How the Flaws of Trump’s Gaza Deal Prevent an Enduring Peace

For over a month now, a tenuous ceasefire has held in the Gaza Strip following intense pressure on Israel and Hamas by the United States and regional partners. U.S. President Donald Trump’s twenty-point plan for ending two years of fighting delivered a welcome respite in a conflict that has seen cataclysmic levels of suffering. Under the plan’s initial provisions, all living Israeli hostages have been released, food and humanitarian aid have begun trickling into the Gaza Strip, and Palestinians have started returning to their devastated homes.

But the celebration stops here. While the twenty-point plan succeeded in achieving an immediate cessation of violence, any expectation that it will deliver durable peace is dangerously misplaced.

The cracks appeared almost immediately. Only ten days into the ceasefire, an attack on Israeli soldiers in Rafah prompted Israel to temporarily resume airstrikes in southern Gaza. Likewise, disputes over hostage body releases and withdrawal line demarcation have brought both sides to the brink of renewed conflict.

Contrary to some assumptions, these flare-ups don’t threaten the collapse of Trump’s plan; they reflect its inherent design flaws. The very factors that enabled the U.S. president to hammer out the deal’s early success now doom its long-term prospects. Lasting peace in Gaza requires precisely what Trump’s deal-centric foreign policy eschews: multilateral coalitional backing and deep institutional grounding.

From the Ceasefire to Exchanges

To observers of Trump’s foreign policy, the negotiations in late September and early October likely seemed familiar. Where the extractive-minded formula of “quid pro quo” has long informed the president’s approach to foreign affairs, on Gaza, it proved remarkably effective.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was hemorrhaging international support in the West and drawing regional fury after strikes targeting Hamas negotiators in Doha, Qatar. To his credit, Trump used his leverage where his predecessor proved unable or unwilling, coercing Netanyahu into negotiations after a staged apology to Qatar before pursuing a pressure campaign elsewhere in the region. Feeling unburdened of any need to include traditional European allies—whose recognition of Palestinian statehood lost them legitimacy in Trump’s eyes—the president maneuvered unilaterally, offering an unprecedented security guarantee to Qatar and dangling the sale of U.S. fighter jets to Türkiye to solicit their government’s assistance in pressuring Hamas to cease hostilities.

After frenzied rounds of shuttle diplomacy and phone calls, a ceasefire took hold, accompanied by what the Trump administration triumphantly declared was a plan that would herald a new era of peace in the region.

At least initially, some of that optimism proved well-founded.

The foundation of Trump’s plan, often described by outside observers as unfolding in three “phases,” is a set of initial exchanges between Hamas and Israel: ceasefire for withdrawal, withdrawal for hostages, hostages for aid. Here again, Trump’s trademark transactionalism was on blunt display, especially in the protocol for hostage and prisoner exchanges, which rested on a macabre calculus: 1,950 Gazan detainees were to be swapped for twenty living Israeli hostages in addition to the remains of fifteen deceased Gazans for every deceased Israeli returned.

The results were impressive, even for critics of Trump’s broader plan. Fighting generally halted for two and a half weeks. Israel withdrew to an agreed upon line within the strip. And the reciprocal release of living Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners proceeded smoothly and without incident. But very quickly after this initial, straightforward exchange, things began to fall apart—the result of the U.S. president’s hyperfixation with a deal and lack of foresight on the timeline and guarantees for hostage bodies and humanitarian aid.

An Ad-Hoc Aftermath

By October 14, only a day after the exchange, the Israeli government began setting limits to aid, contrary to the deal’s requirements. These conditions came after Hamas’ failure to procure all twenty-eight hostage bodies within seventy-two hours of Israeli withdrawal.

The episode did not scuttle the deal, but it revealed one of the deal’s inherent weaknesses: any longer-term action, such as delivering aid and searching for bodies, remains an impediment to progress without a sustained and systematized effort to achieve the plan’s vision.

A failure on the systemization front should not come as a surprise to anyone following Trump’s past actions toward the international humanitarian system. From dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development to defunding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), Trump’s contempt for the global network of aid providers is readily apparent. Moreover, the president finds an eager partner in Israeli leadership, which has banned UNRWA operations in Gaza and has introduced rules to delist humanitarian organizations in the territory writ large.

Although the current system of aid is not without criticism, what has followed has not been better. Most notably, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the U.S.- and Israeli-backed solution to a mounting hunger crisis in the strip, was an abject failure, with contractors describing chaotic scenes and widespread violence at the GHF’s four distribution sites.

Similar inefficiencies plague the ad hoc efforts in sustaining the tenuous ceasefire. The most publicized humanitarian plan—not yet implemented more than a month into the ceasefire—offers twelve to sixteen aid “hubs” along Israel’s withdrawal lines, falling well short of the hundreds of aid locations serving Gazans prior to the GHF. In the meantime, aid truck delivery remains well below even half the required 600 per day stipulated in the twenty-point plan.

Body recovery faces similar challenges. Early reporting stressed promises of an international mechanism intended to assist with recovering hostage bodies in the first seventy-two hours of Israeli withdrawal. But the first such groups, Red Cross and Egyptian teams, only entered the strip starting on October 26, more than two weeks after the ceasefire began. The logistical timeline here is critical, as Israeli officials have cited the delays to justify aid deficiencies and a brief resumption of strikes that killed at least 100 people, threatening to topple the deal entirely.

Phase Two and Beyond

With such a rocky start to aid delivery and body recovery, the security and governance imperatives required for the implementation of the final steps of Trump’s plan—what has been called phases two and three—appear increasingly jeopardized. As in the earlier stage, the processes outlined in these sections carry Trump’s imprint, especially his preference for control and oversight by a small group of advisers, mirroring the president’s current Middle East policy bench of Steve Witkoff, Tom Barrack, and Jared Kushner.

Broadly speaking, the plan calls for an International Stabilization Force (ISF) ostensibly overseen by a fifteen-member Board of Peace, where Trump will serve as chairman. Such a streamlined approach to ISF governance may seem attractive, especially since the history of post-conflict stabilization is littered with peacekeeping and peace-monitoring bodies hamstrung by muddled mandates and byzantine bureaucratic oversight.

But the force as currently configured in Trump’s plan neglects an important lesson from the past: peacekeeping is not peace enforcement. Stabilization forces can monitor and deter minor violations, but they cannot impose a political outcome on belligerents or create trust where none exists.

The few cases where outside troops have upheld a fragile peace elsewhere share a trait: a political settlement agreed upon by roughly equal parties, or at least a roadmap that both sides had accepted. Without such agreements or confidence-building measures in place, peacekeepers can only document new outbursts of fighting while being powerless to stop them. Under Trump’s plan, these prerequisites are glaringly absent. With no defined end state for Gaza’s governance and no path toward a lasting peace, both Israel and Hamas remain locked in a mindset of mutual delegitimization and annihilation.

Understandably, most Arab governments are wary of sending soldiers to participate in the ISF as it is currently envisioned, fearing that it would put them in the untenable and dangerous position of fighting Hamas—or policing its Palestinian sympathizers—while also collaborating with the Israeli military.

Trump’s plan for getting Hamas to relinquish its arsenal is similarly fraught with pitfalls. Most importantly, it seems to overlook the immense political stakes of disarmament—and the implications for Hamas’ identity—by reducing the process to a technical exercise. As seen in other post-conflict settings—Colombia, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, and Libya, to name a few—disarmament succeeds only when grounded in trust with a clear roadmap for demobilizing and reintegrating former fighters. Yet with its implicit bias toward Israel and vague assurances about Gaza’s political future, the plan offers little in the way of security guarantees or credible incentives beyond general promises of amnesty.

This vagueness extends to the Gaza Strip’s eventual security transition to Palestinian forces, where a compromised Palestinian Authority and tainted Hamas would be unacceptable stand-ins for the ISF at some later date. It would hardly be surprising if Hamas rejects demilitarization altogether in favor of retrenchment and consolidating control over parts of the strip until it is strong enough to resume military action.

The Way Forward

In the current situation, the plan is likely to continue in its strained capacity. A technical stalemate will probably persist as Israel retains control over half the strip. Indeed, U.S.- and Israeli-proposed housing development projects in Gaza, dubbed Alternate Safe Communities, have raised concerns over Israeli entrenchment in the territory. Moreover, any continued Israeli presence at the withdrawal line will likely prompt sporadic exchanges of fire between Israel and Hamas, resulting in ever-stronger Israeli bombardment. In a worst-case scenario, these escalating violations could provide a pretext for the Israeli government to call off the deal completely and renew its ground offensive.

With the persistent threat of the deal’s collapse weighing on Trump’s ego—and Nobel Peace Prize prospects—the American president could be enticed to grow U.S. presence on the ground. Around 200 U.S. troops already sit in southern Israel with regional partners at the Civil-Military Coordination Center, and mission creep has a long and storied precedent in U.S. military history. Such engagement from Trump seems unthinkable, given his America First agenda, as well as U.S. reticence to put boots on the ground in yet another Middle East war. But believing that the president would never consider such an option is ill-advised.

Success requires rethinking the current proposal’s framework while facilitating good faith negotiations to bring regional actors and, most importantly, Palestinians themselves to a dialogue with Israel. The politics on this front are bleak, and Trump’s appetite for such an approach may be wholly absent, but without regional support, the plan isn’t workable. The plan itself acknowledges this fact.

But so far, this is a ceasefire agreement—and a flailing one at that—not a pathway to peace. True peace will require reconciliation, justice, and self-determination, and this plan in its current form contains none of the above.