OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
10:17 AM – Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Vice President JD Vance is on a three-day trip to Israel with Second Lady Usha Vance to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
While on the trip, the couple dined with Netanyahu and his wife, Sara. They also had a separate meeting with Israel’s ceremonial president, Isaac Herzog.
On Wednesday, the Israeli prime minister highlighted the “historic visit from President Trump” last week, where President Donald Trump oversaw the return of the Israeli hostages in the first phase of the U.S.-brokered Israel-Hamas peace deal.
“In the last year we’ve had an unmatched alliance and a partnership with the United States. That is changing the Middle East, and it’s also changing the world,” said Netanyahu. “It creates opportunities not only for security, but for the expansion of peace, which we’re working on very, very diligently. And it’s just unmatched.”
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The Israeli prime minister compared his partnership with the Trump administration to previous U.S. leadership and said, “There’s never been anything like it.”
“I was impressed with your clarity,” Netanyahu told Vance, “with your incisiveness, with your solidarity for our common cause, and just a genuine friendship that I saw both in conference meetings and also in our private meetings. And it’s in that spirit that I very much welcome you to Jerusalem in these days of destiny.”
Vance replied, “As the Prime Minister said, these are days of destiny, and we’re very excited to sit down and work together on the Gaza peace plan.”
“We have a very, 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. That’s not easy. I think the Prime Minister knows that as well as anybody, but it’s something that we’re committed to in the Trump administration,” he said. “And I think we’ve, even in the past 24 hours, had a lot of good conversations with our friends in the Israeli government but also, frankly, with our friends in the Arab world who are stepping up and volunteering to play a very positive role in this. So, we’re going to keep working at it.”
Vance emphasized that though there is still much deliberation to be done on the specifics of the deal moving forward and entering into the second phase, he is “very optimistic about where we are.”
The second phase of the ceasefire agreement calls for Hamas terrorists to lay down their weapons to show their commitment to peace in Gaza. So far, the group has been reluctant to disarm itself, and though they have returned most of the 48 Israeli and foreign hostages, they’ve continued to perform public executions of suspected Israel sympathizers. Last week, Trump levied heavy threats that Israel’s partners would have “no choice” but to “kill” them if the bloodshed doesn’t end.
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