Rebuilding Rafah could happen in 2 to 3 years, Vance says as he leaves Israel

By Aileen Graef, Oren Liebermann, CNN

(CNN) — Vice President JD Vance left Israel on Thursday with an optimistic note, saying Rafah, a city in the southern Gaza strip, could be rebuilt in two to three years.

Vance said Palestinians should be able to move into a “Hamas free zone” in southern Gaza “in the next couple of months.”

He told reporters in Tel Aviv before he boarded Air Force Two that the hope is for people to be able to move back to Rafah. Vance said the reconstruction effort could start “very quickly” in areas not under Hamas control.

“You’re going to have first some people, and then more, and then hopefully in a couple years, a half a million people living in security, living in comfort, and also living in a situation where they’re not threatening their Israeli neighbors,” Vance said.

It is the first time the US administration has spoken in detail about the potential timeline for the reconstruction of Gaza, which has been devastated in two years of war.

The vice president’s visit this week to the region was meant, at least in part, to ensure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains committed to the US-negotiated deal as some Trump administration officials worry he could work to thwart it, CNN previously reported.

Vance told reporters Thursday that, so far, both Israel and Hamas are respecting the ceasefire with “exceptions.”

“There are little exceptions to break out here and there that would be expected when these two parties have been at war for two years. But so far, the ceasefire is actually holding. The peace is actually holding,” he said.

Vance said he felt “pretty good” about the maintaining the fragile peace but did admit the potential of “little breakouts of violence.”

“Look, if this peace sticks, you’re going to have these little breakouts of violence. Our message to the Israelis has been: ‘help us build this peace.’ Obviously, the Israelis have their own interests, but we’re going to keep on trying to work with both them and the Gulf-Arab states to make this peace stick,” he said.

Vance criticizes Israeli vote on West Bank

The US vice president also slammed a pair of preliminary votes in Israel’s parliament designed to advance annexation of the occupied West Bank – territory that the international community considers part of a future Palestinian state. Vance said he had been told the votes were “symbolic” and a “political stunt.”

“If it was a political stunt, it was a very stupid political stunt, and I personally take some insult to it,” Vance told reporters.

One bill to annex the West Bank passed by a single vote, 25-24, while a more limited bill to annex the settlement of Maale Adumim passed by a much wider margin, 32-9. In both cases, more than half of Israel’s Knesset did not vote. Netanyahu and his Likud party opposed the measure, but it passed in its preliminary reading anyway.

Annexing all or parts of the West Bank has been a goal of Israel’s right-wing for years. Many hardliners had celebrated Donald Trump’s presidency as an opportunity to advance that agenda, believing he would provide American support to a measure that would immediately face a massive international backlash. But Vance poured cold water on the idea of applying Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank.

“The West Bank is not going to be annexed by Israel. The policy of the Trump administration is that the West Bank will not be annexed by Israel. That will continue to be our policy.”

The Trump administration has made the expansion of the Abraham Accords one of its top foreign policy goals. The accords saw Israel normalize relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and others, representing Trump’s biggest foreign policy achievement from his first term. The US is now trying to advance normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, but Riyadh has made clear that it would only happen with a viable pathway to Palestinian statehood, something openly dismissed by Israel’s right-wing.

Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said at a domestic conference on Thursday, “If Saudi Arabia tells us, ‘Normalization in exchange for a Palestinian state,’ then friends – no thank you. Keep riding your camels In the desert – and we’ll continue building a technological powerhouse.” Smotrich has repeatedly made clear that one of his top priorities is annexing the West Bank.

But in a Time magazine interview published on Thursday, Trump said bluntly said he won’t allow it.

“It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries. It will not happen,” he said. “Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.”

Speaking about the Israel-Hamas war, Trump also said that Netanyahu “would have just kept going” were it not for his intervention.

“It would have gone on for years. And I stopped him, and everybody came together when I stopped, it was amazing,” said Trump. He said the failed Israeli strike in Doha targeting senior Hamas leaders was one of the key moments that helped bring about the ceasefire “because it was so out of joint that it sort of got everybody to do what they have to do.”

This story has been updated with additional information.

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