WASHINGTON
Iran will likely be part of a wider Middle East peace deal after the war in Gaza is brought to an end, US President Donald Trump said Wednesday, just hours after he announced that Israel and Hamas accepted the first phase of his plan to end the war.
Trump said he has been engaged in “some very good conversations” with Iran over an unspecified “deal,” less than four months after he carried out a series of strikes that targeted Tehran’s nuclear program in June. He said Iran was “about one month, maybe two months, away from having a nuclear weapon, and if I allowed that to happen, this deal would not have been possible.”
He was alluding to his proposal to end the Gaza war, but he also said he is “very confident” that a wider Middle East peace deal will be struck after the Israeli war on Gaza is brought to an end, saying, “it seems like everything’s at a different scale” now.
“We’re going to have peace. And by the way, I believe Iran is going to be, actually a part of the whole peace situation. But countries that, frankly, didn’t get along, they’re all involved, and it’s brought the whole world together. It’s amazing,” Trump said during an interview with Fox News.
“Things are going to be much different in the Middle East, but things are going to be different all over the world,” he added.
Earlier Wednesday, Trump announced that Israel and Hamas had signed off on the first phase of the US-proposed Gaza deal.
“ALL of the Hostages will be released very soon, and Israel will withdraw their Troops to an agreed upon line as the first steps toward a Strong, Durable, and Everlasting Peace,” he said, adding that all parties will be “treated fairly.”
A White House official told Anadolu that the hostages are expected to be released Monday.
Trump also told reporters Wednesday that he might visit Egypt later this week, with the White House confirming that he is considering a regional trip shortly after a planned Friday visit to the Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
Since October 2023, Israeli attacks have killed nearly 67,200 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them women and children, and rendered the enclave largely uninhabitable.
The US president said that after his Gaza peace deal is enacted, the coastal enclave “is going to be a much safer place, and it’s going to be a place that reconstructs, and other countries in the area will help it reconstruct, because they have tremendous amounts of wealth, and they want to see that happen.”
“We’ll be involved in helping them make it successful and helping it stay peaceful, but I think it’s going to be peaceful,” he said.