With the leaders of Hamas and Israel’s prime minister agreeing to phase one of a U.S.-brokered ceasefire agreement, Donald Trump may finally be on the verge of ending a bloody conflict that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians — and which largely defined the 2024 election.
The U.S. president could also be on the verge of achieving a major accolade he’s openly sought for months, if not longer: the Nobel Peace Prize. Awarded to Barack Obama in 2009, winning the prize is Trump’s way of attaining a similar level of the same global respect his longtime political foe achieved with ease almost immediately upon taking office.
And as Israel’s ministers vote on the peace agreement the country’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington to support, it remains obvious that the Israeli government and Netanyahu himself could still put serious obstacles in the way of any deal becoming permanent.
Even as leaders of Hamas vowed to return all living and dead hostages, Israeli military forces continued to carry out strikes throughout the day Thursday, according to reports from inside Gaza. Trump himself was posed questions about Netanyahu’s level of commitment to the deal’s capacity to end the war on a long-term basis, and found himself unable to qualify it.
Asked how he could guarantee Hamas would disarm and Israel would not resume bombardments of Gaza at a Cabinet meeting, the U.S. president responded that his current priority was the return of hostages: “After that, we’ll see...but they’ve agreed to things, I think it’s gonna move along pretty well.”
“We’re going to see how it all goes. There’s a point at which we may do something that would be a little bit different, and maybe very positive for everybody,” Trump added of the possibility of Palestinian statehood. “We’ll be looking at that at the time. I think we will get to that.”
It isn’t completely clear the extent to which both sides have agreed to later phases of the peace process. Israel remains publicly opposed to any consideration of statehood for the Palestinian territories, which remains a major sticking point to the deal — particularly as it concerns Hamas’s willingness to disarm and relinquish political control of the Gaza Strip, which the militant group has not said it will do.
Beyond the larger points of a long-term peace agreement, there’s still the chance that hostilities erupt again before that conversation even takes place. Israeli tanks were recorded firing on coastal road densely packed with Palestinians after news of the ceasefire agreement was announced, which had driven many into the streets in celebration.
Reporting throughout Thursday indicates significant roadblocks still in the way. Nearly all stem from Israeli unwillingness to accept Palestinian demands: among those asks included a request for imprisoned Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti to be among the hundreds of Palestinians released from Israeli custody in an exchange of hostages with Hamas; it was denied. The head of the Palestinian mission to the UK warned: "this is not a time to relax."
"We have experience with Netanyahu," Husam Zomlot told Radio 4, noting that the prime minister "looks for loopholes" and "doesn't want to end [the war]".
The prime minister also remains under serious political pressure at home. With many Israelis fuming over the peace agreement’s terms and the growing public support for a Palestinian state among Western nations, Netanyahu faced a threat from far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to dissolve the governing coalition if the prime minister doesn’t secure an agreement for the total dissolution of Hamas.
Hamas, meanwhile, faces the opposite pressure. Much reporting indicates that the involvement of Arab countries and Turkey’s President Erdogan forced the militant group to accept a deal with little in the way of tangible guarantees of success.
“When Trump put forward his plan, as lopsided as it was, the Arab states and others embraced it, not because they loved the terms but because they just wanted to be done with this. That put Hamas in a very difficult position,” Khaled Elgindy, visiting scholar with Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies told The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner this week.
As a result, supporters of a ceasefire across the political spectrum (with the exception of Israel’s loyal defenders on social media) widely agree: for this deal to succeed, the brunt of Trump’s pressure is going to need to be aimed squarely at Netanyahu. The Israeli bombing of Qatar, aimed at assassinating Hamas political leaders, was seen as a key moment that shifted the president’s view — much like the delay in Ukraine-Russia talks and continued Russian strikes on civilian targets in Kyiv and elsewhere seemed to turn Trump against Vladimir Putin.
“The fact that Trump and his team could step in aggressively to get a deal done this week shows that the war could have ended much earlier had the U.S. pressured the Netanyahu government appropriately earlier. The key reason Trump moved forward with pressure on Israel at this point is because of Israel's overreach by bombing Qatar in September. It made the White House recognize that Israel's recklessness was increasingly becoming an American problem,” wrote the progressive Quincy Institute scholar Trita Parsi. His words were approvingly echoed on X by Curt Mills, executive director of the American Conservative magazine and a voice among the war-skeptic MAGA right.
Mills, who has also called the Israeli assault on Gaza a genocide, derided Netanyahu and critics of the agreement to release living and dead hostages within the Israeli governing coalition on Thursday.
“The January ceasefire — secured by [Steve] Witkoff even before he was in office, a baller move — ushered in the very positive first phase of the Trump Admin. That was disrupted by the Israelis breaking the deal and then by June 13. This is a grand opportunity to get back on track,” wrote Mills.
Steve Bannon, the MAGAworld populist ex-Breitbart baron, added on his podcast: “What really drove this was Netanyahu’s overreach. The greater Israel project backfired. We warned them. He dragged America into wars the public won’t support. That’s why this deal happened.” The War Room host was more optimistic than most progressives, and even moreso than his former boss that Palestinian statehood remained not just firmly on the table, but now inevitable.
“It’s a peace plan in Gaza, but it’s going to be the beginning of a two-state solution,” Bannon declared Thursday.
Can Trump force Netanyahu to budge on the one position that seems certain to shatter the Israeli leader’s political coalition? If he does, the Nobel Peace Prize would certainly be on the table — though the prime minister’s vow to nominate him for it could be the price.
