Photo: Alamy
On Tuesday, Vice President J.D. Vance visited a new “civilian-military cooperation center” in Southern Israel, just one week after President Donald Trump inked a historic Middle East peace deal designed to bring an end to the conflict in Gaza.
He was joined by Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner – President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and an instrumental part of orchestrating the Gaza deal – and Admiral Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. CENTCOM.
Vice President Vance delivered remarks to the press during his visit, offering insight into the ongoing negotiations and synthesis of the peace process amid pressures from Hamas, bursts of violence, and strategic discussions about how to kick-start the rebuilding process in the Gaza Strip.
“This is a very, very tough situation – you have two peoples, enemies, who fought a very tough conflict against each other,” Vice President Vance said. “You have a terrorist organization on one hand that murdered a lot of innocent people. You got an Israeli army that was defending itself on the other…and of course you have an innocent civilian population in Gaza that’s caught in the middle.”
He criticized the “weird attitude” in the American media that desires to “root for failure” with every bump in the road in this peace process.
Vance explained that occasional hiccups in the path to ultimate peace in the Middle East were to be expected when considering the cultural context of warfare. “This is exactly how this is going to have to happen when you have people who hate each other,” he stated.
Special Envoy Steve Witkoff said that, in his view, the peace efforts “are exceeding where we thought we would be at this time.”
Interestingly, he revealed that the civilian-military cooperation center (CMCC) was a learning experience for everyone on the negotiation team. “This CMCC that we’re setting up now, this is going to be used in other conflicts,” Witkoff noted.
On Tuesday, Witkoff further said that he and Kushner had just met with ten returned hostages and their families. “I want to observe that I didn’t see any victims in that room, I saw strong people in that room who have come out under very difficult circumstances…it was just my privilege as an American to be there,” he said.