Donald Trump will host Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday for pivotal negotiations over the Gaza ceasefire deal as the Israeli leader visits Washington for the first time since the international criminal court issued a warrant for his arrest, the Guardian reported.

Netanyahu and Trump are expected to discuss the fragile hostages-for-ceasefire deal as Israel and Hamas are supposed to begin a second phase of the negotiations that could lead to a permanent truce and the return of dozens more Israelis held hostage by Hamas in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.

Trump’s meeting with Netanyahu will be his first with a foreign leader since his inauguration, a sign of respect (despite the two leaders having a troubled relationship in the past) that also reflects the urgency of a ceasefire that Trump told reporters on Monday he had “no guarantees” would hold.

Shortly before the summit began, Hamas said that the second round of ceasefire talks had begun as stipulated in the deal signed last month.

A White House official on Tuesday told Reuters that Trump would sign an executive order later in the day to restore his “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, including sanctions and enforcement mechanisms to block the country’s path to a nuclear weapon and would counter Iran’s “malign influence”, the official said.

Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, met with Netanyahu ahead of the summit. Witkoff is said to have been instrumental in pushing the Israeli leader to agree to the ceasefire last month, even as Netanyahu’s ultra-rightwing allies threatened to leave the ruling coalition for taking too soft a line on Hamas.

In the US administration, Trump’s advisers are split among openly pro-settler hardliners such as Mike Huckabee, defense hawks such as the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and more pragmatic dealmakers such as Witkoff who are seeking to keep the shaky ceasefire on track, said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel group.

“It’s a really mixed set of influences and interests that are impacting Trump, and it all has to sort of sort itself out relatively quickly, because if this ceasefire falls apart, you know, this is really, really bad, and there’s no hope of getting back from that,” he said. “This really is an inflection point, and a lot hinges on how this set of meetings go and what direction Trump pushes it in.”

Trump is expected to say that the Gaza Strip will remain uninhabitable for more than a decade, the Washington Post reported, citing a senior administration official previewing the meeting. “President Trump looks at the Gaza Strip and sees it as a demolition site,” the person said.

That may indicate that Trump plans to repeat his call to depopulate the Gaza Strip and send people to neighbouring countries, in effect endorsing ethnic cleansing of the territory over the opposition of Palestinians and the neighbouring countries.

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