Gaza cease-fire sequencing remains unresolved, Trump says
President Donald Trump said Friday that the United States has not agreed to allow Ukraine to produce Patriot air defense interceptors, stepping back from a possibility he raised earlier this month and discussed with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House on Tuesday.
Speaking to reporters during a cabinet meeting at Camp David — the first such gathering at the presidential compound of his second term — Trump was asked whether he was ready to grant Kyiv a license to build Patriots domestically. “We have not agreed to that,” he said. “We’re talking about it, but it’s a hard thing to give away that kind of technology.”
Giving away the weapons carried its own risks, Trump added. “They can suddenly turn on you. You know that is possible,” he said.
The interceptor travels at “8,600 miles an hour,” Trump said, adding for context: “If you go 60, it gets to be a little fast.” He recalled an occasion on which five missiles were fired “at Jordan” and were shot down in sequence — rendered by the president as “bing bing bing bing.”
“Nobody else has that capacity,” Trump said of the system. He concluded that Washington “will be building many plants” to produce Patriots and Tomahawk missiles domestically, but not, for now, in Ukraine.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies has said two-thirds of the Pentagon’s Patriot interceptors have been used, a depletion that may have prompted a $58.6 billion Army contract with Lockheed Martin to rebuild supplies, along with a recent White House request to Congress for tens of billions of dollars more in emergency funding.
Trump also addressed the ongoing confrontation with Iran, telling reporters the U.S. would be “hitting them very hard” if talks broke down. He dismissed Iran’s military as effectively hollowed out. “They have no navy … they have no anti-aircraft,” he said. He compared the five-month campaign favorably with U.S. wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Korea, arguing in each case that the war lasted “many years,” whereas his administration had achieved more in less time. Trump’s stated goals for the campaign have repeatedly shifted, according to the Guardian.
The Camp David gathering came a day after Trump announced what he called a “historic” agreement for Hamas to disarm and for Israeli forces to withdraw from Gaza, a claim that has yet to be confirmed by Israel.
Pressed on the sequencing of the deal — whether disarmament or withdrawal would come first, the issue that has stalled negotiations for months — Trump declined to specify either way, saying only that Washington had “an understanding” with Israel and that the Israelis were “very happy about it.”
He was similarly light on detail when asked if the agreement would hold, given an outstanding International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an unresolved International Court of Justice case accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza, arms restrictions imposed by several governments over the conduct of the war, and a governing coalition at home that has repeatedly rejected anything short of Hamas’s total disarmament before any withdrawal.
“The people are very complex and difficult,” Trump said. “In many cases wonderful, in many cases not so wonderful.”
An Israeli official has said no withdrawal from the so-called Yellow Line will happen before Hamas fully disarms, while members of Netanyahu’s own coalition have voiced opposition to the plan, details Trump did not address.