The jeers from some of those present at Hostages’ Square directed at Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s envoy for negotiations with Hamas (and in the awkward presence of the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner) — simply because he dared to praise Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister Ron Dermer — were not only an exhibition of poor taste (at best), but also demonstrated a complete misunderstanding of the dynamics that produced the latest deal.
Less than a day after that protest, shortly before the eve of Simchat Torah, it was Trump who did not stop lavishing praise on Netanyahu in his Knesset speech, calling him “one of the greatest leaders in time of war… Bibi, they love you because you love to win. And you have won big for Israel, bigger than anyone could have imagined.”
Trump’s warm words were not empty; he himself knows that thanks to Netanyahu and the IDF (whom he also praised in his speech), he was able to record one of the most outstanding achievements of a modern American president: peace (even if temporary and fragile) in the Middle East.
To understand the dramatic event with long-term strategic implications, it is possible to highlight ten points, each of which is crucial to assembling the overall picture.
The key question: Is the deal good or bad?
There is only one way to assess the quality of the deal that first led to the release of all living hostages held by Hamas in Gaza: is it the best among the alternatives presented to the government since the previous deal in January, and does it align with the war aims defined by the cabinet — the return of the hostages, the collapse of Hamas rule and military power, and the removal of the threat from Gaza. The answer, without euphemism, is positive. Hamas had previously rejected offers that were far better than the current one, always insisting on two supreme principles aimed at ensuring its continued existence as an organized military body: a complete withdrawal of the IDF from all areas of the Gaza Strip (“return to October 6”) and an absolute refusal to lay down its arms. Hamas also always preferred to ‘drag out’ time and release hostages drip by drip, over long weeks, to enjoy the fruits of the humanitarian aid it was looting, to rehabilitate and refresh its fighters’ ranks, and to extend the hostages’ suffering. This also allowed it to wage a psychological war against Israel to create internal pressure to end the war while Hamas remained standing.
Trump, already in his early days in the White House, put an end to the drip-feed pattern and made clear in the January 2025 deal that releases would be swift and in a single tranche — and without humiliating ceremonies. And so it happened. But that was only the prelude. In the weeks leading up to the current deal, Trump provoked the terrorist organization even more by declaring that “Hamas will not keep the last 20 hostages because they know that will be their end (for Hamas).” On the surface, this is a statement that should have harmed negotiations, for if the U.S. president himself admits that releasing the hostages would lead to Hamas’s end — why would they release them?
And yet, wonder of wonders, precisely after this statement by Trump, Hamas said “yes” to a deal in which all the hostages are released in the first stage, the IDF remains in most of the Strip, and on paper, the terrorist organization is to be disarmed.
What made Hamas back down? Trump made it clear that if this time they did not accept his deal, he would give Israel “full backing” to continue fighting until the “rapid destruction” of the terrorist organization.
In other words, Trump presented Hamas with a ‘Hobson’s choice,’ a false portrayal of a choice between two alternatives when in reality each would lead to the same result — in this case, the end of the terrorist organization—a lose-lose situation. Hamas, with no choice, selected the option that ostensibly pushed off the end for it, perhaps saving the lives of some of its senior figures and sparing scenes of humiliating surrender. In this way, the hostages were turned from an asset into a burden, and the organization hurried to get rid of them before IDF forces seized its last strongholds in Gaza City, hunted down the remaining heads of the militants, and imprinted in Arab-Muslim consciousness the “Topan al-Aqsa” as a humiliating feat.
Steve Ganyard, ABC’s military analyst (a network not exactly friendly to Israel, to put it mildly), explained well how the IDF lent credibility to Trump’s threat: “Hamas realized that the entry of the IDF into Gaza City is inevitable. The Israelis said, ‘We will go in, conquer all Gaza, and that will take us until the end of the year’… in fact, Hamas really had no choice. Who knows, perhaps there is a secret deal allowing some of the Hamas leaders to board a boat and flee abroad. It was inevitable that they would agree; they had no choice.”
They are rational – according to their own rationale
President Trump threw out the thesis “they are not rational/they have nothing to lose/you can’t defeat a terrorist organization,” which had gained traction among the top brass of Israel’s defense establishment. That view led to abstract terms like “final political leg” or “economic levers” (such as increased Gaza employment, expanded fishing zones, and the import of goods) as substitutes for outright military victory. As a businessman and dealmaker, Trump knows that every human actor has their own rationale and always has something to lose, even if that rationale is not Western.
The smart move is to put yourself in the enemy’s/opponent’s shoes, enter their head and their map of interests as they understand them — rather than trying to interpret the enemy by your own standards (“everyone wants a quiet life and economic welfare for themselves and their children”).
Trump differs from the modern American presidents who preceded him: Bill Clinton, who forced Ukraine to give up nuclear weapons out of a naïve belief that this would reduce tensions, without understanding the Russian rationale of hunger for power and appetite for conquest; George W. Bush, who wanted to bring the gospel of democracy to the Middle East and therefore pressed Israel to allow elections in the Gaza Strip that led to Hamas’s victory; Barack Obama, who believed that a campaign of apologies and humility before the Third World would raise America’s standing among Arab and Muslim countries — which, of course, interpreted it as a manifestation of enormous American weakness; and Joe Biden, who released tens of billions of dollars directly into Iran’s coffers in the belief that this “confidence-building” step would appease the ayatollahs, but they used that money to help Hamas carry out the October 7 massacre.
Today, this naïve perception is represented mainly by Britain and France, which — according to their leaders’ rationale — led the push for recognition of a Palestinian state to isolate Hamas, even though the terrorist organization itself praised the move. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer acted from a distinctly Western rationale and put the full weight of pressure on Israel — a step that, according to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, severely harmed the negotiations and pushed Hamas away from the table.
Trump and his administration understood, by contrast, that the only incentive that works on Hamas is force, and following the first section, they loosened the reins for Israel to apply all necessary power, including entry into Gaza City, to defeat Hamas. Maximum pressure, of course, worked, and Hamas was forced to agree to the terms of the deal. Even now, Trump clarifies that despite the vision of a new Middle East, the fundamental and primary condition for the deal’s success is disarming the organization. “Hamas will be dismantled, and if necessary it will be swift and violent,” the American president made clear days after the agreement’s signing, signaling to the terrorist organization that its central interest — to remain an armed force — is entirely at odds with American policy. Hamas’s rationale, then, is crystal clear, and thus must be broken.
Someone got confused: when the Israeli right becomes the enemy
Before we continue to delve into the Trump–Netanyahu strategy, let’s go back a bit to the start of the war to understand why the Biden administration’s opposite approach failed miserably. At first, the president gave unequivocal support to Israel. Still, as weeks passed and the U.S. elections drew nearer, Biden and his people began to direct the famous DON’T precisely at Jerusalem. This hostile policy by senior administration officials manifested already in the first ceasefire (December 2023) as part of the hostage deal, during which Biden called on Netanyahu not to resume fighting and effectively signaled the White House’s turning its back on Israel. Pressure later intensified, with the administration’s campaign against the IDF’s entry into Rafah (“I know the maps, there’s nowhere for the people to go,” then–Vice President Kamala Harris said), which led to an arms embargo and the imposition of emergency humanitarian aid that had been looted by Hamas — giving oxygen to the terrorist organization to prolong the fighting.
The White House’s threats became concrete when, in September 2024, it was revealed that the Biden administration had imposed an embargo on Israel and delayed shipments of bunker-buster bombs, Apache helicopters, and D-9 bulldozers. Some in the IDF even estimated that many soldiers lost their lives because of Biden’s embargo, due to the increased risk to the fighters’ lives.
In August 2025, eight months after the end of the Biden administration, Jake Sullivan, the outgoing president’s national security adviser, revealed that the partial arms embargo was part of a deliberate administration plan to damage Israel’s war effort, as well as Netanyahu personally and the right-wing camp. “On October 7, the Biden administration decided that one of its aims in the war was to prevent the conflict from strengthening the right in Israel,” Sullivan said in an interview on ‘The Bulwark’ podcast. In other words, at a time of an actual existential threat and when more than a thousand infants, children, women, and older adults were massacred and slaughtered in the most horrific ways imaginable, the Biden White House devoted its time and energy precisely to weakening the right in Israel.
Sullivan went on to explain that to achieve the goal of weakening the Israeli right, “the administration tried to bring about a quick end to the war in Gaza by putting pressure on Israel in various ways, including an ‘Italian strike’ — an undeclared arms embargo.”
Later in his remarks, the senior adviser explicitly expressed support for a full weapons embargo on Israel and adopted Hamas’s propaganda about “hunger in Gaza” and the alleged indiscriminate destruction by IDF strikes, lacking clear military objectives. Sullivan did not hesitate to interfere brazenly in Israeli domestic politics and sermonize to Israeli citizens about which government they should choose. “The question is whether we will continue to deal with the prime minister and a right-wing government for years, or will there be political change in Israel?” he wondered. “If there is no change, if the government continues to be an extreme right-wing one promoting the same policy, it will not be the Israel we knew.”
Sullivan’s statements reveal that he did not recognize the legitimacy of Netanyahu’s government, despite it being democratically and lawfully elected, and that political considerations were intertwined with American foreign policy during a time of war. His words echo the serious accusation by Harris last October that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
Hamas fully grasped the message, and since the first hostage deal — enacted thanks to the increased military pressure at the war’s outset — no further deals occurred until the one signed on January 19, 2025, on the eve of Trump’s return to the White House. This means that the Biden administration, which constantly spoke about the need to avoid escalation of the war, actually breathed life into Hamas’s war machine. Only when the change of government approached and Hamas understood that a Trump America would apply pressure to it rather than to Israel, did it agree to soften. Thus, it was proven — for the umpteenth time—that the path to political achievements is not striving for calm and appeasing terror, but rather a readiness for war, which in turn generates the deterrence required to produce the political gain and the desired quiet.
“We’ll Fight with Our Fingernails”
With the outbreak of the war on October 7, Netanyahu recognized that—unlike previous operations he had led in Gaza (Pillar of Defense, Protective Edge)—this time Israel was facing an existential war. Already on October 9, as the death toll continued to rise on television screens and Israelis struggled to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster, the prime minister vowed that “we will change the face of the Middle East.” At the time, Netanyahu may have seemed delusional, even messianic, but he understood clearly that this was a broad campaign against Iran. Even if the ayatollahs were not fully aware of the exact timing of Hamas’s attack, the sheer scale and intensity of October 7 meant that Israel could not avoid engaging the entire apparatus of Iran’s regional chokehold, including the regime in Tehran itself. In other words, amid the inferno, fear, and grief, Netanyahu also identified an opportunity to turn the tables.
From the very first day of the war, he knew that the sympathy Israel had earned following the horrific massacre would be short-lived. He therefore decided that the conduct of the war would not be dictated by international legitimacy—still important, but not decisive. He treaded carefully in choosing his battles with an increasingly hostile U.S. administration as the presidential election clock ticked down. On some red lines, however, he refused to bend: renewing the war after the first hostage deal, entering Rafah in the summer of 2024, and refusing to inform Washington in advance about the “Beeper Operation” and Nasrallah’s assassination. “I knew that if I didn’t insist on it, Israel would be destroyed,” he explained in an interview on the TV show The Patriots, aired just days after the peace agreement was signed. “Had I agreed, Sinwar would still be alive and hailed as a modern-day Saladin, Nasrallah would be alive with Hezbollah at its peak, and Iran would be months away from a nuclear bomb. Israel faced an existential danger.”
In the summer of 2024, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken asked Netanyahu how he intended to fight in Rafah without American support. According to Netanyahu, he replied: “If we must—we’ll fight with our fingernails.” The message was clear: he would not yield to U.S. pressure, since in his view, no sanction imposed on Israel could compare to the risk of failing to seize Rafah and the Philadelphi Corridor, the lifeline of Hamas’s smuggling network. Netanyahu went beyond the attitude of “I have nothing to lose”; in July 2024, he appeared before Congress to signal to President Biden that he would not hesitate to exert his own leverage inside the U.S.—against both Biden and, especially, Vice President Harris, who had just been named the Democratic presidential nominee to face Trump.
Alongside his readiness to confront Washington publicly, Netanyahu agreed to far-reaching concessions—chief among them, the massive entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza. He knew Hamas was looting the assistance and that Israel, while fighting the group with one hand, was feeding the terror monster with the other. The prime minister understood fully that this was folly, but he also knew he had no choice but to pick his battles within the war. A total halt to aid would have led to scenes of severe hunger in Gaza (whether real or staged) and a situation that might have forced the Biden administration to escalate dramatically against Israel, including a UN Security Council resolution that could have paralyzed the IDF’s operational freedom. Proof of this came with Hamas’s successful “starvation campaign” in August, which managed to pressure even the Trump administration to lean on Israel. So imagine the disaster had Biden and Harris been in power.
The situation threatened to deteriorate further: on the eve of the U.S. elections, Senator Bernie Sanders—Democratic, Jewish, and staunchly anti-Israel—declared that a Harris victory would likely result in a harsher American embargo on Israel, including restrictions on defensive weapons (especially Iron Dome). In Jerusalem, officials believed Sanders was right: a Democratic win would have meant a sharp escalation in the White House’s campaign against Israel, using diplomatic tools on a scale Israel had never experienced. Ultimately, on November 6, 2024, Trump won the presidential race, paving the way for what Netanyahu called “total victory.”
Diplomacy of Leverage
Trump could threaten Hamas as much as he pleased, but his threats would not have carried credibility without Netanyahu’s determination to implement the “total victory” doctrine. The U.S. president is known for favoring diplomacy, leverage, and even coercion over diplomacy of persuasion. He believes diplomacy is not merely elegant words, international accords, or dialogue for its own sake; he views it as a battleground in its own right and is willing to wield America’s unmatched power to impose his will on enemies, rivals, and even allies who fail to see eye to eye with the White House.
Trump does not oppose persuasion per se and would welcome others adopting his worldview, but his faith in his own righteousness runs so deep that he is prepared to use America’s might to bend the arms of other leaders—even those of close friends. The most straightforward and most successful example is NATO. Trump was furious to discover that most member states—including Germany, France, and the UK—were failing to meet their commitment to allocate 2% of their budgets to the alliance’s defense funding. In essence, they relied on the U.S. to cover the gap while redirecting their resources to domestic priorities. In other words, America was paying for Europe’s defense—and was expected to keep quiet about it.
This time, Trump abandoned traditional diplomacy—no persuasion tours, no gentle lobbying—and instead declared bluntly: if European members don’t meet their commitments, the U.S. will feel no obligation to defend them. Unlike other leaders, Trump was perceived as crazy enough to mean it, which made his threat credible. Global media and his opponents accused him of “destroying NATO” and “paving the way for Putin to conquer Europe.” Still, they failed to grasp one simple fact: Europe’s fear of being left alone without U.S. protection outweighed its complacency. The result? Most European nations not only met the 2% defense requirement but also exceeded it—some now invest up to 5% of their budgets, which is two and a half times Trump’s original demand.
In this high-stakes game of chicken, Trump’s hand proved unbeatable—and the big winners were NATO’s own members, now benefiting from a far stronger alliance against Russia, China, and other threats. In other words, NATO’s adversaries are far more deterred today than before Trump’s supposed “tantrums.” What was portrayed as recklessness and warmongering has, paradoxically, increased the chances for peace—Trump’s cherished “peace through strength.”
Trump, eager to be remembered as a “president of peace,” promotes only the kind of peace where he dictates both the terms and enforcement mechanisms to ensure it endures. Unlike the Oslo Accords, the Gaza disengagement, or Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, Trump’s peace plan is built first and foremost on deterrence. Unlike the post–World War II European peace, rooted in shared values and mutual recognition, the Middle East’s peace is based solely on fear and deterrence. In other words: “I make peace with you (or at least refrain from war) not because I like or empathize with you—but because I can’t kill you.” This logic dominates inter-Arab relations and indeed underpins any arrangement between Middle Eastern states and Israel. It is with this mindset that Trump now approaches resolving the region’s conflicts.
