Israeli prime minister said he will award Trump with Israel prize, highest civilian honor, while visiting Mar-a-Lago
Donald Trump has warned that Hamas will have “hell to pay” if it fails to disarm while offering full-throated support to Benjamin Netanyahu during a meeting with the Israeli prime minister in Florida.
In a bravura display of mutual admiration, Netanyahu announced that the US president would be awarded the Israel prize, the country’s highest civilian honour, which since its inception in the 1950s has never before been given to a non-Israeli person.
The trip by Netanyahu to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence came amid a new push by officials in Washington to force concessions from Israel to allow progress towards the second phase of a Gaza peace plan, which in October halted the devastating two-year-long war.
Asked if he and Netanyahu had discussed Israel pulling back troops before Hamas fully disarmed, Trump told reporters: “If they don’t disarm as they agreed to do – they agreed to it – then there’ll be hell to pay for them and we don’t want that, we’re not looking for that. But they have to disarm within a fairly short period of time.”
He described the question of Israel withdrawing its forces as “a separate subject”, adding only: “We’ll talk about that.”
Last week the US news outlet Axios reported that the Trump administration wanted to announce the Palestinian technocratic government for Gaza and the ISF as soon as possible and that senior Trump officials were growing exasperated “as Netanyahu has taken steps to undermine the fragile ceasefire and stall the peace process”.
But Trump himself appeared to show no such qualms after Monday’s meeting. He said he was “not concerned about anything that Israel is doing” and “Israel has lived up to the plan, 100%”.
