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U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly stopped short of endorsing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of Israel's Oct. 27 election, even as Netanyahu seeks his support, Axios reported, citing conversations with U.S. and Israeli sources.
Netanyahu's coalition is polling at just 49 to 53 seats, well short of the 61 needed for a majority and far fewer than the 68 seats it currently holds.
Israel's opposition parties are polling at 67 to 70 seats, with Netanyahu's main rival, former Israeli army Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, showing better favorability ratings in most surveys.
When Netanyahu and Trump met in the Oval Office two weeks earlier, the president asked the Israeli prime minister how he was doing in the polls ahead of the election, according to Axios. Netanyahu paused.
Then one of his advisers interjected: "Mr. President, he is winning," the aide said, according to a U.S. official familiar with the exchange.
Netanyahu is not, in fact, winning, according to Axios's analysis of the polling.
He does not necessarily need to win outright, however, only avoid losing.
His main effort at the moment is to secure enough votes to prevent his opponents from forming a government without the support of Arab-Israeli parties. If he manages that and neither side can form a government, Netanyahu would remain caretaker prime minister for several more months until another election is held, a real possibility at the moment.
Two senior U.S. officials told Axios that while Trump still likes Netanyahu personally, he has grown frustrated with his policies, with disagreements widening over Iran, Gaza and Lebanon over the past three months.
"Bibi is his own worst enemy," Trump said privately, according to two people who spoke with the president about Netanyahu recently.
In the first few weeks of the Iran war, some of Trump's close advisers were confident he would endorse Netanyahu. At the time, Trump was also advocating loudly for Netanyahu to receive a pardon to end his corruption trial. But as the war bogged down, Trump's and Netanyahu's foreign policy goals and domestic political interests began to diverge.
The latest strain in the relationship came after Netanyahu publicly rejected Trump's Gaza Board of Peace plan for disarming Hamas.
A senior U.S. official said the White House viewed Netanyahu's Sunday statement as election-season politics rather than necessarily a policy declaration.
"We understand Bibi's political needs. We have no problem with it as long as he continues to do what we ask, especially regarding restraining attacks in Gaza," the official told Axios.
Days before that public rejection, Netanyahu had spoken by phone with Trump adviser Jared Kushner and promised to give the Board of Peace plan a chance despite his skepticism, also pledging to curb attacks on Gaza so the demilitarization process could begin, a U.S. official told Axios.
Since then, Israel has conducted far fewer strikes on Gaza, and the Israeli army pulled back to the "Yellow Line" it was supposed to be deployed to under the agreement.
Netanyahu's rejection came despite a roadmap the Board of Peace issued July 31 calling for Hamas's disarmament and a gradual Israeli withdrawal to proceed in parallel.
Hamas official Ghazi Hamad had previously told Türkiye's state-run Anadolu Agency (AA) that the agreement called for the "storage of heavy weapons" under the authority of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, alongside progress on other elements of the deal.
The roadmap also provides for transferring Gaza's administration to a Palestinian technocratic committee, deploying an international stabilization force, and placing weapons under the national committee's authority with international oversight, with these measures proceeding alongside a phased Israeli withdrawal and reconstruction.
Since October 2023, Israel's war on Gaza, backed by the U.S., has killed around 73,000 Palestinians and injured more than 174,000, most of them women and children, with the offensive also damaging or destroying nearly 90% of the enclave's infrastructure.
Kushner plans to visit Israel next week, his first trip there since January, alongside Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace's high representative for Gaza, for talks on advancing the U.S. plan, according to Axios, which cited five sources familiar with the plan.
Kushner and Mladenov intend to meet Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials to try to reach understandings on implementing the plan's next stages over the coming months.
Kushner is also expected to meet in Cairo with Gaza mediators from Egypt, Qatar and Türkiye, according to a source familiar with the matter cited by Axios.
"We see eye-to-eye on the strategic goal, but Israel has expressed some doubts about the plan and we want to talk to them in order to make sure we are coordinated," a U.S. official told Axios, noting the exact dates of the trip could still change.
The White House does not want the Israeli elections to stall implementation of the plan's next phase, according to Axios. At the same time, Netanyahu does not want to make concessions that could harm him politically, but also does not want a confrontation with Trump ahead of the election.
"The elections are making everyone hysterical," a U.S. official acknowledged.
"We are not rushing into anything here. We want to make sure all steps in Gaza are being done properly," another U.S. official told Axios.
"We think our plan is better than the alternative." A Board of Peace official told Axios that Mladenov, Kushner and their team are in constant conversation and coordination with Israel.
"Our conversations encompass the many areas of agreement and mutual concern that we are working through together," the official said, adding, "What is critical is that we both agree on the desired outcome and are finding ways to accelerate progress."
Several of Netanyahu's political adversaries, including Eizenkot and former Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, have expressed concern that Trump will endorse the incumbent, two of their aides told Axios.
According to two sources familiar with the outreach cited by Axios, those opposition figures have back-channeled messages to Trump and his aides through mutual friends, donors and other political allies, urging the president to remain neutral in the election.
A former U.S. official briefed on the situation told Axios that Netanyahu's weakness in the polls has itself deterred Trump from getting involved.
Trump has been extremely popular in Israel, but his standing has eroded over the past three months over the deal he signed with Iran and his decision to step back from the war after the agreement was violated.
Israelis have also chafed at the restraints Trump has placed on Israel's military operations in Iran, Gaza, Syria and Lebanon.
Trump has been asked by reporters four times in recent weeks whether he endorses Netanyahu, and each time has stopped short of doing so.
"Is there anyone in Israel better than him to do the job?" radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Trump in July. Trump dodged the question.
"Well, I don't know most of them. I know some of them, obviously, but I don't know most of them," he said, referring to Netanyahu's opponents.
In several recent interviews, Trump has praised Netanyahu as a "great wartime prime minister" but has each time referred to him in the past tense.
While Israeli officials said Trump raised the issue of Netanyahu's pardon privately during their last meeting, the president has not spoken about it publicly for months.
The Israeli election is crucial for Trump's Middle East agenda for the remainder of his term, particularly with the Iran crisis in what Axios described as a "no deal, no war" limbo.
Trump also wants to advance his Gaza peace plan, make progress in negotiations between Israel and Lebanon, secure a security agreement between Israel and Syria, and, most significantly, broker a peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Trump and his team remain wary of a repeat of Israel's 2019 political crisis, which led to three consecutive elections and a lost year of Middle East diplomacy.
A senior U.S. official told Axios the White House will not repeat past mistakes by allowing Israeli domestic politics to hold up its regional agenda.
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