Vice President JD Vance announced Sunday that Hamas will release its remaining hostages “any minute now” as President Donald Trump prepares to depart for a historic trip to Israel.
Vance made the rounds on the Sunday morning shows and told NBC’s Kristen Welker on Meet the Press that hostages will be freed imminently.
“Can you tell me exactly when are the hostages going to be released? When will we see them?” she asked.
“Well, it really should be any moment now, Kristen,” Vance said. “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, you know, Sunday night or very early Monday morning here in the United States.”
“So you can’t say exactly the moment they will be released, but we have every expectation–that’s why the president is going–that he will be greeting the hostages early next week. It’s a monumental thing,” he added.
Of the remaining hostages, 20 are reportedly believed to be alive, while Trump said Thursday that 28 are estimated to be deceased.
Vance told Welker that the first phase of the peace deal brokered by Trump and the hostage release it promises underscores Trump’s diplomatic instincts, which fall outside of the traditional establishment mold.
“I really do think that it shows what happens when you go outside their traditional, failed diplomatic roots and actually try something new,” Vance said.
“It’s kind of crazy to me, Kristen, that for our entire history, we’ve never had a president who’s been willing to sit down both with the Gulf Arab states and the Israelis, to try to tap some unconventional people to just get a deal done,” he added.
Vance coined it the “Trump diplomatic pathway.”
“I really do think the lesson here is that Donald Trump refused to go down the failed traditional diplomatic pathway. He cut his own Trump diplomatic pathway, and because that, it was successful,” he said.
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