The initial response to the Israel-Hamas cease-fire agreement clinched by the Trump administration last week has been rapturous. Palestinians are reveling in the prospect of an end to two years of almost unimaginable brutality and grinding starvation that have decimated every part of the long-suffering people and land. Israelis celebrated the return of 20 living hostages released by Hamas and the chance of an end to international isolation. Enthusiastic crowds in Israel and Egypt showered U.S. President Donald Trump with appreciation.
But it is difficult to share Trump’s optimism that the cease-fire has unlocked a broader transformation of the Middle East—or even that it will survive contact with reality on the ground in Gaza.
The initial response to the Israel-Hamas cease-fire agreement clinched by the Trump administration last week has been rapturous. Palestinians are reveling in the prospect of an end to two years of almost unimaginable brutality and grinding starvation that have decimated every part of the long-suffering people and land. Israelis celebrated the return of 20 living hostages released by Hamas and the chance of an end to international isolation. Enthusiastic crowds in Israel and Egypt showered U.S. President Donald Trump with appreciation.
But it is difficult to share Trump’s optimism that the cease-fire has unlocked a broader transformation of the Middle East—or even that it will survive contact with reality on the ground in Gaza.
The cease-fire agreement lays out a path forward that would, if achieved, see the return of normal life to Gaza, the reconstruction of its infrastructure and economy, and the consolidation of a post-Hamas political order. The deal, remarkably responsive to the concerns of key Arab states, repudiates key hardline Israeli demands, such as the expulsion of Palestinians and the annexation of the West Bank. It promises the flow of desperately needed humanitarian aid, without a role for the widely despised Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and it proposes large-scale economic reconstruction while leaving aside the fantasies of Trump hotels on a Gaza Riviera.
The agreement has already had a positive impact by pausing the killing, returning the hostages, and demonstrating a newfound international consensus for ending the war. What it lacks is a realistic roadmap for actual progress. Humanitarian conditions in an utterly decimated Gaza remain disastrous. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already put limits on the delivery of aid before it has even begun to flow. Hamas has shown little interest in disarming, instead moving aggressively to consolidate control and clamp down on Israel-backed militias and other rivals. The agreement itself is alarmingly vague, relying at key points on heroic assumptions about a wide range of regional actors. While there is considerable international goodwill and a broad regional consensus in support of the plan, it has not produced United Nations Security Council resolutions or firm commitments from external actors.
This is not to say that a resurgence of full-scale war is likely in the short term. A minimalist version of the agreement will probably take root. All actors now more or less believe that they have reached the limit of what can be achieved through war. Netanyahu’s determination to drive into Gaza City was deeply troubling to many across the Israeli national security establishment and the broader public. Palestinians in Gaza are desperate for anything to end their suffering. With Trump putting his personal reputation on the line, and all parties exhausted, we should not expect a replay of January’s short-lived cease-fire, which collapsed after the first phase and extreme violence and starvation resumed.
But there is little chance that the cease-fire will move forward to phase two with the disarmament of Hamas and establishment of a governing authority, to say nothing of the longer-term aspirations of phase three. The critical question today is not really whether the agreement will be fully implemented. It is what the region will look like when it is not. How Israel, Hamas, the United States, and key regional players maneuver in the interim, and what kinds of competitive dynamics shape postwar Gaza, will be driven by broader regional dynamics. The hopes of the moment might be sufficient to restart Arab moves toward normalization with Israel and a return to the grim but superficially stable pre-Oct. 7, 2023, status quo. But the dashing of those hopes in Gaza or an Israeli shift toward annexation of the West Bank could tear apart the new U.S.-led Arab-Israeli regional order that Trump hopes to build.
The challenges begin with the devastation of Gaza itself, a grim reality that has somehow been reduced to an afterthought in the joy over the cease-fire. There is no fresh start to be had in Gaza’s ruins. Virtually the entire population has been displaced and traumatized. At least 67,000 Palestinians have been killed, with likely far more dead—buried beneath the rubble and shattered by two years of war and blockade. The infrastructure of what was once among the most densely packed urban environment on the planet has been mostly destroyed: schools, hospitals, roads, apartment buildings, water treatment facilities, electrical generators, agriculture. The neighborhoods to which Gazans hope to return simply no longer exist—and what remains is incapable of sustaining life.
The cease-fire plan envisions a massive influx of humanitarian assistance to alleviate the most immediate struggles. But while desperately needed, that is both unlikely to fully manifest and inadequate to the needs. Israel has maintained a blockade of Gaza for nearly two decades and has, for the last two years, obstructed the delivery of humanitarian aid—even when it had agreed to do so under U.S. and international pressure. Who can forget the grim spectacle of the American construction of a floating pier, designed to avoid the need for aid to pass through Israeli checkpoints but which quickly collapsed and floated away in a perfect metaphor of former U.S. President Joe Biden’s futility? Netanyahu has already halved the amount of aid to be allowed into Gaza over alleged delays in the return of hostage remains; this will almost certainly be the first of many such obstacles.
Even if desperately needed humanitarian aid were to enter Gaza, it would only be a temporary solution. Gaza is estimated to require more than $50 billion in development aid just to rebuild the essentials that Israel systematically destroyed. While Gulf states have signaled a willingness to support Gaza’s reconstruction, they are neither willing nor able to provide open-ended financing at the required levels. Inflated Gulf promises of aid rarely manifest and always come with political strings attached. Even if the required funds did somehow materialize, no serious development is possible as long as Israel maintains its blockade and prevents the opening of ports and an airport to allow the movement of people and goods. Everything in Israel’s behavior over the course of decades suggests that it will.
Israel’s determination to destroy Hamas and deny it any role in postwar Gaza will complicate conditions even further. Hamas has shown little interest in disarming or departing, and it has already been moving aggressively to reassert its control over Gaza, cracking down on the Israeli-backed militias that had emerged to fill the security vacuum. It is not clear what force would either implement the disarmament of Hamas or take its place in providing order. The experience of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank suggests that Israel will reject the creation of any armed Palestinian police force, no matter how politically subordinate. It is difficult to see any international or Arab peacekeeping force being effective without the de facto cooperation of Hamas—or to imagine Israel relying on such forces for its security demands.
But Hamas’s ongoing presence will provide Israel with endless opportunities to resume military actions and drag its feet on humanitarian aid and reconstruction. That will be more of an excuse than a cause, though. Netanyahu only agreed to the cease-fire under considerable U.S. and domestic pressure, and he shows little sign of being genuinely committed to anything beyond the hostage exchange. The right-wing settlers who dominate the current Israeli government have made no secret of their continued ambitions to annex Gaza and the West Bank, and they will look for every chance to ensure the cease-fire fails.
It is not only the grim history of past Israeli-Palestinian agreements that haunts the current cease-fire. The unrealistic assumptions and exaggerated claims alarmingly resemble the failures of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The absence of security and order will make it difficult to consolidate any sort of effective governance or build legitimacy for a new order, just as it did in Baghdad two decades ago. Overly aggressive efforts to disarm Hamas would backfire but leaving it in effective control would put any new administration at its mercy. The trusteeship envisioned may be installed but like the hapless early administrators of occupied Iraq it will not really be able to exercise control and will command no legitimacy among Palestinians who aspire to their own state rather an international mandate. Even on the path laid out by the cease-fire agreement, Gaza is more likely to be the site of ongoing low-level violence, economic catastrophe, failed governance, and spiraling insurgency than the promised modern and shiny new global city.
Hopes that these readily apparent obstacles can be overcome largely rest on Trump’s determined engagement and his personal investment in the outcome. But that is not to be taken for granted. The Trump administration has virtually no capacity or bandwidth to monitor, oversee, or implement the difficult processes to come. The few officials in place are stretched thin, while the closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development and hollowing out of the government have left little technical expertise or personnel to deal with complex issues. With alarmingly few internal checks on Trump’s erratic decision-making, it’s all too easy to imagine a sudden and rapid swing by the United States back to supporting a renewed Israeli war. And an administration embroiled in endless and escalating domestic political crises, mostly of its own making, is likely to be easily distracted.
Israel hopes that the cease-fire will put an end to its international isolation and blunt the force of the widespread revulsion over its destruction of Gaza. But such hopes are premature. Only a move toward genuinely peaceful coexistence with Palestinians could hope to do that, and nothing of the sort is on offer at this point. What’s happening in Gaza has caused a generational shift in views of Israel around the world—as profound as the occupation of Iraq for views of the United States—profound changes that will not be easily mitigated by a short-lived cease-fire. International justice and accountability for war crimes do not dissipate when the immediate fighting ends.
It is better to have this agreement than to not have it. The catastrophic war needed to end and Trump did what Biden would not to make it happen. But making it endure past this euphoric moment and create the historic dawn of “a new Middle East” that Trump promised will require not just the kind of sustained attention that has rarely been brought to bear but also a willingness to learn from past mistakes. It is far too easy to hear the echoes today of a long history of U.S. hopes for a transformed Middle East emerging from the rubble of catastrophic destruction. But the invasion and occupation of Iraq did not deliver the promised regional transformation. Nor did Israel’s devastating monthlong bombing of Lebanon in 2006, which then-U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice celebrated as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” There is little reason to expect better from the smoldering ruins of the killing fields of Gaza.
