It should be a momentous occasion: late on Thursday evening, President Donald Trump announced a landmark deal, in which Hamas would agree to completely disarm – alongside “all other armed groups in Gaza” – in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from the territory.
Trump himself, on Truth Social, was very much keen to present it as such, calling it a “historic breakthrough” and an “AMAZING DEVELOPMENT, THAT EVERYBODY SAID COULD NEVER BE ACHIEVED!”
The reality is that a deal in which Hamas agreed to actually and verifiably disarm would be a significant achievement for any US president, and a potentially great development for the prospect of peace in the Middle East. But the muted initial response to the announcement is understandable, too, given Trump’s habit of announcing peace deals before all the details are hammered out.
For a deal of this supposed magnitude, traditionally all of the parties would be present for negotiations to make sure everyone’s understanding of exactly who would do what when, and in what order, was absolutely agreed. Statements from all the involved parties would be agreed and approved in advance. Everything would be done to make sure the scope for misunderstanding was as close to zero as possible.
Predictably, Trump has done almost none of this. It took hours for Hamas to issue a statement on the deal it had apparently agreed, and Hamas’s idea of the timetable appeared to differ radically from Trump’s – Hamas has suggested it will disarm once Israeli troops leave Gaza, while Trump’s timetable suggests the opposite. Such details are enough to break down deals.
The most notable silence, though, comes from Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who met Trump as recently as Wednesday and yet had no public statement about this deal he had supposedly agreed.
Benjamin Netanyahu with Donald Trump in the Oval Office this week. The Israeli Prime Minister is yet to make a public statement on the announcement (Photo: GPO / AFP via Getty Images)Netanyahu has spent the years since the 7 October attacks positioning himself as a hawk on Gaza – to the point of launching the largest-scale bombing and attacks in the territory’s history – and is up for re-election in October. To agree a peace deal with Hamas just months before an election would be a strange choice. To do so without any political pitch-rolling at home first would be truly bizarre.
The result is that just hours after its first announcement, Trump’s supposedly “historic” peace deal already looks less substantial than it first appeared. The bigger problem for Trump is that this has become a pattern of his. Trump announced multiple “ceasefires” between Israel and Hamas before one finally stuck, at least after a fashion.
With Trump’s own conflict with Iran, the pattern is even more visible: Trump announces ceasefires, peace deals, or that the Strait of Hormuz is open for business on almost a weekly basis, only for the supposed agreements to fall apart within hours and the pattern of mutual missile launches to resume.
World leaders are all too aware of Trump’s love of signing peace deals, and his desire to style himself as the “President of Peace”. They are by now also aware that Trump doesn’t care about the details, if he thinks he can get a signing ceremony – several of the “peace deals” Trump boasts of in his first year were between countries that weren’t even at war.
Trump has essentially made himself the president who cried wolf. He has announced “huge” deals that fell apart within days so many times before that no one is going to get too excited at the latest one.
This one in particular looks somewhat desperate. Trump has the midterms approaching, and yet seems unable to extricate either himself or the USA from a deeply unpopular war with Iran that is fuelling a global cost of living crisis. Against that backdrop, this abrupt Hamas deal looks almost like a distraction, and one that even if it goes to plan does nothing to address Americans’ day-to-day problems at home.
There is always the chance that this time is different. In the parable, the boy who cried wolf did, eventually, actually spot a real wolf, after all. But so far there is much to be sceptical about in Trump’s latest deal, and the muted response reflects that.
The playbook for dealing with Trump in peacemaker mode is well known now – agree with him that you want peace, agree the broad strokes that he asks you to, and then wait for the deal to fall apart on the details, while trying to blame the other side.
Everyone dealing with Trump knows that real peace relies upon much more than grand announcements, signing ceremonies, and pieces of paper to wave around. An increasingly isolated Trump, approaching the lame duck period of his second term, seems not to have learned that lesson.
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