The Sharm el-Sheikh summit, held at Egypt’s Red Sea resort, brought together world leaders, including President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, Qatar Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and U.S. President Donald Trump, who signed a declaration finalizing the Gaza cease-fire. The agreement designates Türkiye, Egypt, Qatar and the U.S. as guarantor countries, reinforcing the cease-fire, facilitating humanitarian aid and laying the groundwork for Gaza’s reconstruction. However, the summit came far too late, after the loss of 66,000 lives, with 85% of Gaza reduced to rubble and unspeakable suffering imprinted on every survivor’s face. Before signing the document, Trump remarked that “the document is going to spell out rules and regulations and lots of other things.” Yet, this is a tentative first step toward peace and its lasting impact will depend on whether it ultimately advances the establishment of a viable Palestinian state.
Convened in the wake of near-total devastation, the conference sought to offer hope where little remains. The initial steps of the 20-point, Trump-brokered peace plan – a cease-fire, the release of hostages and Palestinian detainees, and the initiation of humanitarian relief – are implemented, offering a brief respite.
Before arriving at Sharm el-Sheikh, Trump visited Israel and declared that the cease-fire marks the end of Israel’s war on Gaza and the “age of terror and death,” adding at the Knesset that it signals “the beginning of the age of faith, hope and of God.” One can wish rather than hope that the war is truly over; for a moment, there could be no more comforting statement, however fleeting.
Ahead of the summit, Erdoğan stated that Israel must not be allowed to walk away from the peace deal, a caution grounded in decades of Israel’s retreat from agreements and the structural obstacles it has created for a viable Palestinian state.
Turkish diplomacy played a critical role in persuading Hamas to accept Trump's plan, despite its ambiguity on essential political questions and apparent focus on immediate humanitarian needs. This intervention helped to prevent a situation in which Hamas’ walking away might have enabled Israel to evade its obligations and shift all blame onto the Palestinians, allowing the plan, however imperfect, to take off.
The most formidable barrier to peace is not Hamas’s resistance but Israel’s decades-long, state-sanctioned project of territorial conquest. The settlement enterprise in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has created irreversible facts on the ground. Over 700,000 Israeli settlers now reside in these occupied territories, their communities linked by Israeli-only roads and protected by military infrastructure, systematically fragmenting Palestinian land into non-viable enclaves. The geography necessary for a contiguous and sovereign Palestinian state has been deliberately dismantled. Without a mandated international mechanism to reverse this colonization, any peace process is a hollow performance.
This is the execution of a strategic doctrine: Israel’s security paradigm has long been invoked to justify the permanent denial of Palestinian sovereignty, claiming that a state along the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital would pose an existential threat. This rationale has consistently undermined major peace initiatives, from Oslo onward, following a relentless pattern: engage in talks, accelerate settlement construction and ultimately attribute the collapse to Palestinian “intransigence.”
Recent surveys indicate a significant erosion of support for peace and a troubling normalization of extremist views within Israeli society. A March 2025 poll revealed that 82% of Jewish Israelis support the forced expulsion of Gaza residents, with 47% affirming the idea of killing all inhabitants when conquering an enemy city. Additionally, a June 2025 survey found that 64% of Israelis agreed with the statement "there are no innocent people in Gaza," and 79% reported being "not so troubled" or "not troubled at all" by reports of famine and suffering in Gaza. These sentiments indicate that, if left unchecked, Israel is likely to persist with occupation and regional hegemony, underscoring the need for sustained international pressure to establish a roadmap for a viable Palestinian state.
The rise of Israel’s far-right political order, openly committed to the vision of a Greater Israel, has further eroded the possibility of a genuine peace.
Israel has almost attained pariah status. The Israeli prime minister, despite being invited to attend the Sharm el-Sheikh summit, was reportedly unwelcome and had to abort his visit on unconvincing pretexts. This moment constitutes a historic legitimacy crisis, eliciting criticism both from Israel’s longstanding opponents and from the very center of the Western foreign policy establishment. As Richard Haass, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, recently warned, Israel “runs the risk of becoming a pariah state.” This sentiment is reflected in concrete diplomatic action: 147 of the 193 U.N. member states now recognize Palestine as a sovereign state, including four permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and a growing contingent of European nations. The Trump plan was conceived against this backdrop. As Trump himself stated, his goal is “to help Israel ward off the negative reputation it has at present.”
The release of hostages is a significant relief, offering a glimpse into the ordeal their loved ones endured over the past two years. Despite Israel’s military dominance in the region and decimating Hamas’ top leadership, its brutal tactics that devastated Gaza, and its intelligence apparatus touted as the best in the world, the hostages could be secured only through diplomacy. Equally notable is that Israel has failed to uproot Hamas. While a military organization, Hamas embodies the symbol of Palestinian resistance, deeply engraved in the body and soul of the people. Even if Hamas were eventually dissolved, the underlying resistance it represents, the aspiration for Palestinian sovereignty and self-determination, would endure. Until a viable Palestinian state is established and Palestinian rights are fully realized, the cycle of resistance will persist. No military victory can substitute for justice, recognition and a tangible pathway to Palestinian statehood.
