J.D. Vance says shaky Israel-Hamas ceasefire is going ‘better than I expected’

Vice President J.D. Vance said Tuesday that the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas is going better than expected.

Mr. Vance was in Israel with Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, who played a role in negotiating the ceasefire agreement.

“Things are going, frankly, better than I expected that they were,” Mr. Vance said. “This is a very, very tough situation. You have two peoples, two enemies who have fought a very tough conflict against each other.”

Despite some flare-ups of hostilities along the ceasefire boundary, Mr. Vance described the progress toward peace as “doing very well.”

“We’re going to have to keep working on it, but I think we have the team to do exactly that,” he said.

Mr. Witkoff said the implementation is “exceeding where we thought we would be at this time.”

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Mr. Vance made the comments while visiting a new Civilian Military Cooperation Center in Israel that will provide aid and work on rebuilding the Gaza Strip.

He said the cooperation center would be used in other conflicts “as we figure out all the intricacies of how to modulate a peace deal — go from war to peace.”

The vice president hailed the cooperation center as a joint effort between Israel and America.

“You have Israelis and Americans working hand in hand to try to begin the plan to rebuild Gaza, to implement a long-term peace, and to actually ensure that you have security forces on the ground in Gaza not composed of Americans who can keep the peace over the long term,” he said.

The ceasefire agreement was just over 10 days old on Tuesday.

Points of contention persist, including the failure of Hamas to return the bodies of dead hostages to Israel. Hamas said it has had difficulty extracting remains from the rubble of Gaza.

Hamas also has resisted surrendering its arms as required in the Trump-brokered peace deal.

On Tuesday, Mr. Vance declined to give a deadline on the return of deceased hostages to Israel or the disarmament of Hamas.

“It is a focus of everybody here to get those bodies back over to their families so they can have a proper burial. Now, that said, this is difficult. This is not going to happen overnight,” he said. “Some of these hostages are buried under thousands of pounds of rubble. Some of the hostages, nobody even knows where they are.

“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work to get them, and that doesn’t mean we don’t have confidence that we will. It’s just a reason to counsel in favor of a little bit of patience.”

Phase One of Mr. Trump’s 20-point plan included the release of hostages, alive and dead.

Phase Two of the plan focuses on the disarmament of Hamas, the withdrawal of Israel from the area and new governance for Gaza.

“I’m not going to do what the president of the United States has thus far refused to do, which is put an explicit deadline on it, because a lot of this stuff is difficult. A lot of this stuff is unpredictable,” Mr. Vance said.

He pointed to Mr. Trump’s Truth Social post that said if Hamas doesn’t comply, the group will be obliterated.

“Unless Hamas disarms in accordance with the agreement, very bad things are going to happen, right?” the vice president said. “And also the incentive is that if they disarm, there is a better future for everybody on the other side of it.”

Mr. Vance said the focus needs to be “security, rebuilding, giving people some food and medicine.”

Mr. Kushner said rebuilding will begin in areas not run by Hamas because “no reconstruction funds will be going into areas Hamas still controls.”

He said that as long as security can allow construction of a new Gaza, that can “give the Palestinians living in Gaza a place to go, a place to get jobs, a place to live.”