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COMMENTARY OF THE DAY
By
Robert Namer
Voice Of America
©2025 All rights reserved
January 23, 2025

     President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday he’s not confident that Israel’s cease-fire deal with the Hamas terrorist group will hold through all three phases.  You can bet, as we went on record saying almost  the same.

     “It’s not our war. It is their war. I am not confident. But I think they’re very weakened on the other side,” he said in response to a question in the Oval Office while signing orders in the first hours of his presidency. Asked about the future governance of the Gaza Strip, the president said he believed “you certainly can’t have the people that were there,” in an apparent reference to the Iranian-backed Hamas terror organization.  “Most of them are dead, by the way, right?” continued Trump. “But they didn’t exactly run it well. Run viciously and badly. You can’t have that.”

       “I looked at a picture of Gaza. Gaza is like a massive demolition site. That place is—it’s really got to be rebuilt in a different way,” he said. “It’s a phenomenal location. On the sea, the best weather. You know, everything is good. It’s like some beautiful things could be done with it.”  Three Israeli women taken hostage during the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre and held captive in Gaza for 471 days were freed as part of the first phase of the US-brokered agreement with Hamas.  Trump hailed the deal on as a “first step toward lasting peace in the Middle East,” crediting his incoming Mideast envoy, Steve Witkoff, with pushing the deal through.  

     “Our incoming administration has achieved all of this in the Middle East in less than three months without being president. We’ve achieved more without being president than they’ve achieved in four years with being president,” Trump said at a pre-inauguration rally in Washington, D.C.  Over the weekend, Trump warned in an interview with NBC that the cease-fire with Hamas in Gaza “better hold,” or “all hell will break out.”  Trump claimed he had told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “Just keep doing what you have to do. You have to have—this has to end. We want it to end, but to keep doing what has to be done.”

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