Trump’s Middle East envoy will enter Gaza as part of ‘inspection team’
United States President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, has announced he will visit Gaza in the coming days as part of what he called an “inspection team” to monitor the ceasefire agreement reached between Israel and Hamas last week.
During an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Witkoff said he would tour two Israeli-held zones in Gaza, as part of an upcoming trip to Israel.
“I’m going to be a part of an inspection team at the Netzarim Corridor and also at the Philadelphia Corridor,” Witkoff said. “That’s where you have outside overseers, sort of making sure that people are safe and people who are entering are not armed, and no one has bad motivations.”
The Netzarim Corridor separates north and south Gaza and has been occupied by Israeli forces since they invaded the Palestinian enclave in late October 2023. The Philadelphi Corridor runs between southern Gaza and Egypt. Israel’s military took “operational control” of the area in May of last year.
The trip will be the envoy’s first visit to the Middle East since Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire deal on January 15. Witkoff, a businessman with no previous diplomatic experience, had previously joined the talks in Qatar that led to the deal.
It will also be Witkoff’s first trip since Trump took office on Monday. Since his inauguration, Trump said he has little confidence the agreement will hold. The deal came into effect on Sunday, and a day later, an Israeli sniper killed a child in Rafah, in an incident caught on video.
“We have to make sure that the implementation goes well, because if it goes well, we’ll get into phase two, and we’re going to get a lot more live bodies out,” Witkoff said, referring to Israeli captives held in Gaza.
“And I think that that is what the president’s directive to me and everybody else working in the American government on this is.”
A three-phase deal
The ceasefire agreement has three phases. Only the implementation of the first phase has begun.
Over the next six weeks, that phase is meant to see a pause in fighting; a partial withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, including from the Netzarim Corridor; and a surge in aid to the enclave.
Fifteen months of war in Gaza has left the enclave levelled and the vast majority of its population displaced. The United Nations has repeatedly warned of imminent famine in northern Gaza, and its experts have compared Israel’s warfare tactics to genocide.
All told, at least 47,107 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023. The Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel had killed 1,139 people, with more than 200 taken captive.
The first phase of the ceasefire is also meant to see 33 Israeli captives released from Gaza and about 1,000 Palestinians released from Israeli detention. Three Israeli captives and 90 Palestinian prisoners have so far been released.
