Hi, welcome to the Times of Israel's Daily Briefing. It's Wednesday, July 9th, and I'm Jessica Steinberg.

I'm speaking today with U.S. Bureau Chief Jacob Magid in Washington. Hi, Jacob. Hi, Jessica. Good to be with you again.

Hi, Jacob. Always good to be with you. And it is day 642 of the war. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with U.S. President Donald Trump for the second time in two days during his current visit in Washington,

but did not make any public statements after this second meeting.

We'll talk about that, as well as reports that negotiation talks in Qatar are at a standstill,

as Mideast envoy Steve Whitkoff delayed his trip to Doha. We'll talk about all of that in just a

moment. Stay with us. Okay, where to start, Jacob.

That's something I tend to say with you.

Let's start with this second meeting, which came right on the heels of the first,

which was yesterday, you know, second time in two days.

And Prime Minister Netanyahu also

met with Vice President Vance. So what are you hearing from your various sources? What does it mean,

let's say, that there was no public statement at the end of a second meeting? Start with the end.

Sure. I guess if you do it based, if you look at the

optimism that seemed to be coming from U.S. officials earlier in the day, you had this

cabinet meeting that Trump held, and Steve Wittkopf was in attendance. I made a point of saying

that he's hopeful for a deal by the end of the week and that three of the four main obstacles had been overcome in the ongoing proximity talks that have been taking place in Doha. So given those two points and the fact that this meeting hadn't even been scheduled between

Netanyahu and Trump, the assumption at least initially was that they must be gathering

for a second time in order to at least make an announcement at the end of it regarding.

And Trump even said himself that it was going to be focused almost exclusively on Gaza,

so the thought was, okay, there'll be an announcement about Gaza.

But we didn't get really any announcement.

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