Praise for what President Donald Trump accomplished in Gaza is coming from more than heads of state who have to worry about his feelings.
Hamas, for instance.
The militant Palestinian group sparked the war by killing 1,200 people inside Israel and kidnapping 250 more on Oct. 7, 2023. But it credits the floridly pro-Israel U.S. President with coercing—with “maximum pressure,” in the words of a senior White House official— Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into accepting the ceasefire, which went into effect Friday.
“Without the personal interference of President Trump in this case, I don’t think that it would have happened, to have reached the end of the war,” Dr. Basem Naim, a physician and senior Hamas official, told Sky News.“Therefore, yes, we thank President Trump and his personal efforts to interfere and to pressure Netanyahu to bring an end to this massacre and slaughtering.”
Read more: How the Trump Administration Sealed the Gaza Ceasefire Deal
Five years after the Abraham Accords—historic agreements normalizing relations between Israel and several Arab states—marked the signal diplomatic achievement of his first term, Trump was once again basking in acclaim for getting something unexpected done in Middle East diplomacy. Whiffs of bipartisanship rose from Capitol Hill. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut termed the prospect of a ceasefire “monumental,” and acknowledged Trump’s role in it.
Trump’s triumph is plain enough: Guns fell silent in a war that was sparked by the deaths of 1,200 people in Israel and over the next two years claimed the lives of 70,000 Palestinians (only 8,900 of them are named Hamas fighters, according to reports of data assembled by the Israel Defense Force through May).
But then, the deal front-loaded good feelings. Phase One of the multi-phased agreement—the only part signed so far by Hamas and Israel—requires the exchange of Israeli hostages for jailed Palestinians, and for Israeli forces to pull back their perimeter. Skeptics focus on what has not yet been hammered out—including the crucial details of how Gaza will be governed, and the broader question of whether, even with outsider monitors that include U.S. officers, Israel can be restrained from resuming military action once it has its hostages back.
But analysts are taking Trump’s push seriously, parsing the president’s 20-point plan while struggling to get their arms around an approach that departs so dramatically from how the world has thought about “the troubled Middle East.”
For 30 years, the solution to the conflict between Israel and Palestinians was thought to be the Oslo Accords, the 1993 agreements meant to produce a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, territory that Israel had conquered in 1967 and militarily occupied since. But Oslo was no match for Palestinian militancy and Israeli territorial ambitions; the West Bank is now home to more than 500,000 Jewish settlers. In time, negotiations nominally aimed at producing a Palestinian state became a shibboleth that gave Israel room to “manage the conflict.” That policy was among the casualties of Oct. 7, 2023.
Diplomacy appeared to be another—and not just in the metaphorical sense. After pulverizing Gaza so relentlessly that a country founded in the shadow of the Holocaust was judged by experts as complicit in genocide, Israel’s military and intelligence apparatus also struck out elsewhere—Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, Syria. Many of the attacks were in self-defense, but on Sept. 9, Israeli missiles struck a complex in Qatar, the Persian Gulf kingdom that had been acting as mediator between Israel and Hamas, and also a key American ally, hosting a huge U.S. air base. The target was Hamas’ chief negotiator on ending the Gaza war.
Yet the attack would provide the impetus for the peace pact. Trump, who has an affinity for the wealthy Gulf kingdoms, was also put out by the attack on a state nominally under U.S. protection. When Netanyahu visited the Oval Office, his host forced him to apologize to Qatar’s prime minister by phone as everyone looked on. Hamas officials later said the spectacle, along with Trump’s earlier vociferous enforcement of a cease-fire between Iran and Israel, encouraged them to trust his vows that the peace pact would be enforced. “Though theatrical, he does what he says,” Reuters quoted an unnamed Hamas official as saying.
The Nobel committee may have been unmoved. But on MSNBC, a guest panel assayed Trump’s “remarkable” success—a segment that, in polarized America, Fox News Channel recognized as a kind of news in itself, and covered on its website.
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