President Donald Trump welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House on Monday for the first time since the U.S. and Israel took military action against Iran last month in an effort to dismantle the country’s nuclear capabilities.
The two leaders complimented each other on their alliance in the conflict, with Netanyahu presenting Trump with a letter he said he sent to the Nobel Prize committee, in which he nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize, a longtime ambition for the president. Israel would be the second country to nominate Trump for the award.
Trump told reporters that Iran wants to talk with the U.S. and that Washington and Tehran have scheduled talks. He declined to reveal the timeline for those talks, telling reporters, “I’d rather not say, but you’ll be, you’ll be reading about it tomorrow.”
Asked whether regime change should take place in Tehran, Netanyahu said that is “up to the people of Iran.”
While a ceasefire between Israel and Iran continues to hold after last month's 12-day conflict, a similar agreement in Gaza is proving harder to achieve, despite the optimistic tone struck by Trump and Netanyahu in recent days.
Trump said Monday night that there was no "hold-up" in reaching a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. "I think things are going along very well," he said.
Asked about possibility of a two-state solution, Trump yielded the question to Netanyahu, who said Palestinians should have the powers to govern themselves but "none of the powers to threaten us."
"That means that certain powers, like overall security will always remain in our hands. Now, that is a fact, and no one in Israel will agree to anything else, because we don’t commit suicide," Netanyahu said.
Shortly before the White House meeting, Netanyahu met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and separately with Trump's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff. Rubio and Witkoff joined Monday's dinner, along White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee.
Israel and Hamas appear deadlocked on whether a proposed agreement will lead to a permanent end to the fighting, which, barring a six-day pause in November 2023 and a 42-day ceasefire earlier this year, has raged for 21 months.
On Friday, Hamas said it had responded to a U.S.-backed Gaza ceasefire proposal in a “positive spirit,” a few days after Trump said Israel had agreed “to the necessary conditions to finalize” a 60-day truce. It has also said it will free all the hostages in exchange for an end to the war and the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza.
But Netanyahu has called for the full elimination of Hamas and asked the group to surrender, disarm and go into exile — which it refuses to do.
While Netanyahu traveled to Washington, a separate Israeli negotiating team went to Qatar on Sunday for indirect talks with Hamas. Netanyahu said the Israeli negotiators had clear instructions to achieve a ceasefire agreement under conditions that Israel has accepted.
Inside Gaza, at least 80 people were killed in Israeli strikes, Dr. Marwan Al-Hams, the director of the enclave's field hospitals, told NBC News on Sunday. He added that the number was likely to increase because of the ongoing shelling and airstrikes on the Gaza Strip.
More than 56,000 people have been killed and thousands more seriously injured since Israel launched its offensive in Gaza following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks, according to health officials in the enclave. About 1,200 people were killed and around 250 taken hostage that day in Israel.
Elsewhere, Israel on Sunday launched fresh strikes in areas of Yemen controlled by the Houthi militant group, targeting ports in Hodeida, Ras Isa and Saif, along with the commercial ship Galaxy Leader that they hijacked in 2023.
“These ports are used by the Houthi terrorist regime to transfer weapons of the Iranian regime that are used to carry out terrorist plots against the State of Israel and its allies,” an Israel Defense Forces spokesperson said in a statement Sunday.
In a separate post on X, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said the strikes were part of “Operation Black Flag,” adding that the Iran-backed militant group would “continue to pay a heavy price for their actions.”
“The fate of Yemen is the same as the fate of Tehran,” he added, referring to the Iranian regime.
But a Houthi spokesperson downplayed the Israeli attack in a statement Monday, saying that the militant group's air defenses had "successfully countered" it by “using locally manufactured surface-to-air missiles.”
The attacks on the Iran-backed Houthis came after Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made his first public appearance since the 12-day war with Israel. Iranian state television showed him greeting worshippers at a mosque Saturday.
