After a pivotal Allied victory, years into World War II, Winston Churchill famously proclaimed that when it came to hopes for the end of the war, it was “not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”
That sort of expectations setting is not President Donald Trump’s style. Appearing with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Monday to present a new 20-point peace plan to end the war in Gaza, Trump declared it “one of the great days ever in civilization,” and suggested he was close not just to ending the war that has been raging for close to two years — but to bringing “eternal peace” after thousands of years of conflict in the Middle East.
That is probably slightly overstating things. But in fairness, there were some significant developments in Monday’s announcement, in between jokes about the pronunciation of the Abraham Accords and some digs at Joe Biden’s memory lapses. It’s notable that Netanyahu backed the peace plan at all — saying it “achieves our war aims” — just days after a defiant speech to the UN General Assembly in which he vowed to “finish the job” of entirely eliminating Hamas in Gaza by force.
Some of what’s in the peace plan itself is familiar from earlier ceasefire proposals. Hamas would release all remaining Israeli hostages, both alive and dead, within 72 hours. In exchange, Israel would release thousands of Palestinian prisoners. Israeli forces would carry out a staged withdrawal to a security perimeter around the edges of the strip. Humanitarian aid would resume to the levels following the last temporary ceasefire in January. Hamas would disarm and renounce any role in governing Gaza.
But there are some seemingly new elements as well. While the plan envisions the Palestinian Authority, which currently governs the West Bank, taking power in Gaza, this would only happen after significant reforms are undertaken. This language is consistent with the Saudi-French proposal put forward at the UN earlier this month. In the meantime, the temporary government of Gaza would be “made up of qualified Palestinians and international experts” and overseen by a “Board of Peace” that would include former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and would be chaired by Trump himself.
The plan includes language affirming that “no one will be forced to leave Gaza,” which is notable given Trump’s previous plans for the region — though a reference to a “Trump economic development plan” suggests that the dream of a Riviera of the Middle East has not quite died.
The draft also states that “Hamas members who commit to peaceful co-existence and to decommission their weapons will be given amnesty,” and allowed to leave Gaza, a notable inclusion that does give the members of the group an alternative to a death sentence, though it raises the question of what country would take them in.
But the fundamental disagreements that have prevented peace so far — Hamas doesn’t want to dismantle or give up the remaining hostages that are its last form of leverage; Israel, or at least factions of the Israeli government, won’t agree to withdraw troops and don’t have a credible plan for the future governance of Gaza — still remain.
The recent experience of Ukraine and Russia suggests that Trump’s patience with leaders he considers friends is not infinite, when they don’t live up to his expectations and optimistic pronouncements. That experience also suggests he does not always have a plan B when they don’t.
Will Hamas agree to this? Will Israel actually agree to it?
The plan emerged following meetings Trump held with leaders of several Muslim nations in New York last week, notably President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey. Based on these meetings, Trump appears to have been convinced that Hamas is seeking peace as well — he said as much on Monday — but it’s far from clear that the group has agreed to anything resembling these terms. Following the press conference, senior Hamas official Muhammad Mardawi told Al Jazeera that the plan appears to “lean toward the Israeli perspective” and that the group would have to receive it in writing before officially responding.
While two years of war have wiped out much of Hamas’s senior leadership and degraded its military capabilities, it is still the dominant political and military power in Gaza, and showed, with an ambush earlier on Monday in Gaza City, that it is still capable of inflicting casualties on Israeli forces. Amnesty or no, the group seems unlikely to agree to a deal that would effectively require eliminating itself. The language of the agreement is also vague as to the time frame of Israel’s troop withdrawal. Netanyahu described it at the White House as only a “modest” withdrawal and emphasized several times that Israel would be keeping troops in Gaza for the foreseeable future. That could be a nonstarter for Hamas.
“The biggest danger is that both Israel and Hamas say ‘yes’ in principle, but then insist on negotiating every detail, dragging things out for months while the war continues.”
— Ilan Goldenberg, former Biden administration Mideast adviser, now with the advocacy group J Street
Aaron David Miller, who advised several presidential administrations on Mideast peace negotiations, says it’s likely that Netanyahu is counting on Hamas to refuse the deal. If that happens, Trump said, “Israel would have my full backing to finish the job of destroying the threat of Hamas.”
While Trump was full of praise for his friend Bibi on Monday, there has clearly been some friction in the relationship of late. Trump was publicly unhappy with Israel’s air strikes on Qatar. (Netanyahu called the emir of Qatar to apologize, with Trump looking on, earlier in the day.) Trump also promised Arab leaders he would oppose Israeli annexation of the West Bank.
“I don’t think he wants and can afford a major confrontation with Trump,” Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Vox.
On the other hand, it does not seem possible that Netanyahu could agree to anything resembling these conditions and keep his current government in power. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose right-wing allies could collapse the government and force new elections if they wanted to, has laid out his own six-point set of conditions for his continued support, which include no role at all for the Palestinian Authority and completely ruling out a future Palestinian state. (Trump’s new plan states that once the Palestinian Authority is reformed, “the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.”)
Could Netanyahu just ignore Smotrich and his other right-wing coalition members? Israeli opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz have backed the plan and hinted they’d be willing to keep Netanyahu’s government afloat if he implemented it and Smotrich’s allies broke with the prime minister in protest. It’s possible that Netanyahu could run in Israel’s next elections (in fall 2026, unless an earlier vote is called) on the basis of the peace plan. But there’s been little indication since the October 7 attacks that he’s willing to jettison his far-right allies or their annexationist ambitions.
Reality check: The war is likely far from over
“The biggest danger is that both Israel and Hamas say ‘yes’ in principle, but then insist on negotiating every detail, dragging things out for months while the war continues,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former Biden administration Mideast adviser, now with the advocacy group J Street. The priority for Trump, Goldenberg said, was to “hold everyone’s feet to the fire” to bring the core tenets of the plan — hostage release, military withdrawal, resumption of aid — to fruition before they get bogged down in debates over Gaza’s future governance.
There are parallels, in these talks, to the ongoing negotiations over the war in Ukraine — and not just because Steve Witkoff has served as the unlikely point man for both. As recently as August, Trump sincerely believed that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to make a peace deal, despite little evidence to suggest that was true. That could describe both Netanyahu and Hamas in this case. In both wars, Trump has made bold and optimistic promises that peace is at hand before obtaining firm commitments to that effect. He also put enormous faith in his personal relationships — with Putin in one case; with Netanyahu and several Arab leaders in another — to overcome the root causes driving long-running conflicts.
As the war in Ukraine has continued to rage and Putin has rejected several opportunities to compromise, Trump has gotten publicly frustrated that the Russian leader is “tapping me along” and has now, rhetorically, shifted to a maximally hawkish pro-Ukrainian position. He has been much slower, however, to apply the kind of economic and military pressure that might force Putin to compromise.
Likewise, Trump may eventually come to the conclusion that Netanyahu is stringing him along. In fact, this seems entirely possible given the recent ups and downs of their relationship. But would Trump become the first president since, arguably, George H.W. Bush, to use real economic and political pressure to get Israel to change course? That seems less likely.
Absent that pressure, Miller says, “it’s hard to imagine that before the end of the year, you could see a fundamental change in the actual situation on the ground.”
We may have gotten a glimpse today of what the end of this war could look like. But accomplishing it is likely to take much more continuous dialogue combined with real pressure than we’ve seen so far or some dramatic political changes in the governments involved. Either may come too late for many of Hamas’s hostages or the people of Gaza.
