Trump Has A Gaza Peace Deal. Will It Hold?

The last two years have brought unprecedented horrors in Israel-Palestine: first, the gruesome Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israelis led by the Palestinian militant group Hamas, then Israel’s sweeping and U.S.-enabled devastation of the Gaza Strip. Daily reports of deaths and apparent war crimes have been so overwhelming as to sometimes obscure the reality that the continued conflict and tragedy are a result of choices by individuals — often, choices at the White House.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced the beginnings of a U.S.-brokered peace deal, under which Israel and Hamas will begin freeing Israeli hostages kidnapped on Oct. 7 and detained Palestinians, while Israel will halt its attacks on Gaza. The two parties signed the agreement on Thursday. Hamas is expected to soon release 20 surviving hostages as the Israel Defense Forces withdraw from much of Gaza; celebrations among exhausted victims of the war and others have already begun.

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But now, the chance of continued peace depends on bigger and more complex decisions by Trump that there is no guarantee he will pursue. Six months ago, Israel broke the last ceasefire he brokered, escalating the killing of Palestinians and initiating a man-made famine without consequences from the U.S. and with heavy American support.

What the two sides have accepted is the first step of a larger proposition. Beyond releasing captives, the president’s plan envisions beginning the reconstruction of the Palestinian territory, with Israeli operations ending, Hamas disarming and Gaza receiving humanitarian aid at a level it has not seen for months. The vision is widely understood as prioritizing a political win for Trump, but he argued on Truth Social on Wednesday that it benefits all involved: “All Parties will be treated fairly! This is a GREAT day.”

It’s a tall order, however. And it could be doomed if the U.S. persists in policy patterns initiated by President Joe Biden, then sustained or even intensified by Trump for close to a year: deference to Netanyahu, disregard for Palestinians and dismissing skeptics of the war strategy in Washington and beyond.

A Blank Check From The U.S.

The United States has unparalleled leverage over Israel’s war effort and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s chief source of funding, weapons and diplomatic backing. U.S. officials have debated how to use that influence throughout the war, and current expectations that a deal can succeed are rooted in the sense that Trump has pressured Netanyahu for peace more than Biden did. 

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The Biden administration began demanding a truce as the war hit the six-month mark in March 2024 and unveiled its own ceasefire plan that May. Yet U.S. officials repeatedly showed Netanyahu he did not need to fear losing their support. They abandoned their own “red line” for his conduct in the war, ignored recommendations from U.S. government experts and fellow Democrats to limit U.S. arms for Israel, and declined to amplify Israelis’ own calls for Netanyahu to end the war, instead greenlighting another devastating Israeli offensive in Lebanon.

Then Trump won the election. Demanding a ceasefire before his inauguration and hinting at big repercussions otherwise, he secured a deal.

Multiple Western officials working on the war since its beginning told HuffPost they see Trump’s recent nudges to Netanyahu as another key break with Biden’s failed policy. One said Israel’s leader was surprised when Trump celebrated Hamas’ conditional acceptance of his plan on Friday, breaking with the U.S. habit of, alongside Israel, treating the Palestinian group as a spoiler unwilling to cut a deal.

“The lack of coordination of a response with Israel is different,” said Maha Nassar, a professor at the University of Arizona who specializes in Palestinian history, pointing to an Axios report that when Netanyahu downplayed Hamas’ response in a private call, Trump snapped back that he was “always so fucking negative.” (Trump publicly denied making the remark.) 

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“President Trump has his own political calculations changing as well, and there’s the personal desire for a Nobel Peace Prize,” Nassar continued. She noted some conservatives’ increased wariness of Israel and that a peace agreement in Gaza seems closer than one in, for instance, the Ukraine war.

Many observers suspected that, between Trump’s urgency for an agreement and their own interests, Netanyahu and Hamas were both keen on the first stage of his plan that is now beginning: exchanging prisoners. However, what comes next is much harder, because Trump’s outline ties ending the war to resolving a range of questions about the future of Gaza, Hamas and Western and Arab enforcement of a ceasefire — contentious matters that could take months to compromise on.

“The Arabs are seemingly more united and putting pressure,” one Western official who was not authorized to speak on the record told HuffPost, a reference to calls from Arab states, traditional allies of the Palestinian cause, for Hamas to accept disarmament and the end of its rule in Gaza. 

Sustaining a truce beyond a prisoner release while those questions remain under discussion will likely require the U.S. to hold firm against any attempt by Netanyahu to abandon the negotiations and once again say the only way to deal with Hamas is through continued fighting. (The Israeli leader partially limited the Gaza campaign after Trump issued his plan, although U.S.-backed Israeli bombing then continued, killing dozens of Palestinians.) 

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“You can’t link ending the war to Hamas disarming or to future governance, because we just don’t know how that’s going to play out,” said Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University and the author of “Blind Spot,” a history of U.S.-Palestinian relations. “That’s just a recipe for Netanyahu to continue his forever war.”

But he and others described uncertainty about Trump using U.S. leverage to prolong a ceasefire.

Withholding, or threatening to withhold, U.S. military equipment for Israel is the strongest possible tactic, yet it is one that could spark strong rebukes from pro-Israel voices and has been largely ignored by the two U.S. presidents overseeing America’s involvement in Gaza. “It’s the equivalent of questioning the authority of the pope in the 13th century, and it’s not on the table for Trump any more than it was for Biden,” Elgindy said.

Inheriting and expanding Biden’s culture of impunity for Israel, Trump has made the use of that tactic even less likely.

One route to halting weapons transfers is for U.S. officials to say Israel used them in violation of American and international law. But Biden repeatedly avoided such conclusions about Gaza, defying extensive evidence cited by his own advisers and independent watchdog groups. His administration rendered U.S. government processes to investigate alleged Israeli human rights abuses and war crimes impotent and condemned global institutions questioning Israeli conduct, like the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the United Nations. 

The Trump administration has since slashed teams of American officials doing that work and placed U.S. sanctions on ICC and U.N. personnel. The undermining of investigations makes it far more difficult and unlikely to build a clear legal basis for American pressure on Netanyahu, even if the administration decided it wanted to do so.  

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Fuzzy interpretations of Trump’s plan could further undermine its survival, particularly because the proposal itself is so vague. 

“It’s a hodgepodge,” Elgindy said, pointing to ideas like a so-called Peace Board for Gaza chaired by Trump and involving former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. “There isn’t a line that runs through everything that makes it make sense… [and] it has no concrete steps or sequencing or benchmarks for Israel to do anything.”

Noting “many ambiguities” in the framework, the Western official described a persistent tussle for influence over Trump between Netanyahu and his hard-line U.S. allies versus other players eager for a ceasefire. “Israel’s best bet is Trump loses patience at some point and greenlights the resumption of the war,” the official said. 

Some suspect the chance for the ceasefire to ensure its own doom is by design, noting Trump’s embrace of extreme ideas like displacing Palestinians en masse and cutting off aid as a war tactic, which Biden called unacceptable.

“The brutality of Trump’s policies is open and transparent, whereas the Biden policies were dishonest and just as brutal,” said a career U.S. official who was not authorized to speak on the record. They cast Trump’s limited nudging of Netanyahu as “fake and largely theater.”

A State Department spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on the criticism.

Humanitarian groups have welcomed the initial deal’s provision for an uptick in aid for Gaza, but say truly addressing the crisis will require big further steps. “Every day, Palestinians are dying needlessly, the majority of which are from preventable causes. What’s needed now is immediate, unrestricted humanitarian access, including the rapid distribution of food, clean water, medication, baby formula, and shelter, hygiene, and medical supplies throughout Gaza,” Rabih Torbay, the president and CEO of the charity Project HOPE, said in a statement, calling for Israel to open all crossings into the strip and ensure aid workers can enter freely.

Ignoring Palestinians

In the years before the Oct. 7 attack, the Biden administration continued policies from the first Trump presidency that showed little interest in relations with Palestinians, like keeping the previous U.S. consulate serving them closed and declining to reopen the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) office in Washington. Instead of pursuing Israeli-Palestinian negotiations — Biden became the first U.S. president in four decades to not even offer a roadmap for such talks— U.S. officials prioritized ties between Israel and other Arab nations, most significantly the regional heavyweight Saudi Arabia. 

Biden himself and manyanalysts have said that approach helped drive Hamas to start a war — recognizing that treating Palestinians as irrelevant or forgotten drove dangerous desperation. But the Biden administration continued prioritizing a U.S.-Israel-Saudi deal throughout the conflict, suggesting that it might produce a ceasefire, while doing little to address Palestinian concerns.

U.S. officials acknowledged the Gaza war showed a need for a lasting Israeli-Palestinian compromise, yet did little to challenge hard-right Israelis seeking long-term Israeli control of Gaza or to demonstrate support for meaningful Palestinian autonomy.

The Trump administration’s new ceasefire push suggests continued — even greater — American blindness toward Palestinian views and aspirations.

Last month, an internal administration cable told U.S. officials they cannot meet with the U.S.-backed Palestinian Authority (PA), which partially governs the occupied West Bank, without prior approval from the office of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the career U.S. official told HuffPost. (The State Department spokesperson did not respond to a query about the policy.)

And the new Gaza peace plan’s references to a governing board and to foreign troops controlling the strip reflect a “stubborn belief that Palestinians are somehow less capable of managing their own affairs,” Nassar said. “It’s a very colonial attitude and it’s a very outdated one, but it’s one that still seems to hold sway in American policy-making circles.”

She suggested the new diplomacy would not produce Palestinian self-governance but “endless rounds of negotiations …[and] in the meantime the Israeli grasp and chokehold on Palestinian life continues to tighten.”

Trump has said he will not permit Israeli annexation of the West Bank, the area envisioned as the heart of a future Palestinian state, and his proposal hints at Palestinians’ hopes for such an entity. Still, his administration will likely only prioritize those matters to the extent Arab governments close to the U.S. want to do so — which means the attention could be fickle, sowing the seeds for future frustration and strife.

Those governments could, for instance, urge the U.S. to ensure the ceasefire diplomacy includes discussions of reconciliation among Palestinian factions, from Hamas to the Fatah group, which controls the PA. But that is “not out of empathy or altruism or value in Palestinian lives… just a recognition that too much Palestinian suffering can be destabilizing,” Elgindy said.

Yet he also highlighted that Trump’s approach could be influenced by his team’s demonstrated intense views on Palestine, which have extended beyond foreign policy to a domestic crackdown on supporters of Palestinian rights in the U.S.

“This administration is the most anti-Palestinian in every conceivable way that we have ever seen in the United States,” Elgindy said. “They are totally bought into the philosophy that the key to peace is to defeat Palestinian aspirations.”

Going It Alone

In mostly providing Israel with unchecked support, Trump has also reflected Biden by largely keeping his policy separate from other international players who could help pressure Tel Aviv. Failing to harness American, Israeli and international calls for greater flexibility from Netanyahu has been a missed opportunity – and if the president is serious about advancing his ceasefire, he will likely need all the help he can get.

On Capitol Hill, opposition to unlimited U.S. support for the Israeli war grew significantly throughout 2024, but the Biden administration helped shield Netanyahu from lawmakers rather than work with the latter to rein in the former.

In 2025, the pushback has grown, with increasing numbers of Democrats accusing Israel of committing a genocide (a charge it denies) and even some of Trump’s fellow Republicans suggesting U.S. involvement in the war is unwise. So far, the administration has not collaborated with those critics or indicated it sees their influence as relevant to discussions with Netanyahu.

“The increasing concerns in Congress are not translating to legislation passing,” said Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, noting that the administration seems unconcerned with Democrats’ recommendations on Israel-Palestine while GOP skepticism of Israel has yet to seem strong enough to sway Trump.

On the global stage, the Trump administration has, to a degree, coordinated with other influential nations on Israel-Palestine in recent months, but it has not endorsed steps that fellow governments and many experts see as necessary, like accountability for abuses during the war and tangible progress toward Palestinian statehood. 

“The so-called ‘Trump peace plan’... fails to demand justice and reparations,” Agnes Callamard of Amnesty International said in a Wednesday night statement. “Stopping the cycle of suffering and atrocities requires an end to longstanding impunity … States must uphold their obligations under international law to bring to justice those responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide.”

She highlighted the pattern under both Trump and Biden of the U.S. using its veto power at the U.N. Security Council to block criticism of Israel.

Meanwhile, in dealing with frustrated Israelis — most of whom want the war to end and many of whom seek a new leader — Trump has, like Biden, expressed sympathy for hostage families but stopped far short of allying himself with Netanyahu’s opponents at home.

Publicly identifying the Israeli prime minister as a problem represents another form of leverage, Elgindy said. He noted Biden avoided ever doing so as part of his administration’s overarching policy of permitting “no daylight,” or no public differences, between Israel and the U.S.

“When there’s no daylight between the U.S. and Israel, that’s when you have war and crisis … we’re just rubberstamping everything Israel does and pretending this somehow also aligns with our interests,” he continued. “When American leaders finally draw a distinction between our interests and Israel’s, that’s when progress can be made.”

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