Facing Trump, Hamas bet on survival and is being vindicated; Iran’s regime has the same game plan |
This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, US President Donald Trump exulted over his remarkable achievement in securing the release of the last 20 living hostages held in Gaza, and, eventually, all 28 slain hostages, under the October 2025 deal he brokered between Israel and Hamas.
“Under the ceasefire I negotiated, every single hostage, both living and dead, has been returned home,” he self-marvelled. “Can you believe that? Nobody thought it was possible. Nobody thought that was possible.”
Similarly, on Iran, the president rejoiced that last June, “the United States military obliterated Iran’s nuclear weapons program with an attack on Iranian soil known as Operation Midnight Hammer.” Obliterated — a word he has continually used to describe the state of the ayatollahs’ nuclear program — is an overreach; most of Iran’s 60% enriched uranium likely survived the 12-day Israel-US-Iran war. Indeed, his key negotiator, Steve Witkoff, warned in a Fox News interview on Saturday, that “they are probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material, and that’s really dangerous.”
Nevertheless, Trump has legitimate reasons to claim credit for extraordinary successes in the battles against both the Islamic death cult terror group Hamas and its key sponsor, the ideologically and territorially rapacious Islamic Republic.
Trouble is, on both fronts, these enemies may be wounded, but not irreversibly so.
In Gaza, as my colleague Lazar Berman detailed in a deeply troubling report earlier this week, Hamas retains control of the half of the enclave where most of the population lives. And it is furtively ensuring that it will continue to hold sway even if and when the Palestinian Authority-affiliated National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, ultimately overseen by Trump, begins ostensibly taking administrative control of parts of the Strip.
Hamas is working assiduously to what I would call “deterrorize” its military commanders — inserting them, Berman reported, into key “civilian roles that are set to become part of the NCAG governing apparatus.” This confirms what the IDF warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in January: “Hamas is advancing steps on the ground meant to preserve its influence and grip in the Gaza Strip ‘from the bottom up’ by means of integrating its supporters in government offices, security apparatuses, and local authorities.”
Berman goes into considerable further detail on Hamas’s strategic planning to ensure it dominates and subverts the purportedly ruling technocratic committee, rather than being marginalized by it. And he underlines that Hamas is firmly refusing to meet the US-Israel demand for it to give up its arms. Just last week, he notes, Hamas’s latest Gaza leader, Izz al-Din al-Haddad, “appointed new intelligence chiefs, regional commanders, and heads of weapons manufacturing and propaganda.”
In short, Trump indeed hammered together a broad framework intended to bring peace and stability to Gaza and by extension to Israel, but Hamas is unsurprisingly intent on ensuring that this will not come to pass, and, right now, is entirely capable of prevailing.
Where Iran is concerned, too, the US president is now seeking to broker a long-term arrangement with the ayatollahs to (again) ensure they cannot get the bomb, with Israel also calling for terms that ensure the cessation of their ballistic missile program and their support for Hamas, Hezbollah and other proxies.
Having amassed considerable military force in the region, Trump is hoping he will not have to use it in order to secure a viable deal. He clearly recognizes, as he said on Tuesday night, that “the regime and its murderous proxies have spread nothing but terrorism, and death, and hate” in the 47 years since the ayatollahs took power.
“This is some terrible people,” he said, aghast. “They’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas. And they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America. After Midnight Hammer, they were warned to make no future attempts to rebuild their weapons program, in particular, nuclear weapons. Yet they continue, starting it all over. We wiped it out and they want to start all over again and are at this moment again pursuing their sinister ambitions. We are in negotiations with them. They want to make a deal. But we haven’t heard those secret words: ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon.'”
The president, according to Witkoff, can’t quite fathom “why they haven’t capitulated” given the US military pressure, “with the amount of sea power and naval power over there.” But that’s because the ayatollahs are thinking in the long term — well aware that Trump has just a historical blink remaining as president, and confident that his successors will be less resolute in confronting them.
Like Hamas in October 2025, the Tehran regime is calculating that it can reach a deal with Trump that buys it more time and ensures its survival, whereas “capitulation” would expedite its demise. Certainly, accepting the far-reaching requirements urged by Israel would represent near-surrender and humiliation at home, weakening its murderously enforced hold on power and inspiring intensified domestic unrest.
And if no deal can be reached in the near future on terms it can abide, it would rather sustain a limited military attack — potentially including even a high-stakes symbolic blow like the killing or Venezuela-style extraction of its Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — and emerge battered but defiant, its loyalists triumphant, its citizenry despondent and cowed.
Trump utilized the levers of his unique presidential power to push Hamas into October’s deal. Nobody, as he rightly said on Tuesday night, had believed Hamas would give up its key bargaining chips — the last hostages, and especially those who were still alive. But it did so, ultimately, because it assessed that freeing the hostages would avert ongoing and intensified Israeli military action, and that it would thus be able to regroup, revive and again run Gaza. That is proving to be the case.
The ayatollahs are betting on a process yielding the same result — a tolerable deal, or even a tolerable American-led military strike, that ensures they retain power and the capacity to work to fulfill their deadly ambitions, notably including engineering the demise of Israel.
Where meeting the threats posed by Hamas and the Iranian regime are concerned, Trump had much to legitimately brag about in his State of the Union address. But for all that has been done, those threats have been only temporarily reduced, not defused.
Hamas isn’t finished. The Islamic Republic isn’t finished. Trump would much prefer that diplomacy rather than force win the day in both those areas of conflict, and is also under all kinds of domestic pressure to keep the US out of further wars. Caught in the middle are the noncombatants of Gaza. Almost 100 million repressed, oppressed Iranians. And Israel.
Two other quick mentions
If what I write most weeks is not troubling enough — and I do make exceptions (remember Japan, Damascus and driver’s ed — I encourage you to read our New York correspondent Luke Tress’s newly published analysis: Tucker Carlson’s anti-Zionism shows horseshoe theory nearing a circle.
The so-called horseshoe theory of politics, Tress explains, “posits that the political spectrum is not a straight line, but that its ends bend toward each other, particularly when it comes to Israel and Jews.” And now, “with Carlson’s emerging right-wing anti-Zionism,” he warns, “the horseshoe is increasingly nearing a full circle.” Read on.
And finally, those many of you who regularly listen to our flagship podcast series, The Daily Briefing, may have noticed that we recently inaugurated a rather elegant recording studio in our Jerusalem offices. While many assume podcasts are an audio-only medium, the main platform “listeners” turn to is actually YouTube. As other podcast delivery systems, including Spotify and very soon Apple, turn to video presentations, we’ve made the decision to put our journalists in front of the cameras as well.
That means you can listen and watch our staff of reporters, alongside hosts Amanda Borschel-Dan or Jessica Steinberg, for our 20-minute news updates on The Daily Briefing from Sunday to Thursday. Likewise, our mid-week in-depth conversations with newsmakers on our What Matters Now series. Then there’s diplomatic correspondent Berman, speaking to a cadre of deep thinkers, on Friday’s punnily named Lazar Focus podcast.
And we recently unveiled our newest weekend series, The Reel Schmooze, where you can catch all the entertainment news and movie reviews a Jew can use. That’s where ToI’s movie maven Jordan Hoffman is hosted by deputy ToI editor Amanda Borschel-Dan for a lighthearted exploration of all the wonders of cinema she somehow missed. A much-needed bit of levity.
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