White House tolerates Netanyahu's rejection of Gaza peace plan ahead of his election

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week publicly rejected President Donald Trump’s latest Gaza peace plan.

The Trump administration can live with it — for now.

The administration says it’s less concerned with what Netanyahu says than what the Israeli Defense Forces do. A U.S. official, who, like others in the story, was granted anonymity to discuss internal thinking, said that the administration was initially “disappointed” that Israel responded to the 15-point peace proposal by ramping up attacks in Gaza — but is pleased that it has since eased its assault.

Now, the administration is willing to give the Israeli prime minister some leeway to message the peace plan in the way he needs to, the official said. There is broad understanding that he is two months from a tough reelection — and needs to please his own hard-right allies to win. Few expected the president’s roadmap to be wholesale embraced, even as Trump on Truth Social trumpeted it as a “major milestone” in the conflict.

“We recognize the complexities that come from the Israeli elections, and we’re obviously going to give Bibi a space to try and navigate that,” the official said. But in turn, “they need to give us a little bit of space in terms of no targeted killings in order to allow us to try to get to the next phase, so there’s a lot more challenges to go to get there.”

U.S. officials and Hamas negotiated the latest peace framework separately, with help from Middle East allies. The proposal, announced last month, called for Hamas to disarm and relinquish governance in Gaza and Israel to withdraw its military from the territory. The plan stalled when Hamas said it would not disarm until Israel withdrew, and Israel said it would not withdraw until Hamas disarmed.

Even as skeptics of the Trump plan criticized the president for overhyping its achievement, U.S. officials believed that they needed to go public once Hamas was on board to lock in its pledge to disarm. Despite the president’s public confidence, administration officials privately expected that the proposal would likely face pushback from Netanyahu but that talks could continue with Israel.

Still, they considered the roadmap a significant win.

“Nobody’s ever gotten to this point where they got Hamas to agree to this, so that’s a necessary step before actually disarming it,” the U.S. official said.

And there are signs that Israel is preparing for the possibility of withdrawal anyway, with Israeli media reporting Israel’s defense establishment began weighing contingencies to do so in the days after Netanyahu’s public rejection.

Another administration official said the Board of Peace, a 27-country initiative formed as part of Trump’s deal last year to end the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, has been “getting good cooperation on the ground of late.”

“That’s what’s important,” the administration official said.

And it’s not just Trump administration officials hailing the framework as a step in the right direction. Former ambassadors and administration officials, including some who served in the Biden and Obama administrations, see the recent commitment the U.S. secured from Hamas to disarm — a monthslong sticking point in the peace process — as a small, but meaningful step, even as doubts remain whether Hamas will follow through. A member of the Hamas political bureau, according to the Associated Press, said this week that Hamas remains “committed to the roadmap.”

“For Netanyahu, his primary objective, of course, is getting through his election so he’s going to at least voice rejection even while he may allow some aspects of it to move forward,” said Dan Shapiro, a U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Obama administration. “It looks like Trump is tolerating the Netanyahu two-step. These two have done a dance like this before and as long as certain elements of it are moving forward … Trump seems to be willing to tolerate Netanyahu’s stated rejection.”

Even Trump appeared in little hurry Monday to escalate the dispute with Netanyahu, insisting to reporters in the Oval Office that he had a “good relationship” with the Israeli prime minister despite the very public rejection of his peace proposal.

The White House referred requests for comment to the Board of Peace.

A Board of Peace official added that “separate discussions with Israel are continuing.”

“The objective remains the full decommissioning of weapons and ensuring Gaza can never again pose the kind of threat Israel faced on October 7,” the official said. “Plans are moving forward in this regard. We have seen important elements of cooperation in recent days and we are intensifying our efforts to accelerate progress.”

The U.S. official added that Israel remains skeptical that Hamas will follow through on their commitments, while noting the country was similarly skeptical that Hamas would release the Israeli hostages.

“We basically have built a lot of credit with them. And I think that they’re willing to give us more of a shot to see if we can get to the next phase,” the official said. “We’re in an uncomfortable position for everyone, but I think that there’s a pathway to get through it.”

The idea that Israeli troops are at least planning to withdraw — especially if that withdrawal goes to the yellow line in Gaza , a key point of the plan the Board of Peace proposed — is giving Trump allies hope that Netanyahu’s words are meant for a domestic audience, while his actions are meant to demonstrate he might consider a deal in the future.

“Netanyahu’s playing a fairly tricky tightrope, where on the one hand he flexes his muscle for domestic audiences, given his situation at election eve, and on the other hand, he’s doing some baby steps in the direction of the 15-point plan — testing the tolerance of the American or Board of Peace team,” said Nimrod Novik, who served as senior diplomatic adviser to former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

James Jeffrey, a former ambassador who served in the Middle East during three presidential administrations, including Trump’s first term, said that “of course it’s a win” to get Hamas to agree to disarm. And, behind the scenes, he said there continues to be movement between the U.S and Israel.

“Slowly we and Israel are moving forward on both Lebanon and Gaza even in the face of Israeli elections,” Jeffrey said.

Still, the incremental movement leaves fundamental questions, which have repeatedly stymied efforts to create a lasting peace between Israel and Gaza. U.S. allies are also concerned that Netanyahu’s public rejection of the latest peace plan is undermining confidence in the Board of Peace and the broader Middle East peace efforts.

Hamas’ willingness to disarm is conditioned on Israel withdrawing from Gaza, leaving unresolved how — and in what order — either side would carry out its commitments.

Hamas is supposed to turn over its weapons to a United Nations-created body responsible for governing the day-to-day operation in Gaza, and that governing authority is supposed to eventually run the territory, supervised by the Board of Peace, though the timeline for leadership handover remains uncertain. And Israel, meanwhile, has not agreed to the withdrawal in the plan, even as its military is preparing for the possibility.

But administration allies don’t really expect some big peace ceremony at Camp David or in Geneva. They’ll settle for dialogue, however tenuous.

“You have to judge these things incrementally in the Middle East,” a person familiar with the White House’s discussions around the peace process said.

Jerry Wu and Daniella Cheslow contributed to this report.