U.S. President Donald Trump told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel must begin redeploying its forces out of Syria, and urged him to do the same in Lebanon, U.S. and Israeli officials told Axios.
According to a U.S. official, Trump told Netanyahu in a phone call Thursday that the IDF’s presence inside Syrian territory is creating tensions and could lead to escalation. A recent unusual incident in the area included gunfire toward an IDF post in Syria, after which the military struck in the buffer zone.
“They don't want you there. You should redeploy,” Trump told Netanyahu, according to the U.S. official, who added that the same applies to Lebanon.
Trump met al-Sharaa last week in Turkey on the sidelines of the NATO Summit
(Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters )
The call between Trump and Netanyahu took place a day after the U.S. president met Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Turkey.
The Trump administration had spent months trying to reach a new security agreement between Israel and Syria, but eventually concluded that Netanyahu was unwilling to make the concessions the administration had requested. According to U.S. officials, one of those concessions was a gradual IDF withdrawal from areas in Syria that Israel seized after the collapse of the Assad regime in December 2024.
The sides also held secret contacts, reportedly mediated in part by the United Arab Emirates, but they ultimately did not mature into a new security arrangement that would lead to an IDF withdrawal from the buffer zone.