Speaking to reporters during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance emphasized that maintaining the current ceasefire requires “monitoring” and “a lot of work.”
Responding to a reporter’s question about why President Donald Trump sent Vance, Jared Kushner, envoy Steve Witkoff and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Israel if the ceasefire is as stable as the administration claims, Vance said, “Look, this thing takes monitoring. It’s going to take a lot of work… It’s not easy. I never said it was easy, but what I am is optimistic that the ceasefire is going to hold and that we can actually build a better future in the entire Middle East.”
“But that requires some work,” Vance continued. “So it’s not about monitoring in the sense of, you know, you monitor a toddler. It’s about monitoring in the sense that there’s a lot of work a lot of good people are doing… It’s important for the principles of the administration to keep on ensuring that our people are doing what we need them to do.”
Despite Vance’s stated optimism, Axios reports that according to a U.S. official, Vance and other senior officials were concerned about Israel’s recent actions, including stopping aid to Gaza, causing the fragile ceasefire to collapse.
Israel suspended aid to Gaza once more and launched a number of lethal airstrikes over the weekend in what it says was a response to an attack by Hamas that left two Israeli soldiers dead.
Palestinian officials have said Israel has violated the ceasefire 80 times and that its airstrikes have killed dozens of Palestinians. In addition, on Sunday, Israel announced that the Rafah crossing with Egypt, which sees a significant amount of aid transported into Gaza, would remain closed “until further notice.”
Behind closed doors, Vance reportedly urged Netanyahu to “give the deal a chance and give us time to make things happen.” Axios reports that the Trump administration is satisfied with the progress made so far. The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
Having attended the meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi earlier this month, Witkoff and Kushner traveled to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday to meet with officials and shore up support for the planned “international stabilization force” the administration wants to deploy in the coming months.
Secretary Rubio, meanwhile, will arrive in Israel on Thursday to work on implementing the ceasefire deal. This contingent of American officials sent to monitor the ceasefire has become known as the “Bibisitters” in Israeli media, NPR reports.
Vance said of the Trump administration’s goals, “We have a very tough task ahead of us, which is to disarm Hamas, but rebuild Gaza to make life better for the people in Gaza, but also to ensure that Hamas is no longer a threat to our friends in Israel.”
Human rights experts have expressed concern about what rebuilding Gaza might look like under Trump, with the president’s 20-point peace plan including suggestions for how Gaza could be developed.
The president has previously suggested that the U.S. could “take over” and “own” Gaza, and has shared an AI-generated video of the region transformed into a Middle East Mar-a-Lago, complete with a luxury Trump-branded hotel.
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