With new US proposal to end war in Gaza, a rare moment of triumph for Netanyahu
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 9 hours ago
- 5 min read
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER and AARON BOXERMAN
Heading into their meeting Monday, the question was whether President Donald Trump would apply enough pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to end the war in the Gaza Strip.
Ultimately, Netanyahu got almost everything he could have hoped from Trump’s proposal — a demand that Hamas release the hostages immediately and lay down its weapons, without which Israel would have carte blanche to keep pummeling Gaza.
As for Israeli troops, they would get to remain in Gaza’s perimeter for the foreseeable future. There was such a stinting nod to the aspiration of statehood for Palestinians that the proposal all but suggested they just keep dreaming. And the Palestinian Authority would be left playing no role in Gaza anytime soon.
It was a rare moment of triumph that showed Netanyahu could still get much — if not all — of what he wanted despite Israel’s mounting international isolation. Just last week, several European countries recognized a Palestinian state over Israeli objections, while a diplomatic walkout left Netanyahu addressing a mostly empty room at the United Nations.
On Monday afternoon, standing alongside Trump, Netanyahu praised the U.S.-backed plan as fulfilling his own conditions for ending the war with Hamas. And Arab and Muslim governments, including the Palestinian Authority, appeared ready to fall in line.
As for Hamas, it would have no say at all in the future governance of Gaza, making explicit what had been left vague in earlier attempts at ending the conflict.
Still, the group and its leadership have been so decimated by the war, and it faces so much apparent pressure from Muslim countries including its patrons in Qatar and Turkey, that its acquiescence is not impossible to imagine.
Hamas’ leaders now must decide whether to accept Trump’s plan, negotiate its terms or reject it outright. All the options carry serious risks for the Palestinian armed group, which has managed to survive two years of an Israeli onslaught by fighting a dogged insurgency.
Hamas negotiators were expected to meet with Turkish officials Tuesday in the Qatari capital, Doha, “to push for an end to the war through this plan,” according to Majed al-Ansari, a spokesperson for Qatar’s Foreign Ministry.
On Tuesday, Trump told reporters in Washington that he would give Hamas “three or four days” to respond to the proposal.
Hamas would struggle to accept a deal that would amount to surrendering its rule in Gaza, but brushing off a clear path to ending the conflict would risk further angering Palestinians who have lived through nearly two nightmarish years of killing and devastation. Some Palestinians in Gaza accuse Hamas of fighting a war for its own political survival at their expense.
Ibrahim Madhoun, a Palestinian analyst close to Hamas, said the Trump plan was “based on excluding Hamas,” making it difficult for the group to accept. Hamas officials have previously said key elements, such as surrendering their weapons, would be a red line.
Hamas could still agree to the proposal — or at least accept it as a basis for negotiations — to end the war, he said. But many of the plan’s 20 other points were downright unclear, meaning they would require protracted talks to hammer out, he added.
“Each clause is such a minefield as to require its own separate agreement,” Madhoun said.
After hearing the terms of the proposal, Mahmoud Abu Matar, a 27-year-old sheltering in central Gaza, said a vast majority of Palestinians living there would most likely support the deal so as to put an immediate end to the violence.
“We don’t want any more war and bloodshed,” he said. “The ball is now in Hamas’ court.”
Some of the most important players in the Trump-Netanyahu vision for Gaza did not speak at the White House on Monday. Among them were Arab and Muslim nations that have offered to provide troops or funding for a peacekeeping force to provide security in Gaza, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.
Those countries had laid down clear conditions for their postwar involvement, including that Israel fully withdraw from Gaza and commit to a pathway to a Palestinian state. They also stipulated that the Palestinian Authority must invite them to Gaza, so they would be seen as supporting the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people rather than as another occupying power.
The plan outlined by Trump and Netanyahu met none of those conditions. Not only would Israel retain a security buffer inside Gaza’s borders, but the multinational peacekeeping force would also take possession of territory directly from the Israeli military. The Palestinian Authority, for its part, would be cut out of the picture until it so completely reformed itself that Netanyahu scoffed at the prospect as a “miraculous transformation” unlikely to happen.
As for a Palestinian state, the proposal said only that as Gaza is rebuilt, “the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood” — if the Palestinian Authority’s reform program “is faithfully carried out.” Yet nothing was said about who would determine this or how.
As favorable as the proposal appeared to Netanyahu, it did entail concessions that he could find politically costly to make. The references to Palestinian statehood someday, the encouragement that Palestinians remain in Gaza and the flat rejection of Israeli annexation of Gaza “completely shatter the far right’s dreams,” Nadav Eyal, a columnist for Yedioth Ahronoth, a centrist Israeli newspaper, wrote Tuesday.
The foreign ministers of eight Arab or Muslim-majority countries offered a qualified embrace of the Trump-Netanyahu proposal in a joint statement early Tuesday, affirming their readiness to cooperate with it. They made it clear, however, that they still insisted on a “full Israeli withdrawal” and on the establishment of “a just peace on the basis of the two-state solution, under which Gaza is fully integrated with the West Bank in a Palestinian state.”
Without any role planned for it in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority nonetheless welcomed Trump’s “sincere and determined efforts” to end the war and affirmed its “confidence in his ability to find a path toward peace.” It went on to say that it wanted “a modern, democratic and nonmilitarized Palestinian state.”
The Palestinian Authority also said it was committed to changing textbooks that critics say demonize Israel and to abolishing the payment of stipends to Palestinian prisoners and their families. It said it would invite international scrutiny of those changes.