Vice President Vance said on Sunday that the 20 remaining living hostages should be released from Gaza “any moment now” as the president prepares to travel to the Middle East to welcome them home.
“It really should be any moment now, Kristen,” Vance told Kristen Welker in an interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” when asked for the exact timing of their release.
“The president of the United States is planning to travel to the Middle East to greet the hostages Monday morning, Middle Eastern time, which should be late Sunday night or very early Monday morning here in the United States,” he continued.
“So you can’t say exactly the moment they will be released. But we have every expectation… that he will be greeting the hostages early next week,” the vice president added, noting that’s the reason President Trump is traveling to the Middle East.
Trump will depart Sunday afternoon for Israel to address its legislature, the Knesset, Monday morning local time before traveling to Egypt for a peace ceremony to welcome the remaining hostages.
Last Wednesday, Trump announced Israel and Hamas had both reached an agreement to release the remaining Israeli hostages and stop the fighting in Gaza.
In an interview on ABC News’s “This Week,” Vance told George Stephanopoulos that Hamas confirmed that it’s holding 20 living hostages and that they will be released in the next 24 hours.
“Well, they’ve been confirmed, George,” Vance said when asked about the Wall Street Journal reporting about Hamas’s confirmation. “Of course, you don’t know until you see these people alive. But thank God we expect to see them alive here in the next 24 hours, probably early tomorrow morning, U.S. time, which will be later in the day, of course, in Israel.”
The vice president touted the peace deal as a “remarkable achievement from an administration that really chose a non-conventional path to diplomacy.”
In the interviews, he also pushed back against reporting suggesting U.S. troops would be on the ground in Israel.
“We already have troops at Central Command. We’ve had them for decades in this country. They’re going to monitor the terms of the ceasefire. That’s everything from ensuring that the Israeli troops are at the agreed-upon line, ensuring that Hamas is not attacking innocent Israelis, doing everything that they can to ensure the peace that we’ve created, actually sustains and endures,” Vance said.
“But the idea that we’re going to have troops on the ground in Gaza, in Israel, that that is not our intention, that is not our plan. There was a bit of a misreporting there, but we are going to monitor this peace to ensure that, that it endures.”
Vance said Indonesia “and a number of other majority Muslim states” have “offered to send ground troops to Gaza to ensure the necessary peacekeeping takes place,” but “that’s not something the United States is going to be expected to do.”
