War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength |
Trucks carrying humanitarian aid wait to cross into Gaza from Egypt through Rafah. Photo by Eskinder Debebe/UN.
On September 29, 2025, standing beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House, Donald Trump announced his 20-point Comprehensive Gaza Peace Plan to the world. Over the next few days the US president put heavy pressure on Hamas to sign up to his deal, threatening that Israel “would have my full backing to finish the job” of destroying the group if they didn’t.
Though neither Hamas nor any other Palestinian organization had been involved in drawing up Trump’s 20 points, Hamas signed an agreement with Israel at noon on October 9 to implement the first phase of the plan, which came into effect the next day.
This agreement—which, let us be absolutely clear, is all that Israel and Hamas have signed up to so far—committed both sides to a ceasefire in Gaza, following which Israel would withdraw its forces to an agreed-upon “yellow line” and “not return to areas it has withdrawn from, as long as Hamas fully implements the agreement.”
In the 72 hours following the IDF withdrawal, all Israeli hostages in Gaza (or their remains) were to be exchanged for “250 life sentence prisoners [in Israeli jails] plus 1,700 Gazans who were detained after October 7, 2023, including all women and children detained in that context.”
“Full aid” would also “be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip… at a minimum in consistence with the January 19, 2025 agreement regarding humanitarian aid.” The latter stipulated the entry of at least 600 trucks, including 50 fuel trucks, per day.
Though this aspect of the October 9 agreement received less media attention than the release of the Israeli hostages, it was critical for the Palestinians. The world’s top authority on food supply, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), had declared the “irrefutable” existence of famine in Gaza more than a month earlier.
The ceasefire officially began on October 10. Hamas released its last 20 living hostages, and Israel began to release Palestinian prisoners on October 13.
At the Sharm el-Sheikh “Peace Summit” in Egypt that same day, Donald Trump declared that “the war in Gaza is over.” His audience included over 30 world leaders, among them Mark Carney, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, and Giorgia Meloni, as well as leaders from Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Middle Eastern and Muslim states and UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
The “president of peace” (as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio baptized his boss) was praised on all sides. Elbows up as ever, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered “congratulations to President Trump for his essential leadership” in delivering this “historic peace plan… opening a new chapter for Israelis, Palestinians, and the world.”
Their enthusiasm is comprehensible—though totally unfounded. For months, Western leaders outside the US had been facing mounting public opposition over their support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza, as well as growing concerns over their own potential liability for complicity in what was increasingly widely being recognized as a genocide. Tensions between the US and its allies peaked when (to Israel’s fury) Britain, France, Canada, Australia, and several other Western countries recognized a Palestinian state at the 80th UN General Assembly session in September in New York.
Trump’s Gaza plan provided them with an off-ramp. As I wrote at the time, “One can almost hear the huge collective sigh of relief that went up in Western capitals as soon as the Trump plan was announced. The cracks are papered over, the delinquent allies are back in the US fold, and our craven leaders are off the genocide hook.”
The reality, however, is less rosy—as everybody present in Sharm el-Sheikh must have known.
To begin with, the October 9 agreement did not commit either Israel or Hamas to accepting the rest of Trump’s 20-point plan. Hamas had always been ready to engage in prisoner exchanges—that was, after all, the reason they took hostages on October 7—Israel rather less so. Other issues have proved more intractable.
Several members of the Israeli government stridently opposed the ceasefire, and Netanyahu himself likely only entered into it under pressure from Donald Trump (who was openly campaigning for a Nobel Peace Prize). Challenged by the opposition to endorse Trump’s plan, Netanyahu’s coalition boycotted a Knesset vote on the issue.
In the ensuing days and weeks, Israeli leaders made it clear that they remained opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state now or ever and had no intention of pulling the IDF out of Gaza anytime soon. Fifty-three percent of the strip, including almost all of its arable land, lies in the area the IDF now controls behind the yellow line.
For its part, on October 24 Hamas communicated that while it was willing to “hand over the administration of the Gaza Strip to a temporary Palestinian committee composed of independent ‘technocrats’” as the Trump plan envisaged, it was not prepared to disarm without serious negotiations on establishing a Palestinian........