President Trump is at the brink of the biggest diplomatic accomplishment of his second term — a cessation of the brutal war between Israel and Hamas — and on Wednesday evening he made clear he was eager to fly to the Middle East to preside over a cease-fire and welcome hostages who have spent two long years in underground captivity.
For Mr. Trump, success in this venture is the ultimate test of his self-described goal as a deal maker and a peacemaker — and a pathway to the Nobel Peace Prize he has so openly coveted. By chance, the winner for 2025 is scheduled to be announced just hours before he may be departing to take his victory lap in Egypt and Israel.
Much could go wrong in coming days, and in the Middle East it often does. The “peace” deal Mr. Trump heralded on Truth Social on Wednesday evening may look more like another temporary pause in a war that started with Israel’s founding in 1948, and has never ended.
But if Mr. Trump can hold this deal together, if Hamas gives up its last 20 living hostages this weekend and with them its negotiating leverage, that would be an extraordinary step toward the kind of peace plan Mr. Trump, and his predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., have pressed to accomplish, despite many diversions down dark holes. And if Mr. Trump can get Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to withdraw troops from Gaza City and give up on his plan to take control of the shattered remains of Gaza, if he can stop the carnage that has killed 1,200 people in Israel and more than 60,000 Palestinians, he will have done what many before him tried: outmaneuvered a difficult and now isolated ally.
“This cease-fire and hostage release, if it happens, only came to fruition because of Trump’s willingness to pressure Prime Minister Netanyahu,” said Aaron David Miller of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has often been critical of Mr. Trump’s starts and stops in the Mideast. “No president, Republican or Democrat, has ever come down harder on an Israeli prime minister on issues so critically important to his politics or his country’s security interests.”
Mr. Trump knows that by far, the best international accomplishment of his first term was the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, the first Arab states to recognize Israel in a quarter of a century. Sudan and Morocco joined later. It was the fear that Saudi Arabia, home to many of the holiest sites in the Muslim faith, was on the verge of joining those accords that helped drive Hamas to the horror of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
But in many ways, stopping the carnage of this war — which destroyed Hamas’s leadership, 90 percent of the homes in Gaza, and ultimately tore at Israel’s global standing — is an even bigger accomplishment.
Israel’s ferocious reaction to the attack, the worst against Jews since the Holocaust, left the country in an unusual place: more powerful than ever, and also more isolated. In recent weeks, Israel’s military campaign in Gaza drove many of its closest allies to call for the creation of a Palestinian state, even if they had no concrete plan about where it would be located or who would run it. And around the world, Israel’s leveling of Gaza, its willingness to kill dozens of Palestinians in order to take out a single Hamas leader, and the talk of driving Palestinians from their refuge did huge moral and political damage to the Israeli state. It may take a generation or more to repair.
It may also change the politics of the region.
With the war still raging and 48 remaining hostages in captivity, 28 of whom are believed dead, Mr. Netanyahu has been on a political high. He told his supporters and critics alike that he had made good on his vow to wipe out the Hamas leadership. He used exploding pagers and walkie-talkies to kill and maim senior leaders of Hezbollah, helped weaken the Assad government in Syria until it collapsed, and killed a generation of Iranian nuclear scientists and military leaders in a 12-day war that ended with an American attack on Iran’s major nuclear sites.
But Mr. Netanyahu also overreached, and Mr. Trump and his aides saw their chance to rein him in. The scope of destruction in Gaza repulsed the world community. His decision to bomb the Hamas negotiators in Qatar shocked the Trump White House. Mr. Trump, who never apologizes himself, forced Mr. Netanyahu to do exactly that to Qatar’s leadership, even releasing pictures of the call. And along the way he maneuvered Mr. Netanyahu to agree to a 20-step plan, one the Israeli leader was betting Hamas would reject.
To the surprise of many, it accepted the opening steps. It had little choice. The scope of the damage, human and physical, undercut Hamas’s dwindling support among the surviving Gazans. The Arab states and Turkey belatedly insisted that it give up.
Mr. Trump will now declare that this chapter is over, and with luck he may be right.
If the peace plan moves forward, Mr. Trump may have as legitimate a claim to that Nobel as the four American presidents who have who have won the peace prize in the past, though with less bombast and lobbying. (They are Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, who was awarded one decades after he left the White House.)
But it is far from clear that the conflict is truly ending. Mr. Trump’s statements, and Mr. Netanyahu’s, referred only to the first step, the hostage-for-prisoner swaps and the withdrawal of Israeli troops to a yet-to-be-described line. Getting to the next stage, where Hamas would have to give up its arms and, even harder, its claim to run Gaza, may prove even more difficult than bringing the living and dead hostages home. Hamas may well balk at the next steps, and so may Mr. Netanyahu, who argues that the job will not be done until every Hamas combatant in the Oct. 7 attacks is hunted down. Any of those could unwind the fragile cease-fire.
It is unclear how the United States and its allies will assemble an “technocratic” interim leadership, or make sure the country’s leadership is purged of Hamas sympathies. Israel seems unlikely to leave as long as remnants of Hamas remain, and maybe even after they are gone. No one seems able to explain what role, if any, the Palestinian Authority will play.
The history of the region suggests that working out peace accords to end conflicts is a little like cleaning up after volcanic eruptions: There is a certainty it will happen again. It is just hard to know when, or how ferociously.
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
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