By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Israel, Trump, and the Gaza Deal

In the days since the January 19 cease-fire in Gaza, many Israelis have found themselves in an emotional storm almost as powerful as the shock of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre. The difference, of course, is that this time the storm is driven not by sorrow and unspeakable horror but by joy and—for the first time in more than 15 months—the possibility of hope. Already, the fragile deal has come under considerable stress, and it could collapse in the coming weeks. Yet for the time being, the fighting has stopped in both Gaza and Lebanon, and hostages have begun to come home. As shown by the outpouring of reactions on social media and in the Israeli press, the vast majority of Israelis have greeted the deal as a cause for celebration—even those who opposed it for strategic or ideological reasons.

But the overwhelming response is not primarily about peace. Far more, it is about what the deal means for Israel’s embattled identity. The core issue for Israelis, which may not be fully grasped by outside observers, is that ever since the establishment of Israel in 1948, three years after the end of the Holocaust, the country has defined itself by its status as a safe haven for Jews. For more than 70 years, despite major wars and frequent challenges, it was able to maintain this foundational ideal. With the October 7 attacks, however, that status was ruptured. The belief that the army and other security agencies would always arrive in time to save Jews in distress was completely shattered. For many Israelis, this failure persisted throughout more than 15 months of war, as the government proved unable to rescue or return a large number of the 251 hostages—Israelis and foreigners—that had been taken to Gaza.

Now, Israel has finally begun to repair these broken foundations. At the time of the cease-fire, there were 97 Israeli hostages—civilians and soldiers—about half of whom are believed to be alive. Seven, all of them women, have been released so far, and 26 more are to be returned in small groups over the next four and a half weeks. For many Israelis, the government and security forces can never atone for the lapses that allowed October 7 to happen. But the hostage deal does restore hope for the first time since the war began that the safe haven can be rebuilt to some extent.

Yet the deal comes at a high price, and it is far from clear how long it will hold. In exchange for the first 33 hostages, Israel has agreed to release approximately 1,700 Palestinian prisoners, including more than 200 who are serving life sentences for murdering Israelis. And that is only the first round of concessions. Once “Phase One” is completed, 64 hostages will still remain in Gaza, fewer than 30 of whom are believed to be alive. Their release will require the freeing of thousands more Palestinian prisoners, including many who are serving multiple life sentences. Those freed will also include prisoners whom Israelis view as “terrorist celebrities”—high-ranking figures in Palestinian militant groups responsible for orchestrating mass-casualty suicide bombings in the 1990s and the first decade of this century. These are prisoners no Israeli government has ever agreed to release before.

For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, all this presents a huge dilemma. He needs his far-right coalition partners to stay in power. But they adamantly oppose the cease-fire and—in contrast to a large majority of the Israeli public—are demanding that the war restart or they will resign. If new elections were held today, Netanyahu would probably lose. At the same time, the prime minister must also now contend with U.S. President Donald Trump, who is applying enormous pressure to get things done his way and says he will not tolerate having the war continue on his watch. Netanyahu is expected to meet Trump at the White House in early February.

What happens next, then, will depend primarily on the U.S. president. The incoming administration has big plans. For many months, Trump’s aides and advisers have been speaking about the regional arrangements Trump wants to establish. His main goal seems to lie in multibillion dollar technology and defense deals between the United States and Saudi Arabia. An accompanying step would be a grand Israeli-Saudi normalization deal, similar to the one the Biden administration tried to push through in the fall of 2023. (Hamas leaders later described thwarting that deal as one of their motivations for launching the October 7 attacks.) To achieve these goals, Trump will need the cease-fire in Gaza, along with its counterpart in Lebanon, to hold as long as possible—whether or not both sides are interested in peace.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump, Washington, D.C., September 2020

 

War Gone Wrong

The story behind the Gaza cease-fire is almost as long as the war itself. In November 2023, after concluding that the large number of women and children they had abducted were more of a liability than a strategic asset, Hamas’s leaders negotiated the first cease-fire for hostage deal with Israel, mediated by Egypt, Qatar, and the United States. At the time, Hamas hurried to offload those hostages in exchange for a negligible benefit compared to past such deals—three Palestinian prisoners, mostly women and minors, were released for every Israeli hostage.

In theory, after seven days, the initial exchange was supposed to lead to a second phase, in which the cease-fire would be extended and the remaining hostages would gradually be released in exchange for a higher price from Israel. But negotiations stalled on the seventh day, and contrary to the mediators’ expectations, fighting resumed, and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) relaunched its massive ground invasion into central Gaza. Soon, that campaign expanded into the southern areas of the strip.

In the following months, despite repeated efforts, negotiations toward a new deal broke down. By May 2024, the Biden administration was so frustrated by the lack of progress by the Israeli government that President Joe Biden took the extraordinary step of announcing a cease-fire for hostage deal that he said had been approved in private by Israel. But Netanyahu nixed it. (In fact, it was essentially the same deal to which Israel has now agreed.) Still, throughout his final year in office, Biden generally provided Netanyahu with cover, mostly blaming Hamas for the breakdown of talks.

Many of the members of Israel’s own negotiating team, however, knew otherwise. They suspected Netanyahu was deliberately sabotaging the talks whenever they neared fruition, because he feared that his far-right coalition partners, Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, would resign if the agreement were implemented. And if the government collapsed, Netanyahu himself faced growing legal jeopardy in the three corruption cases against him. Thus, by continually stonewalling a deal, the prime minister seemed to be prioritizing his own political and personal survival over bringing the hostages home.

Meanwhile, the government’s continued failure to secure a deal produced a growing outcry among large segments of the Israeli public, led by the families of the hostages. In Tel Aviv, tens of thousands of people gathered in weekly protests, and a major square near the IDF headquarters was renamed “Hostages Square.” Hostage families and protest activists frequently blocked major roads. In every Israeli community, symbolic and less confrontational protest initiatives also emerged, such as displays of empty plastic chairs, yellow ribbons, and posters with giant photos of the hostages and the words, "What if it were your daughter?" The faces and personal stories of the hostages became familiar in almost every Israeli home, with many adopting a particular hostage to champion. The government’s apparent indifference toward the hostages—despite the IDF’s near-total military control of Gaza and the fact that many hostages were held within a few kilometers of IDF positions—only deepened the public’s frustration.

Throughout the entire span of the war, the military succeeded in rescuing just eight hostages from Gaza—only about three percent of the total. Meanwhile, dozens more were found dead, hidden by Palestinians in various locations within the strip. These results are astonishingly poor for a country that has long prided itself on its bold rescue missions. Consider the 1976 Entebbe operation, the raid in Uganda by Israeli commandos—and the raid in which the prime minister’s elder brother, Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu, was killed: the operation succeeded in rescuing 102 of the 106 hostages held by Palestinian militants. In the decades since, the risks involved in such operations have grown, for both the elite Israeli rescue forces and the hostages themselves.

As the war in Gaza dragged on without a deal, hope for the hostages diminished further. In June 2024, after Israeli forces rescued four hostages from the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, Hamas changed its instructions to hostage guards: if they detected any Israeli military activity nearby, they were told, they should execute the hostages to prevent their liberation. Two months later, this tragically occurred, when the captors of six Israeli civilians, after hearing the movement of IDF armored vehicles above them, murdered them. Among the victims was Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a young Israeli-American whose family’s extensive advocacy for his release elicited significant responses in Israel and the Western world. It was hard for many Israelis not to see this as the result of a failed war.

 

Trump or a Hard Place

If the January 19 cease-fire has signaled a possible turning point, Israel’s crisis of confidence is a long way from being repaired. Israeli society is sharply polarized, and Netanyahu’s divisive persona will complicate the rebuilding process. Additionally, the government’s inability to make good on its promise to achieve “total victory” over Hamas despite the IDF’s overwhelming battlefield advantage and Netanyahu’s refusal to permit an independent investigation into the failures leading to October 7 pose substantial roadblocks to any national reconciliation.

Moreover, as part of the cease-fire, the government has made other significant concessions. The IDF has withdrawn from the security corridor it created in the center of Gaza to split the north and the south, and it has committed to withdrawing from the so-called Philadelphi corridor along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, near Rafah, in the seventh week of the cease-fire. Israel will almost certainly insist on retaining some form of military presence in what it calls the security perimeter—a buffer zone extending about a kilometer beyond the border fence into Palestinian territory along the entire border.

These concessions, along with the release of Palestinian prisoners, have drawn harsh criticism from not only the far-right parties but also Netanyahu’s core supporters. Take Channel 14, the pro-Netanyahu TV network that resembles a mix of Fox News and Newsmax. Throughout the war, the network deflected all questions about the prime minister’s culpability for the catastrophic security failures on October 7 and justified every decision he made since then. But the reality of the cease-fire and the unprecedented concessions it has involved has upturned the Channel 14 narrative. Now, the network’s usual pro-government propaganda has given way to theological debates between loyalists and those who are suddenly critical. “If this were an agreement brought by [the former Israeli prime minister and current opposition leader] Yair Lapid, I would have opposed it,” admitted one of the journalists. “But since it’s Netanyahu, I support it.” Others on the right are more strident, calling the deal an “embarrassing surrender.”

Undeniably, the main factor in this new reality is Trump. What changed between July 2024, when Israel balked at a cease-fire agreement, and January, when it accepted more or less the same deal, is simple: Trump had won the election and was preparing to take office. Unlike his hardcore supporters, Netanyahu immediately understood the implications for Israel. Since the U.S. election, frantic discussions have taken place between Trump’s aides and Netanyahu. The Israeli cabinet member Ron Dermer, who is Netanyahu's closest confidant and his longtime key contact with Republican administrations, was dispatched multiple times to Washington and to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. 

While Netanyahu’s supporters celebrated the appointments of staunch Israeli right-wing allies to senior U.S. positions, Netanyahu and Dermer noted Trump’s different priorities. Many of Trump’s advisers, they recognized, also hold isolationist tendencies and take a skeptical view of military interventions. The president himself has repeatedly stated both before and since his election that despite claims to the contrary, he intends to end wars rather than start new ones.

In Israel’s case, Trump’s immediate goal was to halt the war in Gaza as part of a hostage deal. As Inauguration Day approached, he repeatedly emphasized the urgency of the matter and even threatened to “open the gates of hell” if his demand was not met. In Israel, many interpreted this as a threat toward Hamas—or perhaps even more so toward Egypt and Qatar, the mediators in the negotiations. But Netanyahu may also have understood it as a message aimed at him.

By late December, Trump and Biden had reached an unusual understanding on Gaza: both administrations would work together to achieve a cease-fire by January 20. At that point, intense negotiations resumed in Doha, Qatar, between an Israeli delegation and representatives of the mediators and separately with the Hamas leadership abroad. In an extraordinary deviation from usual protocol for an administration not yet in power, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s designated Middle East envoy and a fellow New York real estate tycoon, joined the talks. Lacking any professional background in Middle Eastern affairs, Witkoff nevertheless brought a knack for dealmaking, and Israeli participants reported that as soon as he entered the room, negotiations gained momentum.

Then, on Friday, January 10, something remarkable happened. Witkoff, calling from Doha, urgently requested a Saturday morning meeting with Netanyahu in Jerusalem. Netanyahu, recovering from prostate surgery, rarely holds meetings on the Sabbath and tried to postpone it to Saturday night. But Witkoff insisted, and Netanyahu couldn’t shake him off. Israeli sources described their meeting in exaggerated terms, likening it to scenes from The Godfather. That same evening, Netanyahu authorized senior officials—Mossad Chief David Barnea, Shin Bet Director Ronen Bar, and IDF Prisoners and Missing Persons Coordinator Major General Nitzan Alon—to travel to Qatar for the first time in months. This time, he granted them a broader mandate for the negotiations. Eight days later, the deal was signed, going into effect the day before Trump’s inauguration.

Despite the significant concessions involved, Netanyahu has yet to openly discuss the deal with the Israeli public. Instead, he continues to send conflicting messages to different audiences. Netanyahu’s long-standing policy has always been the sum of all his fears—and this time, he was torn between Trump’s pressure and threats from the far right to dismantle his government. As of late January, it appeared that his fear of Trump had prevailed. But the matter is far from over. Although Ben-Gvir resigned from the government in protest over the deal, and Smotrich announced he would wait until Phase One of the agreement is complete, both have signaled they will rejoin the coalition if Netanyahu halts the deal’s implementation and resumes the war.

The day after the deal went into effect, Smotrich said in a radio interview that Biden had handed Netanyahu a letter allowing Israel to resume hostilities on the 43rd day of the agreement if Phase Two negotiations failed. The Israeli journalist Amir Tibon bluntly described the situation: “Netanyahu is deceiving Trump and preparing to sabotage the cease-fire agreement.” There are two ways he could do this, Tibon predicted: simply by delaying the Phase Two negotiations until time has run out or by setting off a violent escalation against Palestinians in the West Bank. Already, far-right Israeli activists have been rampaging through West Bank villages, torching property in protest of prisoner releases, and the Shin Bet is preparing for potential terror attacks by far-right activists who seek to derail the deal. Defense Minister Israel Katz, seen as a puppet of Netanyahu, stoked tensions further by announcing the release of several far-right settlers from administrative detention.

David Makovsky, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a longtime Netanyahu observer, argues that the prime minister will try to carve out a middle ground. Netanyahu, he says, “will try to convince Trump to give him a few more weeks or months to complete the military operation against Hamas—then bank on the president-elect getting distracted by other matters.”

 

Sparks in the Ashes

On January 19, Hamas tried to exploit the release of the first three hostages—Romi Gonen, Emily Damari, and Doron Steinbrecher—for a renewed show of strength. Dozens of members of its military wing, armed and masked, appeared before the cameras in central Gaza City, an area where they had hardly been seen since the previous cease-fire because of IDF strikes. Around them, a restless crowd gathered. Palestinian residents swarmed the vehicle transporting the hostages to Red Cross personnel, and some even attempted to reach the car by force. Hamas militants waved their weapons to push them back, creating chaos at the scene. As the cameras moved slightly farther away, the limitations of Hamas’s capabilities became clear. Only a few hundred citizens had gathered in the area, and many of the surrounding buildings appeared destroyed.

Hamas has not been annihilated in Gaza, contrary to Netanyahu’s promises, and it continues to maintain some of its civilian responsibilities and military capabilities, despite the severe blows it suffered during the war. This is likely related to the prime minister’s insistent refusal to entertain any discussion of “the day after” in Gaza and his outright ban on drafting solutions that would involve the Palestinian Authority, which governs cities in the West Bank.

Female Israeli soldiers being released by Hamas militants, Gaza City, January 2025

Meanwhile, Gaza is in ruins—at least 70 percent of homes are uninhabitable—and the price paid by Palestinians has been enormous. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, controlled by Hamas, more than 47,000 Gazans have been killed in the war; the final figure could be much higher, as many bodies are still buried under the ruins. (The Palestinian Ministry of Health does not distinguish civilians from fighters. Israeli assessments claim that as many as 20,000 Hamas fighters have been killed.)

The current agreement, if it does not collapse, may allow Hamas to survive despite its weakened status and to quickly regain control of Gaza. But Netanyahu, under Trump’s threats, is not alone in recently softening his stance. The prolonged war has utterly exhausted the residents of Gaza, nearly 90 percent of whom have been displaced from their homes and forced to live in makeshift and temporary tent camps in the southern part of the strip. Some have been largely cut off from humanitarian and medical aid for months.

Hamas also faces a dramatic decline in external support. Hezbollah, its regional ally, suffered a devastating defeat in its war with the IDF last fall. Hamas’s patron, Iran, has faced huge setbacks, including a heavy Israeli airstrike at the end of October 2024. A further blow to Iran’s “axis of resistance” came with the collapse of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria in December. As a result, by January, Hamas found itself nearly isolated and had little choice but to compromise. What is less clear is how long this rare alignment of priorities and pressures will last.

 

Right-Wing Reckoning?

With its own plans for the region at stake, the Trump White House is unlikely to stand back while Netanyahu’s right flank tries to bring down the cease-fire. Already, Trump’s wish list is starting to take shape: long-term calm in Gaza, a Saudi deal, normalization, and if possible, a deal to remove the Iranian nuclear threat. Trump will renew his “maximum pressure” against Tehran, which continues to advance its nuclear program despite the blows it has suffered. But at the moment he seems unlikely to back a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, as some in Netanyahu’s government have fervently hoped.

Instead, Trump will likely seek to leverage his close coordination with Netanyahu and, perhaps, the supply of precise munitions to the Israeli air force to signal to the Iranians that they would be better off compromising and signing a new nuclear deal, even though it will be much harsher than the one they reached with President Barack Obama in 2015. Trump’s move likely has another motivation related to his competitive nature and disdain for the Obama mythos. Sources in Washington claim that Trump seeks to win a Nobel Peace Prize in the first year of his second term as president. The path to this prize likely runs through Jerusalem, Riyadh, and Tehran more than it does through a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine.

One component of Trump’s emerging framework, the end of the war in Gaza, will be difficult for Israel’s far-right to accept. If Netanyahu moves forward with implementing the second stage of the deal, including a full withdrawal from the strip, his government will probably fall. And even if it somehow survives, miraculously, for a few more weeks until the end of March, it will likely collapse at that point, due to a developing political crisis concerning efforts to exempt all ultra-Orthodox (haredim) men from mandatory military service. Theoretically, Netanyahu could decide to pivot politically toward the Israeli center, ride Trump’s coattails, and declare that only he can achieve historic agreements while maintaining Israel’s security. Netanyahu will need to attempt all of this while his corruption trial continues in the background and another threat to his future grows—a campaign by the bereaved families of soldiers killed on October 7 to establish an independent investigative commission to examine the government’s failure to prevent the massacre.

Eran Halperin, an expert in political psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has argued persuasively that the real reason Israel’s far-right opposes ending the war in Gaza is not political or ideological. “What truly drives the attempt to sabotage the deal,” he writes, is the concern that it will shatter “the fundamental link between the use of unlimited military force and the ability to provide security to Israel’s citizens.” In other words, the end of the war will ultimately force Israelis to acknowledge that Netanyahu’s right-wing government utterly failed to prevent October 7 or defeat the group that committed it, despite 15 months of brutal war.

During the last five years, Israelis have endured the COVID-19 pandemic, five election cycles, an attempt to pass very aggressive judicial reforms, and a war that began with a horrific massacre and spread to several arenas simultaneously. According to all indications, the coming year will not be any calmer. But during this time, it will likely become clear not only what Gaza’s fate will be but also what Israel’s role will be in the new Middle East envisioned by the incoming American president, even as that vision itself, like many of Trump’s ideas, is hard to figure out.

 

 

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