As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump claimed he would quickly end the war in Gaza. Eight months after taking office, Trump finally decided to exert some US pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, announcing a 20-point peace plan at the White House on Monday.
But the deal that the US president struck with Netanyahu – after Trump dithered for months, allowing Israel to continue its genocidal war with US weapons and unwavering political support – is less a ceasefire proposal than an ultimatum for Hamas to surrender.
After nearly two years of prolonging the war and obstructing ceasefire negotiations, Netanyahu got almost everything he wanted, thanks to Trump. The US plan calls on Hamas to lay down its weapons and release the Israeli hostages remaining in Gaza, but it allows Israeli troops to occupy parts of Gaza for the foreseeable future. It’s close to the “total victory” over Hamas that Netanyahu has consistently promised the Israeli public, but failed to deliver on the battlefield.
What if Hamas rejects this deal that was drafted without its input, or that of any other Palestinian faction? Trump made clear he would enable Netanyahu to sow even more death and destruction in Gaza. “Israel would have my full backing to finish the job of destroying the threat of Hamas,” he said at the White House. On Tuesday, Trump added he would give Hamas officials “three or four days” to respond – and warned that the group would “pay in hell” if it turns down the agreement. In past negotiations, Hamas had rejected Israeli proposals that forced the group to disarm and pushed it out of any future role governing Gaza.
Once again, Netanyahu has outplayed Trump, who considers himself a master deal-maker. But he’s been regularly outmaneuvered by strongmen like Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin.
When Trump took office in January, he had the upper hand over the Israeli leader, having pushed Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza that went into effect a day before the president’s inauguration on 20 January. But Netanyahu, who worried that his rightwing government would collapse if he agreed to a permanent truce with Hamas, imposed a new siege on Gaza in early March. With Trump’s blessing, Israel deprived Palestinians of food, medicine and other necessities. Netanyahu then refused to continue negotiations with Hamas, and broke the ceasefire after two months.
Thanks to his unwavering support of Netanyahu, Trump has made the US more deeply complicit in Israel’s war crimes. Since Netanyahu resumed the war in March, civilians made up about 15 of every 16 people that the Israeli military has killed in Gaza, according to the independent violence-tracking group Acled. Israel has also pursued a more severe starvation campaign and instigated a famine in northern Gaza. (In August, the Guardian reported that a classified database maintained by the Israeli military showed that 83% of Palestinians killed in Gaza, between the outbreak of war in October 2023 and May of this year, were civilians.)
Along the way, Netanyahu has exploited Trump’s desire for flattery, allowing the Israeli premier to not to draw out the war on Gaza but also to conduct attacks on other countries in the Middle East, including Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. Starting with billions of dollars in US weapons provided by Joe Biden’s administration and continuing under Trump, Israel has been able to bomb virtually anywhere in the region, with impunity. In June, Israel launched a surprise attack against Iran, killing dozens of top military officials and nuclear scientists. Netanyahu then convinced Trump to briefly join Israel’s war, when he ordered US planes to bomb three major nuclear facilities in Iran.
Two weeks later, in early July, the Israeli premier showed up for dinner at the White House. Trump was eager to build on the momentum of a ceasefire he brokered between Iran and Israel, and was planning to cajole Netanyahu into making a deal with Hamas in Gaza. But Netanyahu avoided being publicly pressured by Trump to end the Gaza war, as Trump had done weeks earlier with the Iran ceasefire. Instead, Netanyahu stroked Trump’s ego by revealing that he had nominated the US president for the Nobel peace prize.
Netanyahu managed to both flatter Trump and tap into his sense of grievance over being denied the world’s top peacemaking award. Trump has insisted for years that he deserves the Nobel prize for orchestrating a series of diplomatic agreements between Israel and several Arab countries during his first term. These so-called Abraham Accords were brokered in 2020 by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser at the time, and they included the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. But Trump couldn’t entice Saudi Arabia, the most important Arab state, and its crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, to reach a normalization deal with Israel.
Like Trump’s current peace plan for Gaza, the Abraham Accords were negotiated directly with Israel and autocratic Arab regimes – and they excluded Palestinians from any discussion of their future or aspirations. These are deals conceived by real estate tycoons like Trump, Kushner and Steve Witkoff, who has served as Middle East envoy and one of Trump’s top diplomats in his second term. Trump and Kushner have always viewed Gaza through the prism of a real estate project, where Palestinians are holdouts refusing to cave into pressure to make way for the renovation of prime beachfront property along the Mediterranean Sea.
In one of the few positive developments for Gazans, Trump dropped his widely-derided idea, which he floated during a meeting with Netanyahu in February, for the US to take over Gaza and turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East”, in effect endorsing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
But on Monday, as Trump announced his latest plan, which would establish a temporary governing board for Gaza that he himself would chair, he couldn’t resist ad-libbing a digression about the perceived value of the territory’s waterfront. “As a real estate person, I mean, they gave up the ocean,” Trump said, referring to the Israeli government’s decision in 2005 to withdraw troops occupying Gaza, along with about 8,000 Israeli settlers. He added: “They gave up the ocean. I said: ‘Who would do this deal?’”
In reality, even after its withdrawal, Israel maintained control over Gaza’s airspace, borders and shoreline. In 2007, after Hamas took military control of Gaza following its victory in Palestinian legislative elections, Israel imposed a blockade on the territory that continues until today. Israel gave up the beach, but it still controlled the sea.
In the days leading up to Monday’s announcement at the White House, Kushner and Witkoff spent hours meeting with Netanyahu, who was able to make last-minute changes to Trump’s plan, including the scope and timing of Israeli troop withdrawals from Gaza. As he has for the past two years, the Israeli prime minister managed to impose his will on a US administration that should have far more leverage over him than the other way around. And that means Netanyahu may well doom Trump’s latest peace deal.
Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor, at New York University
