As he sat next to President Trump on Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had a grin on his face that he rarely had during the last administration. And why not? He got most everything he came to Washington for.

Put aside the president’s far-fetched notion of a U.S. takeover of Gaza. Mr. Trump made clear that he had no intention of pressing Mr. Netanyahu as President Joseph R. Biden Jr. did at times since the Israeli leader returned to power in 2022.

In fact, Mr. Netanyahu’s mere presence in the White House was a sign of how much has changed. Mr. Biden did not host the prime minister at the executive mansion until last July, more than 18 months into Mr. Netanyahu’s latest term and six months before the end of his own. By contrast, Mr. Trump made Mr. Netanyahu the first foreign leader he has invited since his own return to power a little over two weeks ago.

During their meetings, Mr. Trump indicated that he would not try to stop Israel from continuing to wage war against Hamas even at the expense of the temporary cease-fire now in effect. Just before Mr. Netanyahu’s arrival at the White House on Tuesday, Mr. Trump signed an order reinstating “maximum pressure” on Iran and later, with the Israeli leader at his side, vowed again to prevent Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Mr. Trump also recommitted to brokering a diplomatic rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a potentially legacy-making priority for Mr. Netanyahu, while dropping any support for a Palestinian state, something the prime minister has rejected despite pressure from the Saudis and others. He has also canceled sanctions imposed by Mr. Biden on violent West Bank settlers and has released weapons held up by the former president.

“All of the hoopla on the U.S. taking over Gaza caused us to miss the real story from the meeting,” said Aaron David Miller, a longtime Middle East peace negotiator now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Bibi leaves the White House among the happiest humans on the planet. If there ever was a demonstration of no daylight between Israel and the U.S., this was it.”

Mr. Netanyahu alluded to the tension with Mr. Biden during his meeting with Mr. Trump. Despite his strong support for Israel over a half-century in public life and particularly after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack by Hamas that killed 1,200 people, Mr. Biden periodically pushed the Israeli leader to do more to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza, alleviate the humanitarian crisis there and bring the war to an end. Mr. Netanyahu resisted and made clear on Tuesday how happy he was that Mr. Biden was gone.

“When Israel and the United States work together — and President Trump and I work together, you know — the chances go up a lot” for success, Mr. Netanyahu said in the Oval Office. “It’s when we don’t work together, Israel and the United States don’t work together, that creates problems. When the other side sees daylight between us — and occasionally in the last few years, to put it mildly, they saw daylight — then it’s more difficult.”

At another point, Mr. Netanyahu was asked who deserved more credit for the cease-fire agreement reached last month, Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump. Mr. Biden first put the cease-fire deal on the table and his team spent months negotiating all the details, but Mr. Trump’s pressure at the end forced the negotiators to finally sign off.

In response to the question, Mr. Netanyahu praised Mr. Trump’s “great force and powerful leadership” and said nothing about Mr. Biden.

The duet sung by the two leaders papered over the rift that developed during the final year of Mr. Trump’s first term, when he bristled at what he considered Mr. Netanyahu’s presumption and erupted when the Israeli leader congratulated Mr. Biden on his victory in the 2020 election.

But there were still a couple of discordant notes. It was somewhat surreal to listen to Mr. Trump repeatedly lament all the “death and destruction” wrought on the Palestinian people in Gaza while sitting next to the prime minister who gave the orders for the war that has killed 47,000 people, according to Gaza health authorities.

The two also gave different assessments of Iran’s strength. Mr. Netanyahu boasted of everything that he has done in the past 16 months to damage Iran and its proxy forces Hamas and Hezbollah. “The Iran terror axis has never been weaker,” he said.

But that does not fit the narrative Mr. Trump has been pushing. He has been arguing that Mr. Biden was too soft on Iran, which in this version has grown ever more powerful during the past four years. “They’re not weak,” Mr. Trump insisted. “They’re very strong right now.”

Still, those disparities went largely unnoticed amid the bonhomie. Two leaders, both of whom have faced criminal trials, both of whom have recaptured office after being defeated, relished their renewed alignment and did all they could to avoid any daylight.

Ukraine is sending its largest-ever delegation to a gathering of politically influential Christian leaders in Washington this week, seeking to lay out an argument that protecting religious freedom is a strong reason for continuing U.S. aid to resist Russian aggression.

The Ukrainian pastors, members of Parliament and military chaplains who will be attending the National Prayer Breakfast say they hope the message of combating religious persecution will resonate with the Trump administration officials and members of Congress who are sure to also be there.

The prayer breakfast, a major event on Washington’s social calendar since 1953, presents an opportunity for business executives, religious leaders and diplomats to jockey for access to influential coreligionists in government to sway policies. While the meeting is open to all faiths, its purpose, according to its website, is ”gathering together in the Spirit of Jesus of Nazareth.”

The Ukrainians will argue to those gathered that further Russian advances would expand a zone of repression of several Christian denominations, as well as the destruction and looting of churches and the arrests of pastors and priests — actions that rights groups have documented in areas already under Russian occupation.

“Russia doesn’t just kill people, doesn’t just destroy our cities — Russia also destroys and bans religious communities” in areas under its control, said Roman Lozynskyi, a member of Parliament with the opposition Holos Party.

Mr. Lozynskyi is a member of the Greek Catholic Church, part of a branch known as Eastern Rite Catholicism that follows the Vatican, that is persecuted in Russian-held parts of Ukraine. He recalled the deportation of a friend and Greek Catholic priest in the Russian-held city of Melitopol as an example of the suppression of Catholic congregations under occupation.

More than 100 Ukrainian pastors, politicians, military chaplains and priests, including the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Epiphanius I, are in Washington for the prayer breakfast on Thursday and related events through the week, said Pavlo Unguryan, a former Parliament member organizing the Ukrainian effort.

Ukrainian Orthodox priests and parishes are among the targets in eastern Ukraine. An estimated 50 priests in Russian-occupied territories — including the most senior church official in Kherson, who refused to join the Russian Orthodox Church — have been killed over the last three years, Metropolitan Epiphanius I said in an interview. Other priests have been forced to leave or to celebrate Mass in secret.

The Ukrainians also intend to highlight the plight of evangelicals, said Mr. Unguryan, who is Baptist. Within its borders, Russia has targeted evangelical Christians with investigations and has arrested Jehovah Witnesses. The repression extends to occupied Ukraine.

“Ukraine is the center of the Bible Belt of Europe,” said Mr. Unguryan, and expressions of evangelical faith there are now under threat. About one million Ukrainians attend evangelical services weekly, he said.

Russia occupies about 19 percent of Ukrainian territory and is making slow but steady gains. Ukraine is defending itself in fierce trench fighting along an about 600-mile front.

“A part of this war is spiritual,” Mr. Unguryan said. “It is important for America to know about this.”

The Ukrainians attending the prayer breakfast want to showcase the vitality of Christian churches in the country, where about 70 percent of the population say in surveys they are religious.

The effort is aimed at swaying supporters of Mr. Trump, who has voiced skepticism about the Biden administration’s heavy military and financial aid to Ukraine. This week Mr. Trump said continued aid could be exchanged for U.S. access to Ukrainian minerals.

Previous religious outreaches in the United States have already yielded results for Ukraine.

Last summer, the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, gave a video address to a Christian gathering in Ukraine. Ukrainian Baptists have appealed to him for military and diplomatic support for their country. Mr. Johnson is a Southern Baptist who has put his conservative Christian faith at the center of his political career.

Ukrainian churches and the country’s Parliament have sent delegations to the breakfast since the early 2000s, but in recent years have ramped up attendance, calling the annual visit “Ukraine Week” in Washington. In past years, several dozen religious and political leaders turned up. The larger delegation this year, Mr. Unguryan said, is in recognition of the importance of Christianity for many supporters of Mr. Trump.

“These are absolutely important issues which can unite Ukraine, a very conservative, Christian country, with a very conservative, Christian America,” said Mr. Unguryan, who has promoted conservative social policies in Ukraine.

Ukrainian protestant pastors have volunteered widely as military chaplains during the war, Liudmyla Filipovych, a Ukrainian scholar of religion, said in an interview. Ukrainian evangelicals have opened about 100 churches in other European countries to provide Ukrainian-language services to the country’s refugees, she said.

Russia under President Vladimir V. Putin has sidelined or banned churches outside what the Kremlin has called the four “traditional” religions — Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism. Russia is on a U.S. government list of “countries of particular concern” for restricting freedom of religion.

In occupied territory in Ukraine’s east and south, Catholic and Protestant churches face “threats, interrogations and arbitrary arrests,” according to a report released in January by Mission Eurasia, a group promoting evangelical Christianity in former Soviet States.

“The Russian occupation authorities have also extensively engaged in illegal imprisonment and convictions on fabricated charges of extremism, torture and even murder,” the report said. It described instances of closing and looting churches, and removing their crosses. Overall, Russia’s invasion has destroyed, damaged or led to the looting of at least 630 religious sites, the report said.

Metropolitan Epiphanius’s visit to Washington is part of his efforts to win international recognition of his church and support from religious leaders for its stand against Russia. His church won independence in 2019 from the Russian Orthodox Church, but some congregations continued to follow the hierarchy in Moscow.

Last year, Ukraine banned the Orthodox branch aligned with the Russian Church, drawing criticism from the Kremlin and from Pope Francis. Ukrainian officials have said the restrictions were necessary, as some priests served as Russian spies or encouraged congregants to pray for the head of the Russian church, which has blessed the invasion.

“The Russian church has tried to block our activity abroad, and we are trying to unblock it, because the church is one of the most important elements for the future of the existence of the Ukrainian state,” Metropolitan Epiphanius, the Ukrainian church leader, said in an interview in December in Rome. “We are trying to destroy these blocks, speaking the truth, because truth destroys the walls.”

Recently, he has preached that message to as many religious leaders as he can reach. He says he talks regularly to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians.

With discussions swirling among Western officials over how to negotiate an end to the war, Metropolitan Epiphanius said the outcome for Ukraine was unpredictable, but he left little doubt of his hopes for Ukraine’s destiny.

“We believe that God could create the miracle, the same as he created a miracle for Syria, and Assad left Syria,” he said. “We ask everybody for the spiritual weapons, the prayers.”

President Trump declared on Tuesday that the United States should seize control of Gaza and permanently displace the entire Palestinian population of the devastated seaside enclave, one of the most brazen ideas that any American leader has advanced in years.

Hosting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at the White House, Mr. Trump said that all two million Palestinians from Gaza should be moved to countries like Egypt and Jordan because of the devastation wrought by Israel’s campaign against Hamas after the terrorist attack of Oct. 7, 2023.

“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference Tuesday evening. “We’ll own it and be responsible” for disposing of unexploded munitions and rebuilding Gaza into a mecca for jobs and tourism. Sounding like the real estate developer he once was, Mr. Trump vowed to turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

While the president framed the matter as a humanitarian imperative and an economic development opportunity, he effectively reopened a geopolitical Pandora’s box with far-reaching implications for the Middle East. Control over Gaza has been one of the major flash points of the Arab-Israeli conflict for decades, and the idea of relocating its Palestinian residents recalls an era when great Western powers redrew the maps of the region and moved around populations without regard to local autonomy.

The notion of the United States taking over territory in the Middle East would be a dramatic reversal for Mr. Trump, who first ran for office in 2016 vowing to extract America from the region after the Iraq war and decried the nation-building of his predecessors. In unveiling the plan, Mr. Trump did not cite any legal authority giving him the right to take over the territory, nor did he address the fact that forcible removal of a population violates international law and decades of American foreign policy consensus in both parties.

He made the proposal even as the United States was seeking to secure the Israel-Hamas cease-fire’s second phase, which is designed to free the remaining hostages in Gaza and bring a permanent end to the fighting. Negotiators had described their task as exceptionally difficult even before Mr. Trump announced his idea of ousting Palestinians from their homes.

Hamas, which has ruled in Gaza for most of the past two decades and is re-establishing control there now, immediately rejected mass relocation on Tuesday, and Egypt and Jordan have rejected the idea of taking in a large influx of Palestinians, given the fraught history, burden and destabilizing potential.

Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas official, said that Mr. Trump’s proposed relocation was “a recipe for creating chaos and tension in the region.”

“Our people in Gaza will not allow for these plans to come to pass,” he said in a statement distributed by Hamas. “What is needed is the end of the occupation and the aggression against our people, not expelling them from their land.”

Mr. Trump waved aside the opposition from Arab countries like Egypt and Jordan, suggesting that his powers of persuasion would convince them.

“They say they’re not going to accept,” Mr. Trump said during an earlier meeting with Mr. Netanyahu in the Oval Office. “I say they will.”

Mr. Netanyahu, sitting at Mr. Trump’s side, smiled with satisfaction as the president first outlined his ideas. Later, during the joint news conference, the Israeli prime minister heaped praise on Mr. Trump.

“You cut to the chase,” Mr. Netanyahu told Mr. Trump. “You see things others refuse to see. You say things others refuse to say, and after the jaws dropped, people scratch their heads and they say, ‘you know, he’s right.’”

“This is the kind of thinking that will reshape the Middle East and bring peace,” he added.

In his remarks, Mr. Trump insisted that Palestinians would quickly warm to his idea.

“I don’t think people should be going back to Gaza,” Mr. Trump said. “I heard that Gaza has been very unlucky for them. They live like hell. They live like they’re living in hell. Gaza is not a place for people to be living, and the only reason they want to go back, and I believe this strongly, is because they have no alternative.”

He suggested that nations in the region could finance the resettlement of Gazans to new places — perhaps “a good, fresh, beautiful piece of land” — that would provide better living conditions, either as a single territory or as many as a dozen. “It would be my hope that we could do something really nice, really good, where they wouldn’t want to return,” he said without offering details of what that would entail.

Asked how many Palestinians he had in mind, he said, “all of them,” adding, “I would think that they would be thrilled.” Pressed repeatedly on whether he would force them to go even if they did not want to, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t think they’re going to tell me no.”

Gaza has a long and tortured history of conflict and crisis. Many Gazans are descendants of Palestinians who were forced out of their homes during the 1948 war after Israel’s independence, an event known around the Arab world as the Nakba, or catastrophe. Now Mr. Trump is suggesting that they be displaced again, even though the Geneva Conventions — international agreements that the United States and Israel both ratified — bar forcible relocation of populations.

Egypt captured Gaza during the 1948 war and controlled it until Israel seized it, along with other Palestinian territory, in a 1967 war against a coalition of Arab nations seeking to destroy the Jewish state. Palestinians in Gaza waged violent resistance for years afterward, and Israel eventually withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

But within two years, Hamas, an avowed enemy of Israel that the United States and other nations have designated a terrorist group, took control of the enclave and used it as a base for war against Israel.

For years, Israel blockaded Gaza while Hamas fired rockets and staged terrorist attacks, culminating in the October 2023 operation that killed 1,200 people and led to the capture of 250 more. Israel retaliated with an unrelenting military operation that killed more than 47,000 people, according to Gazan health officials, whose count does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

In the weeks since a cease-fire that President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s administration negotiated and that Mr. Trump pushed came into effect, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were repeatedly displaced throughout the war have returned to their homes in Gaza to find them and their communities demolished. Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, visited Gaza last week and said it would take 10 to 15 years to reconstruct.

“If you had damage that was one-hundredth of what I saw in Gaza, nobody would be allowed to go back to their homes,” Mr. Witkoff told reporters on Tuesday. “That’s how dangerous it is. There’s 30,000 unexploded munitions. It is buildings that could tip over at any moment. There’s no utilities.”

Picking up on the theme later in the day, Mr. Trump said it was not realistic to have Palestinians return to Gaza. “They have no alternative right now” but to leave, Mr. Trump told reporters before Mr. Netanyahu’s arrival.

“I mean, they’re there because they have no alternative,” he said. “What do they have? It is a big pile of rubble right now.” He added: “I don’t know how they could want to stay. It’s a demolition site. It’s a pure demolition site.”

Mr. Trump suggested the resettlement of Palestinians would be akin to the New York real estate projects he built his career on. “If we could find the right piece of land, or numerous pieces of land, and build them some really nice places with plenty of money in the area, that’s for sure,” he said. “I think that would be a lot better than going back to Gaza.”

“I do see a long-term ownership position” for the United States, Mr. Trump said, adding that “everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent.”

Mr. Trump’s summit with Mr. Netanyahu was his first in-person meeting with another world leader since his return to power two weeks ago. It was part of a multiday visit to Washington by Mr. Netanyahu that was meant to demonstrate the close ties between the two leaders.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu forged a close partnership during the president’s first term but fell out toward its end over a number of issues, including the Israeli leader’s willingness to congratulate Mr. Biden on his victory in the 2020 election, which Mr. Trump insists he won. Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu have since sought to smooth over their rift.

But Mr. Netanyahu went into his meeting at odds with Mr. Trump on several important issues, according to analysts, likely including how to confront Iran’s nuclear ambitions and how quickly to end the war in Gaza.

The Trump administration has made clear that it wants to see all of the hostages held by Hamas returned and then move on to a grand bargain involving Saudi Arabia that formalizes relations with Israel.

Saudi Arabia reiterated support for an independent Palestinian state on Tuesday and said forging ties with Israel would depend on the creation of such a state.

Advisers to Mr. Trump told reporters on Tuesday morning that the president and Mr. Netanyahu were united behind the idea that Hamas should not be allowed to remain in power.

With Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing government in jeopardy if the war ends with Hamas still in control in Gaza, and with no other plan for the area in place, analysts expect the Israeli prime minister to try to delay moving toward a permanent cease-fire.

“Netanyahu made this salami deal,” said Shira Efron, the senior director of policy research at the Israel Policy Forum, a New York-based research group, referring to the three-phased agreement with Hamas. “He’s always playing for time and kicking the can down the road.”

Adding to the anxiety in the region were reports on Monday that U.S. intelligence officials believe Iran is seeking to build a cruder atomic weapon that could be developed quickly if the leadership in Tehran decided to do so.

It remains unclear whether that decision has been made, and Iran’s new president has indicated that he would like to begin a negotiation with Mr. Trump’s administration even as the country’s nuclear scientists push ahead with their efforts.

Mr. Trump on Tuesday signed an order directing a return to the policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran through sanctions, but avoided hostile language and refused to say whether he would support an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, an indication of his interest in reaching an agreement. “This is one I’m torn about,” he said as he signed the order. “Hopefully, we’re not going to have to use it very much.”

Edward Wong contributed reporting from Washington, and Adam Rasgon from Jerusalem. Ephrat Livni contributed research.