President Donald Trump said the ongoing war in Gaza is damaging Israel politically, particularly in the U.S. Congress, and warned the country must move quickly to end the fighting.
In an interview published Monday by the conservative news site Daily Caller, Trump said, “Israel will have to end this war. They may be winning the war, but they are not winning in the court of public opinion—and it’s hurting them.”
He added that Israel’s influence in Washington has weakened in recent years. “If you go back 15–20 years, Israel had the strongest lobby in Congress of anything or body, or of any company or corporation or state that I’ve ever seen. Israel was the strongest, and today it doesn’t have that strong a lobby. It’s amazing.”
Trump also pointed to the growing prominence of progressive lawmakers. “There was a time where you couldn’t speak badly about Israel if you wanted to be a politician—you couldn’t. But today you have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and all these lunatics, and they’ve really changed it,” he said. “Israel once had complete control in Congress, and now it doesn’t. I’m a little surprised to see it.”
“People have forgotten October 7, it was a really horrible day," he added. "I saw the pictures. It was really bad. You have people that deny it ever happened. You have people that deny the Holocaust ever happened,” he said.
Last week, the White House held an internal discussion on postwar planning for Gaza. A senior official said Trump convened a policy meeting with aides to review “all aspects of the Gaza issue, including increasing aid deliveries, the hostage crisis and plans for the day after the war.” Another official said Trump “made clear that he wants the war to end, and that he wants peace and prosperity for all the people of the region.”
U.S. officials have repeatedly signaled their preference for a quick resolution to the conflict. Both Trump and his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, have indicated the timeline for the war should be short, even if Israel goes ahead with a planned offensive to capture Gaza City.
On Tuesday, families of Israeli hostages planned to demonstrate outside the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, urging Trump to press for an agreement to secure their relatives’ release and end the war. Organizers said they would present a symbolic peace agreement and a mock Nobel Prize certificate to highlight what they described as a “historic opportunity” for U.S. leadership.
“An agreement for the return of the hostages is now on the negotiating table through mediators,” the families said in a statement. “Yet the Israeli government continues to obstruct it and refuses to discuss it, putting our loved ones in real danger.”