U.S. Vice President JD Vance is “very optimistic” that the White House-brokered ceasefire deal between Israel and the Hamas terror organization will hold, the former Ohio senator said during a press conference in Israel on Tuesday.

“What we’ve seen in the past week gives me great optimism that the ceasefire is going to hold,” Vance said, on the day after a truce resumed in Gaza following Hamas’s attacks on Israeli troops and the Jewish state’s response.

The vice president, who said as recently as a few days ago that he wasn’t sure if he was going to visit Israel, said that his visit had nothing to do with events of the past 24 hours and had been planned for months.

He said that he “wanted to check in on things” and “see how things were going and put some eyes on it.”

Maintaining the

See Full Page