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Vice President JD Vance and Mr. Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, said Tuesday that the U.S.-brokered plan to end the war in Gaza is going better than they expected, despite the violence that erupted between Israel and Hamas in recent days. Vance, Kushner and U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff are in Israel this week as they try to shore up the fragile ceasefire in Gaza. "Look, I think that we are one week into President Trump's historic peace plan in the Middle East, and things are going frankly better than I expected that they were," Vance told reporters as he began his press conference in Israel. Vance insisted this is "not the end" of the peace plan, but rather, "exactly how this is going to have to happen when you have people who hate each other, who have been fighting against each other for a very long time.""We are doing very well," he said. "We're in a very good place. We're going to have to keep working on it, but I think we have the team to do exactly that." But Vance urged a "little bit of patience" as Israel waits for the return of all of the hostages' remains from Hamas. Vance said there are "difficulties" in securing all the bodies. "Some of these hostages are buried under thousands of pounds of rubble," he said. "Some of the hostages nobody even knows where they are."Kushner said it's "amazing to think it's only been a week" since the peace agreement was signed. "A lot of people are getting a little hysterical about different incursions one way or the other, but what we are seeing is that things are going in accordance," Kushner insisted. "Both sides are transitioning from two years of very intense warfare to now a peacetime posture." Vance said the last week has given him "great optimism" the ceasefire is going to hold. The vice president said his visit has been in the works for months, but he wanted to "see how things were going" on the ground so he could report back to the president. As he answered reporters' questions, the Vice President emphasized that no American troops would be deployed in Gaza to implement the peace plan."There are not going to be American boots on the ground in Gaza," Vance said. "The president of the United States has made that very clear, all of our military leadership has made that very clear. What we can do is provide some useful coordination."Before Vance left for Israel, he said bumps in the road to peace were to be expected."There are going to be fits and starts," Vance told reporters. "Hamas is gonna fire on Israel, Israel's gonna have to respond, of course."Hamas has denied responsibility for an alleged RPG attack that killed two Israeli soldiers over the weekend. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that it was a Hamas attack, and that the Israeli military responded to the alleged ceasefire violation by dropping almost 169 tons of bombs in Gaza."One of our hands holds a weapon, the other hand is stretched out for peace," Netanyahu told lawmakers on Monday. "You make peace with the strong, not the weak. Today Israel is stronger than ever before."The Israeli strikes killed at least 45 Palestinians, according to health officials in the Hamas-ruled territory.President Trump warned Hamas on Monday against breaching the deal that took months to negotiate."They're gonna behave, they're gonna be nice," he said. "And if they're not, we're gonna go and eradicate them if we have to."Kushner and Witkoff met Monday with Netanyahu, and the Israeli leader's office said Vance would also meet him this week. The vice president and second lady Usha Vance were greeted upon their arrival Tuesday by U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter and Israel's Minister of Justice Yariv Levin.Vance was scheduled to have a working lunch with Witkoff and Kushner on Tuesday before his meeting with Netanyahu.The peace process has taken incremental steps forward despite the weekend violence, with Israel returning the remains of 15 Palestinians to Gaza on Tuesday following the handover by Hamas on Monday evening of the body of another deceased hostage. As part of the peace deal, a total of 165 Palestinians' bodies have now been returned to Gaza, many of them former detainees, while all 20 living Israeli hostages have been released by Hamas, along with the remains of 13 deceased captives.But despite those steps, the long-term viability of Mr. Trump's peace plan, which he's said will end nearly eight decades of fighting between Israel and the Palestinians, remains less certain.Ex-Israeli official casts doubt on prospects for Trump's peace planSome Israelis remain skeptical that the Israeli prime minister is genuinely interested in a lasting peace. Among them is fierce Netanyahu critic Alon Pinkas, who served as an advisor to four Israeli foreign ministers. He told CBS News that Netanyahu signed the peace deal brokered by Mr. Trump, but never really backed its core purpose, or Mr. Trump's stated goal of securing an enduring peace in the heart of the Middle East."This was an agreement he was bullied into," Pinkas said. "This is an agreement he signed under duress, and now he is developing a new scheme to manipulate Trump."Pinkas credited Mr. Trump for doing "something that his predecessors were disinclined or hesitant to do, and that is exert real pressure" on Israel's leader. "It worked, but it only worked for the first phase," Pinkas said, referring to the living Israeli hostages being released and the ceasefire coming into effect.He said after the weekend's violence that the deal had been "ostensibly restored, but when Netanyahu says, 'I'm restoring the ceasefire,' it's only because there's a visit here of the vice president, JD Vance, and because the U.S. sent its envoy."Pinkas said he was certain Israeli forces would resume operations in Gaza within days, noting they remained deployed in about half of the Palestinian territory."The hostages are no longer in danger because they were freed, and Hamas was not decisively destroyed, as Mr. Netanyahu promised and boasted and bragged for two years, so I see a serious incentive for Mr. Netanyahu to resume" an offensive against Hamas, Pinkas told CBS News. "Maybe not on a huge scale, given the agreement, but I do see ... a local skirmish that becomes a wider flare-up, that then deteriorates or escalates into a full Israeli military operation."Hamas' top negotiator said Tuesday that the group remained committed to the ceasefire agreement. But President Trump's peace plan calls for the demilitarization of Gaza, and many analysts, including Pinkas, have doubts that Hamas will willingly hand over all its weapons."That's probably the biggest flaw in the agreement," said Pinkas. "The agreement in and of itself is a good agreement, but in order for an agreement like that to work, it requires good faith, good will, and trust. None of these ingredients exist. In fact, both sides have a vested interest in not progressing beyond the ceasefire.""Hamas wants to lure Israel inside [Gaza] into a de-facto occupation, and mount an insurgency and show to the Palestinians that they are the real resistance. And Netanyahu wants to go in because he knows that if everything stops now and there is progress into the next phases, that almost inevitably means that he will be deemed as the guy who failed to defeat Hamas."Pinkas said that while the past two years of war have left Hamas defeated militarily and degraded, "Hamas is not done. Hamas are there, and you see those pictures every day. You show them on CBS — Hamas gangs walking around in battle fatigues, armed. That's not going to cut it politically for Mr. Netanyahu."Speaking in a recent interview with CBS News' Tony Dokoupil, Netanyahu said his government had agreed "to give peace a chance," but he noted that the conditions of Mr. Trump's 20-point peace plan "are very clear — it's not only that we get the hostages out without getting our military out, but that we would subsequently have both demilitarization and disarmament. They're not the same thing. First Hamas has to give up its arms. And second, you want to make sure that there are no weapons factories inside Gaza. There's no smuggling of weapons into Gaza.""We also agreed: Okay, let's get the first part done. Now let's give a chance to do the second part peacefully, which is my hope," the Israeli leader told CBS News.
