When a deal was sealed in Cairo last week to set the stage for President Trump’s speech at the Israeli Knesset and summit in Sharm al-Shaikh a few days later, the first step on the document signed by all the parties that day started with: “President Trump announces the end of the war in the Gaza Strip.” On his way over to the region, Trump was asked on Air Force One how he responded to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying Israel intends to continue the war. Trump was unequivocal: “The war is over. The war is over! Do you understand that?” When he arrived in Egypt where he was joined by many of the key leaders from Europe and the Middle East, the peace summit was framed as the signing of an “agreement to end the war in Gaza.”
Sense a pattern? An American declaration that the war was finally over was the key ingredient to reaching an elusive agreement, and it removed the final obstacle that Netanyahu had continued to put in the way of a deal for many months now. Even though the overall framework for this agreement had been in place arguably since the fall of 2023, and certainly since the spring of 2024 under Joe Biden, Netanyahu’s repeated refusal to end the war, and America’s refusal to get him to accept it under both administrations, led to failed negotiations over and over again. Now, this seems to have finally changed.
How did we get here? Several key factors ultimately contributed to the White House pressing Netanyahu to accept a deal he has long stood in the way of. First, negotiated exchanges proved to be the only successful way that Israel was able to secure the release of their captives in Gaza. Despite Israel’s overwhelming military advantage, two years of bombing, destruction, and genocidal violence did not change this equation.
Second, Israel’s growing isolation around the globe, which peaked in recent weeks at the UN General Assembly, when the world walked out on Netanyahu’s speech and many major American allies recognized a Palestinian state, sent a clear message that the costs of Israel’s genocide were continuing to grow. In recent weeks, Netanyahu even recognized this in what became known as his “Sparta speech,” where he told Israelis they will have to reorganize their economy to deal with the continuing challenge of isolation. In additional to reputational and economic costs, an exhausted Israeli reserve corps and a growing but underreported suicide crisis among troops added to the ledger.
Third, Israel’s botched strike in Doha, Qatar, when it attempted to assassinate Hamas negotiators congregating to discuss President Trump’s proposal, sent shockwaves around the world, deepening Israel’s diplomatic isolation and sending a message that the Israeli government was unserious about getting its captives in Gaza back. All of this created the conditions under which Trump could tell the reckless Netanyahu it has to end now.
But is it really over? Yes and no. For the people of Gaza, the kind of large-scale killing perpetrated by the Israeli military on a daily basis, routinely near 100 Palestinians a day, looks like it will abate. If Israel were to return to genocide now, after making this deal, getting its captives back and with so much global diplomatic investment involved in making that happen, it would immediately be identified as a bad faith actor hell bent on killing, and the international opprobrium would quickly increase several fold. Trump himself has invested significant Presidential prestige in declaring an end to the war, and Israel returning to large-scale slaughter would then greatly embarrass its most important and last remaining ally and its vain president.
Still, Gaza’s genocide survivors are far from safe. History tells us that even after agreeing to ceasefires, Israel has continued to kill and maim Palestinians, even if at a slower pace, and we have already seen that happen in Gaza. Meanwhile, in the occupied Palestinian West Bank, Israeli military and settler killings of Palestinians have not stopped either. Even when the bombs are not dropping on Gaza, the risk of death is great.
From massive amounts of unexploded ordinance, physical hazards created by the Israeli military’s mass destruction, the effects malnutrition and starvation, disease and unsanitary conditions all combined with a health sector that has been destroyed by the Israeli war machine means that Palestinians will continue to struggle to survive in Gaza and will die much younger on average than most any other people for quite some time to come.
And what about peace? Despite his delusions of grandeur, Trump did not achieve “peace in the Middle East.” Nor, as he ridiculously claimed, did it take “3,000 years to get to this point.” Instead, what we have is a ceasefire agreement that may largely hold if heavily enforced—and then a bunch of outstanding questions. Actual peace requires dealing with the question of Palestinian self-determination, which Israel and Washington remain unwilling to do. This week, however, did provide an interesting foreshadowing of how things may play out moving forward.
While Trump traveled to the region for his glorious peacemaking achievement, it was noteworthy that he couldn’t get everybody around one table. Instead, he had to go to Israel separately, then join the rest of the world in Egypt. The international community, except for Israel, the United States, and perhaps Micronesia are more united than ever behind the principle of Palestinian self-determination. Israel, however, seems more opposed to that than ever, setting itself on a course for continued confrontation with, and isolation from, the rest of the globe, even if it has hit pause on the genocide.
While there is no clear path toward a broader peace at this moment, there is a far more dangerous dynamic evolving that could put finding a path to peace even further away: the normalization of genocide. For two years, the world has witnessed a daily cadence of war crimes by the Israeli military, from the wanton killing of civilians, the deliberate starvation and collective punishment of the population, the mass destruction of civilian infrastructure, and gruesome crimes and sadistic celebrations of them posted by Israeli troops themselves. We cannot simply turn the page from this after a photo op in Egypt.
If the international community is indeed interested in peace and stability, in the Middle East and beyond, it must immediately focus on reinstituting norms against war crimes that have been blown to smithereens across Gaza for the past two years. Failing to do so not only bodes poorly for the region, but for an entire world that will be more dangerous and more deadly as war criminals walk freely.
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