JERUSALEM — U.S. Vice President JD Vance and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met on Wednesday to discuss plans for a postwar Gaza, with the allies trying to maintain and look beyond a truce in the shattered Palestinian territory.

The plan is for “a completely new vision of how to have a civil government, how to have security there,” Netanyahu told reporters. “I think we have some very, very good ideas.”

He did not elaborate. Vance, in the middle of a three-day visit to Israel, described the talks as a work in progress. He’ll be followed by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who plans to travel to the country later this week to help reinforce the U.S.-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

“We are really creating a peace plan and an infrastructure here where nothing existed even a week and a day ago,” Vance said. “That’s going to to require a lot of work and a lot of ingenuity.”

The White House has said it’s optimistic the fragile ceasefire — which began just over a week ago — will hold and turn into a formal end of the two-year war in Gaza. That’s despite deadly clashes between the two sides over the weekend.

Under U.S. President Donald Trump’s peace plan, Israel and Hamas committed to holding fire, with the latter freeing all 20 remaining live hostages. But the Palestinian Islamist faction’s failure to return the remains of all 28 deceased hostages, as it agreed to, has raised doubts about whether the pause in fighting can be made permanent.

Hamas has also balked at the demand in the Trump plan for the group to disarm and cede power to an alternative Palestinian government supervised by a board made up of foreign officials and possibly chaired by Trump. In response, Israeli officials have threatened a resumption of the war which had rattled the wider Middle East and whose toll on Gaza civilians distanced U.S.-allied Arab powers from the Jewish state.

As part of the truce, Israel released almost 2,000 jailed Palestinians, including scores serving life terms for lethal attacks. Citing difficulty in searching the Gaza rubble, Hamas has lagged in handing over remains of slain hostages, 13 of whom are unaccounted for.

Netanyahu’s forward-looking tone differed from that of some of his own ministers.

“When I read over the agreement, I see that it requires ‘a return of all hostages, the living and the deceased as one,’” Eli Cohen, a member of the Israeli security cabinet, told Tel Aviv radio station 103 FM. “Until they come back, no more progress will be made.”

Privately, Netanyahu aides involved in the Gaza talks acknowledge that as many as five dead hostages may not be retrievable at this time — a possibility publicly voiced by Vance. The prime minister’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Some of these hostages are buried under thousands of pounds of rubble,” Vance said on Tuesday. “Some of the hostages — nobody even knows where they are.”

Israelis, he said, will need to show a “little bit of patience.”

Vance arrived a day after Trump envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. The visits prompted Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid to accuse the prime minister of “single-handedly turning us into a client state which accepts diktats regarding its security.”

Netanyahu dismissed that as “hogwash.” Vance said Israel is no U.S. vassal state.

“I would say the ceasefire is very fragile,” Meghan O’Sullivan, director at Harvard’s Belfer Center, told Bloomberg Television on Tuesday. “I would imagine that the very clear message these three individuals (Vance, Witkoff, Kushner) brought to Netanyahu and his cabinet was: ‘You must maintain the ceasefire.’ Israel is on alert that that is the president’s highest highest priority at this very moment.”

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