US President Donald Trump disembarks from the Air Force One upon his arrival at Sharm el-Sheikh International Airport in Sharm el-Sheikh to attend a summit on Gaza. Photo / Saul Loeb, AFP)
United States President Donald Trump today marked the end of Israel’s devastating two-year war in Gaza and the release of the remaining Israeli hostages with a call for lasting peace that would reshape the entire Middle East and could become a defining feature of his place in history.
But the tenuousness of the ceasefire and the intractability of the underlying disputes were embedded in his two separate stops.
Firstly, in Jerusalem, he welcomed the hostages home, met with their families and received acclaim and ovations from Israeli leaders, whom he urged to declare victory and stop fighting.
Next, he headed to the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh to visit Arab and other world leaders who supported the ceasefire and Trump’s 20-step plan for a permanent settlement.
Though billed as a “peace summit,” the Egypt meeting notably lacked either side of the fighting.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declined Trump’s last-minute invitation, saying that travel would conflict with a Jewish holiday, after at least one Arab leader objected.
Hamas was never included, and the organisation has refused to disarm, as Trump’s plan would require.
Still, Trump portrayed today’s steps as the prelude to a broader reshaping of the region, hoping to build on his first term’s Abraham Accords that normalised Israel’s relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.
His overture extended even to Iran, whose nuclear sites the US bombed in June.
“This long and difficult war has now ended. You know, some people say 3000 years, some people say 500 years. Whatever it is, it’s, the granddaddy of them all,” he said in a speech to Israel’s parliament. “This is the historic dawn of a new Middle East.”
The immediate effect today was to return all 20 living hostages to Israel; release about 1700 Palestinian detainees and 250 serving life sentences in Israeli prisons; and facilitate the resumption of humanitarian aid to Gaza, where residents desperately need food, medicine and shelter.
Hamas said it would release the bodies of four of the 28 dead hostages it held, after warning that it would not be able to recover all the remains in time for the 72-hour deadline stipulated by the deal.
The agreement also builds in extra time for a group of regional countries, including Turkey, to help to locate the remains.
Israel’s defence minister said Hamas was failing to meet its commitments under the ceasefire deal.
The fighting began when Hamas militants killed about 1200 people in southern Israel and abducted 251 hostages on October 7, 2023.
A total of 468 Israeli military members have died in combat since, according to the Israel Defence Forces.
At least 67,800 Palestinians, a majority of whom were women and children, have died in the war according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Most Israeli hostages were freed during two brief earlier ceasefires.
“You succeeded in doing something miraculous,” Netanyahu said to Trump at the Knesset.
“You succeeded in doing something that no one believed was possible. You brought most of the Arab world - indeed, you brought most of the world behind your proposal to free the hostages and end the war.”
Trump seized a moment of regional fury last month to force the issue after Israeli jets unilaterally struck a Hamas apartment building in Doha, the capital of Qatar, a close US ally.
Angered by the move, Trump pressured Netanyahu to accept more comprehensive terms, according to a senior White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss closed-door diplomatic negotiations.
While Trump never specifically threatened to cut off military aid for Israel in return, the official said, he didn’t need to.
“Without the US, Israel will not exist. And you don’t have to say that,” the senior White House official said last week.
In the ensuing weeks, special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, accelerated a improvisational push toward a ceasefire.
The effort started in a White House session with top Israeli officials in late August, evolved through marathon sessions in New York hotel suites on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly last month and culminated in the chamber of the Israeli Cabinet last week, according to senior US officials involved in the negotiations.
Trump and Witkoff unveiled his plan to Arab leaders in New York, then pushed Netanyahu to accept it. Eventually he did, with caveats. Hamas, too, eventually declared that it was ready for peace, though it left some of the most crucial issues, such as its willingness to disarm, unresolved.
Ultimately, Witkoff decided to break negotiations into two pieces last week in Sharm el-Sheikh.
The easier deal to reach was the ceasefire and hostage and prisoner exchange, the officials said.
The sides are still negotiating on who will run and rebuild Gaza with the fighting over, and a resolution is far from certain.
“A key question on Hamas is whether it will actually disarm,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.
“They’re going to resist that because, guess what, resistance is its middle name, literally,” referring to its full Arabic name, the Islamic Resistance Movement.
“The bigger issue, and the big gap that I don’t think Trump or his team have really prepared the ground for, is the gap that exists between his Administration and Israel on the one hand, versus the rest of the Arab world, on the longer-term questions, especially a pathway to a two-state solution,” Katulis added.
Already, the President has wavered on the composition of the group tasked with establishing governance in Gaza, backpedalling in an interview with reporters on his way to Israel on a previously announced plan to include former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in an oversight role.
Throughout the effort, Trump played the role of remote closer - phoning into sessions, issuing real-time instructions and vowing to “enforce good conduct” on both sides, according to one of the officials.
He has offered up a top US military commander, Admiral Brad Cooper, to oversee a contingent of 200 US troops, along with deployments from Arab and Muslim-majority nations, to supervise the peace. The White House has said US troops will not enter Gaza.
Trump appeared to reference the difficulty of negotiations at the Knesset, saying of Netanyahu: “He’s not the easiest guy to deal with, but that’s what makes him great”.
His speech also included improvisations and digressions typical of his rallies, such as telling the story of Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine’s nickname “Raisin” and swipes at his Democratic predecessors. He also urged Israeli President Isaac Herzog to pardon Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption charges.
The American president’s congratulations on Israel’s victory also contained an undertone of warning Netanyahu not to resume fighting.
“I said, ‘Bibi, you’re going to be remembered for this far more than if you kept this going, going, going, kill, kill, kill.’”
During the negotiations, Hamas pushed for a written guarantee that Israel would not resume attacking Gaza after the hostages were released, but the American negotiating team rejected it twice, according to Khaled Okasha, an Egyptian consultant who advised the Egyptian and Palestinian delegations during the talks.
Instead, they offered verbal assurances to Egypt, Qatar and Turkey.
The push for a public ceremony in Egypt was partly an effort to get Trump on the record in front of world leaders that the war was over, Okasha said. “If he comes to Egypt, he’ll be tied to the agreement,” he said.
The Israeli strike on Doha rattled Arab leaders’ trust in the US, and the test for restoring it will be Trump’s follow-through on his peace plan.
“He cannot backtrack and waste all his efforts,” said a former Egyptian official familiar with negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. “He has to continue” or else “he will lose his legacy”.
The enduring tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbours interrupted today’s pageantry at the suggestion that Netanyahu might accompany Trump to Egypt.
Trump brokered a call with Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi and invited Netanyahu to Sharm el-Sheikh, a White House official said, and Sisi announced that the Israeli Prime Minister would be attending - a significant development because Netanyahu is rarely in the same room with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas.
But Netanyahu’s office quickly declined, and the Iraqi Prime Minister said he had threatened to quit the summit if Netanyahu came.
There would be no iconic photograph of two sides shaking hands, like the 1993 one of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestine Liberation Organisation Chairman Yasser Arafat with US President Bill Clinton at the White House.
In Sharm el-Sheikh, Sisi awarded Trump an Egyptian honorary title, to match the Israeli award that Netanyahu announced earlier.
During Trump’s remarks, he called up Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who said Trump deserved the next Nobel Peace Prize. Trump openly sought and did not receive this year’s accolade, which he teased the Norwegian leader about at the summit. “Norway, what happened?” he said.
With Hamas’ and Israel’s positions still so far apart, the truce remains fragile.
In the meantime, Trump has pushed past the heavy caveats to embrace the yeses.
“Generations from now, this will be remembered as the moment that everything began to change and change very much for the better,” he said in Jerusalem.
“Like the USA right now. It will be the golden age of Israel and the golden age of the Middle East.”
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