President Trump says he has brokered a deal between the terrorist group Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, bringing an end to the war.
All hostages will be returned: This week marked two years since the October 7 terrorist attack in which Hamas slaughtered 1,200 Israelis and took 251 of them hostage. Since then, Israel has waged war in Gaza, displacing nearly 2 million people in an effort to avenge the deaths, return the remaining hostages, and stamp out those responsible for the attack.
Now, President Donald Trump says he has brokered a deal between the terrorist group Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, bringing an end to the war. Some 20 living hostages will be released, along with the bodies of 28 who were killed, returning all hostages to Israel. They will be swapped for Palestinian prisoners, and the hostages are expected to be released on Monday. The United States will play a role in the rebuilding process. Trump says he will travel to the Middle East this weekend to continue to oversee the early stages of the peace process. Netanyahu is convening his cabinet today to sign off on the deal, though the full text has not yet been released.
« I am very proud to announce that Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first Phase of our Peace Plan », wrote Trump on Truth Social. « This means that ALL of the Hostages will be released very soon, and Israel will withdraw their Troops to an agreed upon line as the first steps toward a Strong, Durable, and Everlasting Peace. All Parties will be treated fairly! This is a GREAT Day for the Arab and Muslim World, Israel, all surrounding Nations, and the United States of America, and we thank the mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey, who worked with us to make this Historic and Unprecedented Event happen. BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS! » (Nobel Peace Prize winners are announced this week, and Trump may be jockeying for one. Incentives matter, I suppose. But the motivations are also probably deeper than that.)
« Israel’s Sept. 9 strike targeting Hamas representatives in Qatar motivated an angry Mr. Trump and his advisers to push Mr. Netanyahu to supporting a framework for ending the war, which Mr. Trump unveiled late last month », reports The New York Times. « This cease-fire and hostage release, if it happens, only came to fruition because of Trump’s willingness to pressure Prime Minister Netanyahu », Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Aaron David Miller told the Times, adding that « no president, Republican or Democrat, has ever come down harder on an Israeli prime minister on issues so critically important to his politics or his country’s security interests. »
Some of Trump’s motivation here might also be that his signature first-term foreign policy accomplishment was the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Sudan and Morocco joined later. (Hamas’ attack on Israel is believed to be at least partially due to fears that more Arab nations, especially Saudi Arabia, would further normalize relations with Israel; the terrorist attack and subsequent war put Abraham Accords progress on hold.)
The first phase of the deal will mandate that the Israeli military retract its troops to certain boundaries in Gaza.
