Donald Trump has always believed the art of the deal could solve anything.
It was his creed in business, then in politics: the conviction that every conflict, no matter how intractable, can be negotiated into submission. So when he set his sights on one of his trickiest second-term goals—ending the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas—he didn’t turn to diplomats or generals. He enlisted two men who spoke his language: Steve Witkoff, a fellow real-estate developer turned special envoy, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and the family’s bridge to the Middle East.
After painstaking efforts, Witkoff and Kushner emerged with the framework of an accord that promises, at least for now, to quiet one of the world’s most destabilizing conflicts. Under the agreement, accepted by both parties this week, Hamas will return all living hostages—believed to be around 20—in exchange for roughly 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences and about 1,700 detainees from Gaza. The bodies of the dead hostages held by Hamas will follow. In return, Israel will allow a surge of humanitarian aid into the ravaged coastal enclave. A ceasefire has already taken effect, and Israeli forces have withdrawn from parts of Gaza. With a fragile but historic peace within sight, Trump is expected to travel to the region on Sunday night to see the agreement through, White House officials said. If all goes according to plan, the President will participate in a signing ceremony on Monday.
The deal could become a signature achievement of Trump’s second term—fulfilling his campaign vow to stop a war that has killed tens of thousands, while returning Israeli captives to their families and beginning the arduous work of rebuilding Gaza. It could also mark a strategic turning point for the Middle East. Israel, already emerging from a year of history-bending military operations—crippling Hamas in Gaza, decapitating Hezbollah’s command structure, and setting back Iran’s nuclear program—now stands at the threshold of something larger. If the peace holds, the region could enter a new era defined less by conflict than by the possibility of transformation, including the rebuilding of a post-Hamas Gaza and the normalization of Israeli relations with Saudi Arabia.
Such an outcome is far from certain. While Israel and Hamas have accepted the two-phase agreement, there remains the chance it could unravel. Even if the first phase holds, the thornier issues awaiting resolution in the second—the scope of Israel’s military withdrawal and future deployment, the structure of a peacekeeping force, the question of who governs Gaza, and the dismantling of Hamas’s terror infrastructure—could cause the process to collapse.
Read More: Israel Pulls Back Troops As Gaza Ceasefire Takes Effect.
That uncertainty is why Witkoff and Kushner raced to Israel as soon as the pact was struck, and why Trump himself is slated to head there next, leaving Washington on Sunday night for meetings in Israel and Egypt on Monday. “The reason we’re here in Israel is just to make sure the implementation occurs,” a senior Administration official told reporters.
For decades, Israelis and Arabs alike have insisted on having the U.S. in the room to help broker security guarantees and offer political cover when the two sides needed to take risks for peace. But in recent years, America has often stopped looking like the global hegemon and started looking like a shrinking superpower. President Joe Biden struggled to stop wars in Europe and the Middle East. Trump, for all his bluster, couldn’t move Russian President Vladimir Putin on Ukraine, nor stop Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from escalating the war in Gaza.
The breakthrough in recent days offers a chance to reassert America’s ability to shape events beyond its borders. Ending a war that has caused extraordinary suffering would be a victory on its own. But it represents a measure of redemption for Trump, whose critics have accused him of abdicating America’s leadership role abroad with an “America First” posture that upended global alliances.
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The turning point in the negotiations came in New York a few weeks ago, during the U.N. General Assembly. For Trump’s envoys, the global forum was an opportunity to convene a conversation with allies and mediators. Witkoff, who has labored on Middle East diplomacy since January alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio, persuaded Kushner to lend a hand. The President’s son-in-law shaped Trump’s first-term Middle East policy, proposing an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan rejected by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and brokering the Abraham Accords, which normalized Israel’s ties with several Arab states. Trump has long wanted to expand on its diplomatic momentum, most importantly with Saudi Arabia.
After consultations with Israeli officials, Qatari negotiators, and regional mediators, Witkoff and Kushner assembled a 20-point peace plan calling for a ceasefire and hostage exchange, Israeli security guarantees, the demilitarization of Gaza, and a new civilian governing authority. On the UNGA sidelines, they shared the plan with Arab leaders from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey. Taking in their reactions, they went back to work, harmonizing the feedback and, as one senior Trump official put it, “wordsmithing the document.”
Soon after, they brought the plan to Trump, who assembled a meeting of world leaders to present it. The gathering, which included a number of Muslim-majority countries from around the world, was “historic,” Rubio said during a Cabinet meeting Thursday. The group’s reaction surprised even the Trump team: less resistance than expected. Witkoff, Rubio, and Kushner then streamlined the proposal to a two-phase structure—first, a ceasefire and exchange of hostages and prisoners to stop the fighting; second, a framework for Gaza’s future, including disarmament and a technocratic transitional government. Trump played a role of his own in applying pressure. “I spoke a little bit tough,” he told reporters Friday in the Oval Office.
By this week, both Netanyahu and Hamas leadership had accepted the plan, with the Israeli cabinet voting Thursday to approve it. For Netanyahu, the agreement offers both relief and risk. The Prime Minister’s critics, even within his coalition, have long accused him of prolonging the war for political survival. When the fighting ends his government could unravel, triggering snap elections and a reckoning over the security failures that led to the Oct. 7 massacre. While Netanyahu’s military gains over the past year have steadied his standing, the two-phase structure of the deal gives him a measure of cover, allowing him to argue that Israel must be vigilant in forcing Hamas to honor its commitments, and that he is the right leader to make sure that happens.
For now, Trump’s team is taking a cautious victory lap. “I think it’ll hold. They’re all tired of the fighting,” the President told reporters Friday. His team sees the deal as a start, not an ending. Much depends on whether Arab governments are willing to take ownership of Gaza—to manage it, rebuild it, and ensure Hamas or any similar terrorist group can’t rise again.
“The Arab countries made a lot of commitments,” a senior Trump aide told reporters. “They’re going to commit a lot of resources, and they’ve committed to seeing Hamas demilitarized. Then we have a kind of trust-and-verify withdrawal mechanism with the Israelis, so the more those goals are met, the closer we get to a full withdrawal because there’s a lot of stability in Gaza.”
That’s the aspiration, at least. The situation on the ground is volatile. The Trump team has few illusions about how precarious the peace remains. As the senior Administration official said: “There’s still a lot of ways this can go wrong.”
With reporting by Brian Bennett and Nik Popli
