On Jan. 15, 2025, the world reacted with joy and skepticism to the announcement by Qatar’s Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani that a Gaza cease-fire and prisoner swap deal between Israel and the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement represented by Hamas had been finally agreed effective from Jan. 19, 2025, one day before the swearing-in of U.S. President Donald Trump as the 47th President of the U.S.
The deal resulted from the joint mediation efforts of Qatar, Egypt and the United States, with a major push from President Trump’s Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff. He had worked meticulously with the then Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and the outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Israel and Biden’s Envoy on the Middle East, Jack Lew, since November 2024 and effectively used President Trump’s threat to the parties that “all hell will break loose if a cease-fire was not reached before the inauguration day.”
On the face of it, the warning was meant for Hamas to take the negotiations seriously, but in fact, it was addressed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well, who had blocked two previous cease-fire deals that Hamas had accepted, first in December 2023, two months after the Oct. 7, 2023 attack, and then in May 2024 which the former U.S. President Joe Biden's administration had proposed to the joint mediators. The outgoing Biden dismissed Trump’s threat as “a joke” but took credit for it as the deal was reached four days before Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025. Israel’s earlier refusal to accept the May 2024 cease-fire agreement was one of the many reasons for the defeat of Kamala Harris in the November 2024 Presidential election, as many Arab and Muslim Americans in the marginal seven States punished the Democratic candidate by denying her their vote and opting for the Republican and other Presidential candidates.
While many observers are giving credit to Trump for the cease-fire agreement, he is neither interested in sustaining the cease-fire nor concerned about Israel’s post-cease-fire attacks on the Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. If anything, he would like to see all the Palestinians in Gaza resettled in other Arab countries to allow U.S. construction companies to come to Gaza as Israel’s reoccupied territory. Trump’s only interest in stopping the war is to demonstrate to the world, as well as to the Arab and Israeli leaders, that the hostages have come back to their homes safely and that his power as the president of the greatest country in the world should not be questioned. President Trump knows the real estate value of the coastal belt of Gaza and the potential it holds for turning the strip’s long beachfront into a priceless tourist haven. Steve Witkoff is a billionaire real estate investor and developer. If Trump has an interest in Gaza, it is for the sole reason that a destroyed Gaza has the potential to become a multi-billion-dollar real estate empire for U.S. investors on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Last year, Trump’s Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, said that Israel should level up an area in the Negev desert and transfer the Palestinians living in Gaza to this new location.
While the January 2025 agreement stated that it was based on President Biden’s proposal of May 31, 2024, it did not mention that it included elements that were discussed earlier and presented by the mediators in December 2023, which Israel rejected, together with the U.S., at the U.N. Security Council’s aborted resolution on the Israel-Gaza war. This information would not have come to light had it not been for the Prime Minister of Qatar’s interview with Sky News U.K., the day after the two parties finally agreed to a cease-fire deal on Jan. 15, 2025.
In December 2023, the Netanyahu and Biden governments were united on the policy of exterminating Hamas from Gaza following the October 2023 attack by Hamas inside the Israeli-occupied territory and taking Israeli civilians, including foreign tourists and military personnel hostages. Israel launched a massive air and ground incursion in Gaza in hot pursuit and caused the death of thousands of Gazan civilians, mostly women and children and destroyed homes and civil institutions intending to remove Hamas from the Middle East equation. Despite the fact that Hamas’ top leadership, together with the top leaders of its main backer Hezbollah, was wiped off in the 15-month-long war, Israel and the U.S. were unable to achieve their combined objective of eliminating the last living Hamas fighter from Gaza.
After 55,000 Palestinians died and the whole of Gaza was raised to the ground, there is a realization that it is not possible to erase the presence of Hamas in Gaza. Israel also failed to get its hostages released from Hamas custody using brute force and lost its own soldiers in Gaza, some of whom became POWs. It also failed to find a replacement for Hamas to govern Gaza and oversee the security of the Gaza Strip after the Israeli troops’ withdrawal. The alternate policy now at work is to strengthen the buildup of more settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories and bring them to a level where they can effectively change the demography of Palestine and make the local Arab population a minority in their own homeland.
The cease-fire agreement has three related and interconnected stages, of which only the first stage is agreed. The joint mediators will try to achieve a final consensus through indirect talks between the parties to implement the exchange of hostages and prisoners and the withdrawal of Israeli troops. Trump’s skepticism about the cease-fire makes their task difficult to reach a consensus on the remaining two stages. He has expressed no concern about the violent attacks of Israeli settlers on the Palestinians in the West Bank. He also wants the Palestinians to leave Gaza and emigrate to Jordan, Egypt and other countries. This is quite the opposite of what he desires his legacy to be in the Middle East and the rest of the world, namely, to be a peacemaker and a unifier.
The cease-fire agreement does not guarantee that it will result in a permanent cease-fire between Hamas and Israel. It also does not require Hamas to recognize Israel, nor does it make Israel recognize the right of Palestinians to have a sovereign independent state sharing borders with Israel. It is too early to say whether the cease-fire will hold after all Israeli hostages and captives have been released by Hamas or will fall apart, giving way to another wave of violence in Gaza and the West Bank.
Trump has at least fulfilled the promise he made to his Arab voters of ending the war in Gaza. He has also fulfilled the pledge to his Jewish supporters that he will bring the hostages back home without any harm or delay. But he remains a staunch supporter of Israel. In his first term as president, he moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and set in motion the process of other diplomatic missions doing the same.
At the end of his first term in 2020, President Trump got Israel and the Arab states of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to sign the Abraham Accords, which recognize the importance of cooperation, dialogue and friendly relations among states to pursue a vision of peace, security and prosperity in the Middle East. President Trump also witnessed these agreements as a facilitator of his strategic diplomatic initiative for the Middle East. Subsequently, two other states, Morocco and Sudan, signed these accords in December 2020.
In his second term, President Trump is expected to persuade Saudi Arabia to sign a bilateral treaty with Israel in several areas of cooperation, including the establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel. Any agreement will need to recognize the commitment of the signatory states to continue their efforts to achieve a just, comprehensive, realistic and enduring solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet, it is not expected to be preconditioned by starting peace talks between the two parties and their international guarantors to arrive at a two-state solution. If Saudi Arabia assents to join the Abraham Accords, it may have a snowball effect on other Arab and Islamic governments that are interested in maintaining good relations with the U.S.
Trump is not opposed to stopping the government of Netanyahu from pursuing the goal of greater Israel. At the start of his second term, he reversed many policies of the Biden Administration relating to other countries except those about Israel. His Administration stopped U.S. aid to all recipient countries pending a review of their relationship with the U.S., except Israel and Türkiye. Trump lifted the sanctions placed by the Biden Administration on the far-right Jewish settlers in the occupied territories. He also did not express any concern about the continued IDF attacks on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank since Jan. 15, 2025. On the contrary, he expressed doubt that the cease-fire would last long.
In any future confrontation between the two sides, Trump may even encourage Israel to reoccupy Gaza and force the Palestinians to resettle in neighboring Arab states. By pushing for the cease-fire and taking credit for ending the war in Gaza, he may have given a gift bag to Israel to leave Gaza now but annex all occupied territories of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and make these the official borders of Israel together in pursuit of the joint U.S.-Israel Strategic Agenda for the Middle East.