ISTANBUL

US President Donald Trump asserted Sunday that the war in Gaza had come to an end as he began his flight to the Middle East, where he will be attending an international peace summit on an agreed ceasefire in Gaza.

"The war is over, okay? You understand that?" Trump told reporters on Air Force One after the plane took off from Joint Base Andrews in Maryland for his first stop, Tel Aviv. He was responding to a question about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not having acknowledged the end of the conflict.

Trump said he believed the ceasefire agreement, based on a 20-point proposal he announced last Wednesday, would remain intact.

"(There are) a lot of reasons why it's going to hold. But I think people are tired of it. It's been centuries, not just recent. It's been centuries," he said.

On a planned “Board of Peace” to be set up to govern Gaza as the deal proceeds, he said the body would be established “very quickly but that the inclusion of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was uncertain.

“First, I want to find out that Tony would be popular with all, because I just don't know that,” he said.

He said reconstruction efforts and especially the process of clearing out debris and damaged buildings would start “immediately” and likely last a period of years.

“You have to get people taken care of first. But it’s going to start, really, essentially, immediately. They’re going to have to start by removing a lot of the structures that you see that are down to the ground…It’s blasted. This is like a demolition site. Almost the entire site is.”

Trump's remarks came minutes after he left for Israel and Egypt ahead of the Sharm el-Sheikh Peace Summit on the ceasefire.

“Everybody's very excited about this moment in time. This is the first time everybody is amazed and they're thrilled, and it's an honor to be involved, and we're going to have an amazing time,” he told reporters before he left.

He was accompanied by top officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, en route to Israel, followed by the Egyptian Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh to co-host an international peace summit aiming “to end the war in the Gaza Strip."

He is scheduled to land in Tel Aviv at 9.20 am local time (0620GMT) on Monday, meet with hostage families and address the Knesset, or parliament. He will depart for Egypt at 1 pm (1100GMT), where he will attend the planned peace summit.

Trump is expected to arrive in Sharm el-Sheikh at 1.45 pm local time (1045GMT) to co-chair the Sharm el-Sheikh Peace Summit with the Egyptian President Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

More than 20 world leaders are expected to attend the summit including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, French President Emmanuel Macron, Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Bahraini King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

Egypt said the summit aims “to end the war in the Gaza Strip, enhance efforts to bring peace and stability to the Middle East and usher in a new phase of regional security and stability.”

Trump announced Wednesday that Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas had agreed to the first phase of his 20-point plan aimed at implementing a ceasefire in Gaza. The plan includes the release of all Israeli captives in exchange for around 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and a gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip. The first phase took effect on Friday.

Phase two of the plan envisions the creation of a new governing body in Gaza excluding Hamas, the deployment of a multinational force and the disarmament of Hamas.

Since October 2023, Israeli attacks have killed more than 67,600 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them women and children, leaving the enclave largely uninhabitable.

*Ahmet Salih Alacaci contributed to this report