and south Gaza and has been occupied by Israeli forces since they invaded the Palestinian enclave in late October 2023. The Philadelphi Corridor runs between southern Gaza and Egypt. Israel’s military took “operational control” of the area in May of last year.
The trip will be the envoy’s first visit to the Middle East since Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire deal on January 15. Witkoff, a businessman with no previous diplomatic experience, had previously joined the talks in Qatar that led to the deal.
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It will also be Witkoff’s first trip since Trump took office on Monday. Since his inauguration, Trump said he has little confidence the agreement will hold. The deal came into effect on Sunday, and a day later, an Israeli sniper killed a child in Rafah, in an incident caught on video.
“We have to make sure that the implementation goes well, because if it goes well, we’ll get into phase two, and we’re going to get a lot more live bodies out,” Witkoff said, referring to Israeli captives held in Gaza.
“And I think that that is what the president’s directive to me and everybody else working in the American government on this is.”
A three-phase dealThe ceasefire agreement has three phases. Only the implementation of the first phase has begun.
Over the next six weeks, that phase is meant to see a pause in fighting; a partial withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, including from the Netzarim Corridor; and a surge in aid to the enclave.
Fifteen months of war in Gaza has left the enclave levelled and the vast majority of its population displaced. The United Nations has repeatedly warned of imminent famine in northern Gaza, and its experts have compared Israel’s warfare tactics to genocide.
All told, at least 47,107 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023. The Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel had killed 1,139 people, with more than 200 taken captive.
The first phase of the ceasefire is also meant to see 33 Israeli captives released from Gaza and about 1,000 Palestinians released from Israeli detention. Three Israeli captives and 90 Palestinian prisoners have so far been released.
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The second and third phase have been agreed to in principle, but negotiations on the details remain ongoing. The second phase is expected to see the remaining Israeli captives released in exchange for the “complete withdrawal” of Israeli forces from Gaza.
That goal would be at odds with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s previous pledges to maintain control over Gaza’s security indefinitely after the war. Far-right members of Netanyahu’s government have also called for a return to fighting after the first phase is completed.
Details of the third phase are less clear, but they reportedly include plans for multiyear reconstruction in Gaza and the return of captives’ bodies.
The current deal includes no agreements over who will govern Gaza following the war.
‘Not confident’Witkoff spoke to Fox News a day after Trump told reporters he was “not confident” that the ceasefire agreement would hold.
“That’s not our war. It’s their war. But I’m not confident,” Trump told a reporter during a photo opportunity at the White House. “I looked at a picture of Gaza. Gaza is like a massive demolition site.”
The US president, whose first term stretched from from 2017 to 2021, had demanded a ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel prior to his inauguration day, promising “hell to pay” if one was not reached.
It was not immediately clear how Trump would respond if Israel were to break from the agreement.
Trump has generally been more amenable to Israeli interests than his predecessor, former President Joe Biden.
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Still, the Biden administration pledged “unwavering” support to Israel and refused to leverage the billions of dollars in military support the US provides to Israel in exchange for a ceasefire.
Trump and Biden have both claimed credit for reaching this month’s ceasefire agreement.
As he begins his second term, Trump is expected to expand US support for Israel. His administration, for example, is packed with pro-Israel hawks, including supporters of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Already, he has peeled back Biden-era sanctions on Israeli settler groups accused of violence against Palestinians.
Still, Trump ran on a pledge to be global peacemaker and end conflicts abroad as part of his “America First” agenda.
Speaking on Wednesday, Witkoff credited Trump’s “peace through strength” approach as the driving force behind the ceasefire, while acknowledging the incoming administration was not involved in the “mathematics” that made up the terms of the deal.
Renewed push for normalisationWitkoff also said he hoped to reignite Israeli-Arab normalisation efforts Trump spearheaded during his first term, in order to make Israel less diplomatically isolated.
The so-called Abraham Accords saw Israel establish diplomatic ties with Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Sudan, but the negotiations were widely criticised for sidelining Palestinian interests.
Experts have also said the future of the Abraham Accords has been thrown into doubt amid regional outrage over the war in Gaza.
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Still, Witkoff said he believed a long elusive normalisation deal with Saudi Arabia could yet be reached. He went even further, saying he believed every country in the region could get “on board” with such a deal.
“My own opinion is that a conditional precedent to normalisation was a ceasefire,” Witkoff said. “We needed to get people believing again.”
When asked to specify which other countries he thought would be open to a deal, Witkoff pointed to Qatar, praising its role as a mediator in the Gaza negotiations.
Qatar has repeatedly rejected the prospect of normalising ties with Israel.
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