UN experts have warned that US sanctions over Benjamin Netanyahu's arrest warrant would erode international order.

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For weeks, Donald Trump has been exerting influence on events in the Middle East. After winning the 2024 election, he dispatched his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, to the region to help the Biden administration get the Israel-Hamas cease-fire and hostage-release deal over the finish line. Now, a little more than 24 hours into his presidency, Trump has already begun to undo much of President Joe Biden’s decision making from the past four years, including on foreign affairs. I spoke with my colleague Yair Rosenberg, who covers both Trump and the Middle East, about the new president’s goals and approach to the region.

Isabel Fattal: What moves has Trump made on the Israeli-Palestinian front since taking office yesterday?

Yair Rosenberg: Shortly after inauguration, Trump rescinded Joe Biden’s February executive order that erected an entire sanctions regime against extremist Israeli settlers. This order allowed the administration to impose stiff penalties on violent settlers in the West Bank and anybody who supported them, and—as I reported in March—could have eventually applied not just to individual actors and organizations on the ground but also to members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and the Israeli army.

Biden’s executive order was seen as a sword of Damocles hanging over the settler movement. It effectively cut off some important people on the Israeli hard right from the international financial system, because if you’re under U.S. sanctions, a lot of institutions cannot touch you. The settler movement was so concerned about this that they pressed Netanyahu to lobby against the sanctions in Washington, and some members even took the Biden administration to court in the United States. All of that now goes away: not just the sanctions, but the executive order that created the entire regime. Trump is also reportedly expected to end the U.S. freeze on 2,000-pound bombs that Biden put in place during the war in Gaza, and impose sanctions on the International Criminal Court over its attempted prosecution of Israeli officials—something Biden resisted.

Isabel: Trump told reporters last night that he is “not confident” that the Gaza cease-fire will last, adding that “it’s not our war; it’s their war.” How durable is the cease-fire deal right now?

Yair: Trump is right to be skeptical. It’s not at all clear whether this is actually going to hold. The first of the agreement’s three phases, which we are in right now, is 42 days long. Israel is releasing nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, including convicted mass murderers, in exchange for 33 women, children, and elderly hostages in Gaza held by Hamas, some of them living, some of them dead. That part of the deal seems likely to continue according to plan.

But partway through this period, the two parties are supposed to negotiate for the release of the remaining male hostages, for whom Hamas is demanding a much steeper ransom than this already steep price. And if those negotiations don’t bear fruit, it’s entirely possible the war will resume, especially because hard-right politicians in Netanyahu’s government have already vowed to press on until Hamas is eliminated.

The question becomes: How committed are Israel and Hamas to actually getting this done? And how committed is Trump to keeping the cease-fire on the rails? From his comments, it doesn’t seem like he knows. He’s speaking like a spectator instead of an actor. So we have no idea what he intends to do.

Isabel: What would it look like for Trump to truly commit to keeping the cease-fire on track?

Yair: It would require his administration to make it more worthwhile for both sides to compromise and stick to the deal rather than capsize it. Most Israelis support the current deal, but the accord’s most bitter opponents are the hard-right politicians in the current Netanyahu government, making the cease-fire harder to sustain as time goes on. But the Israeli far right is also hoping to get many items on their wish list over the next four years, much like they did during Trump’s previous term. Among other things, they seek U.S. support for Israeli annexation of the West Bank, the removal of the sanctions we discussed, and backing for Israel in its ongoing war with Iran and its proxies. If Trump is committed to the continuation of the cease-fire—an open question—he could make clear that some of these benefits come with a price, which is calm in Gaza. And Trump, both in his previous term and in recent weeks, has shown that he is willing to offer incentives that Biden would not.

Hamas is even harder to influence, because they’re a messianic terrorist group. Fundamentally, they don’t seem to care about not just how many of their own fighters they’ve lost but also how many Gazan civilians have been killed in this war. For them, every casualty is either immaterial or an asset in a gruesome PR war against Israel. But they do have sponsors abroad—like Qatar, which hosts some of the group’s political leaders. The Qataris want to be on the right side of the next Trump administration, like any other state in the Middle East. And so Trump has the ability to put pressure on the Qataris, who can then push Hamas to compromise on what they’re willing to accept in the next hostage exchange.

These methods aren’t guaranteed to work. It’s true that the U.S. has some sway over events, but these countries and actors have their own national interests and make decisions based on their own internal politics. Americans on both the right and the left tend to overestimate the U.S.’s role in world developments. Frankly, if there were a magic button here, Biden would have pushed it already.

Isabel: What can we learn about Trump’s second term from how he has handled this cease-fire situation thus far? What does it tell us about how he might relate to the region?

Yair: The thing to understand about Trump’s approach to politics, as I’ve written, is that he has few if any core beliefs, which means that he is both incredibly flexible and easily influenced. Both domestic and international actors know that if they can give Trump something he wants, he might give them something they want. It doesn’t matter if they are a traditional U.S. ally or not. It doesn’t matter if they’re a democracy or not. It’s entirely about whether you are in his good books. So everybody is now scrambling to get on Trump’s good side, to make down payments on the things they hope the most powerful person in the world will then pay them back for. In a real sense, that’s what this cease-fire is—for Israel, for Qatar, for Egypt, it’s all jockeying for advantage by trying to give Trump a win now so he’ll give them a win later.

Expect the next four years to look a lot like this, with international actors such as Saudi Arabia and Israel and domestic actors such as American evangelicals and Republican neo-isolationists all playing this game of thrones, hoping to curry favor with the ruler now holding court.

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By Shayla Love

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By Carnegie’s measure, plenty of people are in serious jeopardy. It’s not that they don’t remember what their friends and acquaintances are called; rather, saying names makes them feel anxious, nauseated, or simply awkward. In 2023, a group of psychologists dubbed this phenomenon alexinomia.

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Hamas and Israel each abandoned long-standing demands in order to secure the cease-fire that takes effect today. Both parties were responding to internal and external pressures when Israel agreed to pull its forces back from almost all of Gaza, and Hamas accepted a temporary cessation of hostilities, but not the end to war it had sought.

In Israel’s case, one source of external pressure was President-Elect Donald Trump, who pushed Benjamin Netanyahu to accept conditions he’d long rejected. The Israeli prime minister was also swayed by intense public demands to retrieve the hostages. Netanyahu’s priorities and incentives are relatively visible and easy to apprehend. Hamas’s strategy is, in this instance, more opaque.

A major concession for Hamas was to accept that many of its key cadres will now stay indefinitely in Israeli prisons. In any case, the militant Islamist group is no longer the same organization that launched the October 7, 2023, massacre. Its battalions have been smashed; all that is left is a ragtag insurgency capable only of hit-and-run tactics. The group’s arsenal is greatly depleted; its fighters have fallen back on improvised explosive devices assembled from unexploded Israeli ordnance. The top tier of Hamas’s military leadership has been eliminated, leaving two relatively inexperienced and junior commanders—Ezz al-Din Hadad in the north and Mohamed Sinwar, younger brother of the October 7 attack’s mastermind, Yahya Sinwar, in the south.

As they planned the original 2023 assault, Sinwar and his lieutenants no doubt anticipated a devastating military response from Israel. They accepted the bargain of sacrificing all of the infrastructure and quasi-state apparatus that Hamas had built in Gaza since seizing power in 2007, in return for a “permanent” guerrilla war against Israel. According to the military wing’s theory of insurgency, after drawing the Israel Defense Forces into Gaza, Hamas fighters would inflict grinding attritional losses on Israeli troops. In a marginal way, that scenario seemed slightly plausible when Israel recently lost 15 soldiers in the northern town of Beit Hanoun within a week. After 15 months of fighting, the IDF’s losses are incommensurable with Hamas’s. But Israel’s generals need clarity from its civilian government about the political goals of the war and what they can call victory.

[Read: Israel never defined its goals]

Hamas, too, may finally have had a moment of clarity. Sinwar used to mock the Hamas politburo as “the hotel guys” because few of the political leaders ensconced in comfortable digs abroad had personal experience of armed struggle. For more than a decade, the Gaza gunmen became ascendant, while these formerly commanding, civilian Hamas figures in foreign capitals were reduced to soft-power roles as diplomats and TV talking heads. They had their uses as conduits for money and arms, but as Sinwar saw it, they had no hard-power value to the movement.

All of that has changed. Sinwar is dead; in Lebanon, the great ally Hezbollah has collapsed; in Syria, Israel’s longtime adversary Bashar al-Assad is gone; a humbled Iran has been kept at bay. So Hamas has had to change course. With the reemergence of Turkey and Qatar as regional power brokers, the deal-making diplomacy of the hotel guys is now the only game in town. If Hamas is to have any way of rebuilding power inside Gaza, the politburo must get its way.

Plenty of evidence suggests that the Sinwar-directed version of Hamas has not fared well in public opinion in Gaza, where 2.2 million Palestinians suffered serial displacement, hellish misery, and mass death. The military wing calculated that its adoption of a frontal position in the so-called Axis of Resistance of Iran-backed regional militias would shift Palestinian public opinion in its favor. But the backlash potential among Gaza’s civilian population, in what was surely imagined as a years-long insurgency, must have been obvious. Even the most implacable and belligerent Hamas leaders must operate within a Palestinian political context that demands significant support for a “people’s war.”

But the decisive factor in shifting Hamas at the negotiating table is the dramatic change in the wider geopolitical landscape. The Sinwar strategy of October 7 was to provoke a multifront war against Israel, in hopes of dragging into a regional conflict the ultimate adversaries, the United States and Iran. That call went unanswered. When Hezbollah made clear that it would intensify its long-standing border conflict with Israel but essentially sit out the war in Gaza, Hamas leaders complained at first, but eventually had to accept that the Lebanese cavalry was not on its way.

Even so, Hamas assumed broader backing from its regional sponsors. Yet the devastation that Israel inflicted on Hezbollah last year, the general degradation of Iran’s militia network, and the failure of Tehran’s strategy of using Arab fighters as a forward defense against Israel and the U.S. were decisive. The collapse of the resistance proved central to Hamas’s change of course.

With the end of the Assad regime in Syria, Iran now has no overland route to resupply Hezbollah in Lebanon, let alone Hamas in Gaza. The fall of Assad has helped shift power inside Hamas away from the Qassam Brigades, which advocated “permanent war” against Israel, and toward the civilian politicians who recently relocated from Qatar to Turkey. Many of those operatives were never really on board with the strategy of ditching governance in Gaza and turning to guerrilla combat. Hamas was careful to avoid open dissension, but signs of unease among politburo members were evident.

The victory in Syria of the Turkish-backed rebels fundamentally altered Hamas’s calculations. Turkey and its close ally Qatar are now emerging as key players in the Levant. For Hamas, whatever political links to Ankara and Doha it can leverage suddenly matter far more than any ties to Tehran. Unlike Iran’s leaders, the rulers of Turkey and Qatar have no interest in prolonging an open-ended conflict in Gaza. Both countries are largely aligned with the U.S. They have an overriding interest in regional stability, not in support for an endless insurgency on Israel’s doorstep.

If Hamas is to have any hope of getting back in the business of governing Gaza, and restoring a social contract with its more than 2 million Palestinian residents, Turkey and Qatar are most likely to supply the means. That would involve, first, political and diplomatic cover, and then financing for the territory’s reconstruction, especially its shattered health and education systems.

Trump’s threats of “hell to pay” if a hostage deal did not materialize before his inauguration probably meant little to Hamas. But even if the president-elect’s principal influence was on Netanyahu, Ankara and Doha certainly felt the Trump factor enough to lean on the politburo. The Qassam Brigade fighters surviving in Gaza’s tunnels still have their guns, and at some point they may decide they’ve had enough of the cease-fire; equally, Israel will show no hesitation in playing militant whack-a-mole, and Netanyahu might judge that resuming the conflict would advance his interests. But for the moment, the politburo members who want to pull back from endless warfare and try to rebuild political power in Gaza have the momentum and the leverage. That’s why there’s a cease-fire—and why it might just last.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel has a right to continue military operations in Gaza.

When Donald Trump completes his once-unthinkable return to the White House, he’ll face a world far more violent and unsettled than when he unwillingly gave up power four years ago.

And his very presence behind the Resolute desk feels destined to destabilize it further.

Trump has offered mysterious plans to bring quick ends to the wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East. He has antagonized allies and mused about a return to an age of American imperialism, when the United States could simply seize the territory it wanted. He and his advisers have threatened trade wars and allied themselves with movements that have eroded democracies and supported rising authoritarians.

And Trump is again poised to push an “America First” foreign policy—inward-looking and transactional—at a moment when a lack of superpower leadership could embolden China to move on Taiwan or lead to renewed conflict in the Middle East, just as the region seems on the doorstep of its biggest transformation in generations.

“Trump is less of a surprise this time but will be a test. The international system has baked in that Trump is not an instinctive supporter of alliances, that he will be inconsistent,” James Stavridis, a former supreme allied commander of NATO, told me. “Allies and adversaries alike are going to know that nothing is free; everything is a negotiation.”

[Read: How ‘America first’ became America alone]

Trump, Biden officials ruefully note in private, will inherit a strong hand. He will take the helm of a healthy economy and will become the first U.S. president in decades to assume office without a large-scale military deployment in an overseas war zone. And the grueling conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza—which Trump has demanded end immediately—both appear to be at inflection points, with war-weary sides showing a willingness to talk.

The president-elect has said there will be “hell to pay in the Middle East” if Hamas hasn’t released the hostages seized on October 7, 2023, by the time he is inaugurated. After months of negotiations by President Joe Biden’s team, a breakthrough appears at hand to pause fighting and release some hostages.

The moment has come during the incumbent’s final days in office, yet Trump has been quick to take credit—the deal was made with input from his Middle East envoy—even as a permanent resolution to the conflict remains uncertain. And his intervention does seem to have played a key role in achieving a breakthrough. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, appeared eager to start Trump’s second term on the incoming president-elect’s good side while Hamas may have been spooked by his bombast. But as the cease-fire slowly unfurls in the weeks ahead, Trump’s tempestuousness could just as easily endanger the fragile deal.

During his reelection campaign, Trump repeatedly proclaimed that he would end the war between Russia and Ukraine “within 24 hours,” a claim he has since softened. Indeed, nowhere will his swearing-in be more nervously watched than in Kyiv. Trump, of course, has long derided NATO, the alliance that has propped up Ukraine. Moscow has made some halting advances, despite a last-ditch surge of aid to Ukraine from the Biden administration. And the president-elect’s desire for a quick, negotiated end to the conflict seems likely to ratify some of Russia’s territorial gains.

Trump’s White House and the MAGA-ified House of Representatives have shown no appetite to send substantial aid or military equipment to the front, and although Europe will gamely try to pick up the slack, Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself will suffer without American support. Russia’s advantage in manpower—bolstered by the North Korean troops it is using as cannon fodder—will only expand, and Russian President Vladimir Putin may grow more confident that he can simply win a war of attrition.

[Read: Trump is facing a catastrophic defeat in Ukraine]

One senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the incoming administration, identified Trump’s long-standing deference to Putin as a grave concern, particularly if Russia’s aggression sets off NATO’s mutual-defense pact. “If Trump gives in to Putin an inch, he’ll take a mile,” the official told me. “If he turns his back completely and encourages him to move beyond Ukraine, think how much more costly it will be if Article 5 gets triggered. Then we have American skin in the game.”

Divisions are already emerging in Trump’s orbit as to the best approach to Ukraine and beyond. Steve Bannon, the right-wing provocateur and first-term Trump aide, has argued against globalism. Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who has become Trump’s most influential informal adviser, has used his fortune and social-media reach to prop up right-wingers in the U.K. and Germany who are eager to walk away from Kyiv. That echoes the approach of the incoming vice president, J. D. Vance.

But not all of Trump’s team is in lockstep. The secretary-of-state nominee, Marco Rubio, has been a NATO defender, and Mike Waltz, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, has argued forcefully in favor of tougher sanctions on Moscow’s energy sector to strangle Putin’s government economically.

Those divisions feel familiar. Trump’s first-term diplomatic and national-security teams—initially stocked with Republican stalwarts whose views were far closer to GOP orthodoxy than those embraced by MAGA—often found themselves feuding among themselves. Both camps were frequently frustrated by a president who had few consistent desires other than a need for flattery.

The result was a haphazard foreign policy. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un started out on the receiving end of “fire and fury,” only to later receive what Trump called “beautiful letters.” China went from foe to friend and then back again. And even as his administration levied tough sanctions against Russia, Trump continually cozied up to Putin, siding with the dictator over his own U.S. intelligence agencies in Helsinki.

[Read: No more Mr. Tough Guy on China]

That unpredictability, although it brought chaos before, could work to Trump’s advantage on the world stage this time around, his new crop of advisers believes. Would any foreign adversary dare test Trump if they can’t anticipate his response? Trump himself leaned into the idea in October, when he told The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board that he would not have to use military force to prevent Beijing from blockading Taiwan, because Chinese President Xi Jinping “respects me and he knows I’m fucking crazy.”

It’s far less calculated than Richard Nixon’s “madman” theory of the case—far more born of Trump’s own whims and ego—but the end result, his advisers argue, could be the same.

And that, to put it mildly, was on full display during the transition.

Maps showing the familiar view of the Western Hemisphere, but with the U.S. borders cartoonishly expanded, have become popular right-wing memes. Suddenly, Greenland is part of the United States. Upon closer examination, so is the Panama Canal. And Canada—our friendly, polite neighbor to the north—is now the 51st state.

There are debates even in Trump World as to how serious any of these efforts at territorial expansion might be, and all agree that a healthy dose of trolling was involved in Trump dispatching Donald Trump Jr. to Greenland or calling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “governor.” But foreign capitals have long learned to take the elder Trump both literally and seriously.

Trump’s desire for Greenland—based on its strategic location and abundant resources—has rattled not only Denmark, which governs the island, but also other NATO members, which are aghast at the incoming American president’s refusal to rule out using military force to seize the island. Similarly, Trump’s threats toward Panama and his bullying of Canada—including warnings of sweeping tariffs—have again sent a clear message to the world: Under its 47th president, the United States cannot be counted on to enforce the rules-based order that has defined the postwar era.

[Read: The intellectual rationalization for annexing Greenland]

A Trump-transition spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In the Middle East, Israel’s response to October 7 created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza but also decimated the Iranian proxies that have served as buffers for Tehran for decades, leaving the regime newly vulnerable.

“Iran is now at the weakest point since 1979,” Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s national security adviser, said on Monday. “There is a cease-fire in Lebanon and the possibility of a new political future with a new president. Russia and Iran’s lackey in Syria, [Bashar al-Assad], is gone.”

In his first term, Trump withdrew the United States from a nuclear deal with Iran, implemented a “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign, and brokered the Abraham Accords, which further isolated Tehran. He authorized the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the general who directed Iran’s militias and proxy forces around the Middle East. He’s now filled his Cabinet with Iran hawks, including Waltz—which could put him at odds with Gulf allies who seem more inclined to try for a détente with Tehran.

The only certainty is more uncertainty. And the president-elect was quick to embrace the chaos when asked by a reporter at a news conference last month about his plans for Iran.

“How could I tell you a thing like that now? It’s just … you don’t talk about that before something may or may not happen,” Trump said. “I don’t want to insult you. I just think it’s just not something that I would ever answer having to do with there or any other place in the world.”

Israel and Hamas have reached a hostage-release and cease-fire agreement, offering a measure of relief and hope to the region. But the deal brings no certain closure to the catastrophic Gaza war. It does not guarantee an end to the fighting, a full release of the Israeli hostages, or a lasting political solution for Gaza.

For Israelis, joy at the return of some of the hostages is tempered by trepidation about the fate of the rest. The deal provides for a six-week cease-fire, during which 33 Israeli hostages will come home—some alive, some for burial—in exchange for the release of a much larger number of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. A second stage of negotiations will then begin, to include the return of the remaining 65 hostages in Gaza and a lasting cease-fire. The success of those talks is just one of the questions the current deal leaves open.

Another is why the agreement wasn’t reached months ago. The framework appears to be the same one—“but for a few small nuances,” the Israeli ex–cabinet minister and former general Gadi Eisenkot said in a radio interview yesterday—that President Joe Biden presented last spring. Had both parties agreed to these terms then, thousands of Gazans might still be alive, and the recent destruction in the northern Gaza Strip could have been averted. At least eight Israeli hostages—including Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the best-known—might have survived, along with more than 100 Israeli soldiers.

So why was the agreement reached only now? The most significant development in recent days appears to be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new urgency. This week, unlike in May, he pressed the leaders of his coalition’s two resistant, far-right parties to accept a hostage agreement. One new element is Donald Trump. The president-elect demanded a hostage deal before his inauguration, promising that there would be “hell to pay” otherwise. He sent his own envoy, Steven Witkoff, to Qatar, where the indirect negotiations were taking place. Witkoff went from Qatar to Israel on Saturday and insisted on having a meeting with the prime minister on the afternoon of the Jewish sabbath—a violation of Israeli protocol rudely designed to remind Netanyahu who was the vassal and who was the suzerain.

Israeli government and military sources have tried to explain the timing of the deal to national media outlets by pointing to the death of Hamas’s leader Yahya Sinwar in October; the defeats suffered by its Lebanese ally, Hezbollah; and the devastation of northern Gaza. But the purpose of this account largely appears to be presenting the agreement as the fruit of Israel’s military success—rather than a sharp change of course under pressure. In reality, Hamas managed to sustain its war of attrition despite being weakened.

[Read: Sinwar’s death changes nothing]

Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s willingness to pursue a deal is a major reversal. Last summer, he reportedly stymied progress toward a cease-fire by raising new conditions, which infuriated his then–defense minister, Yoav Gallant. (The dispute was one reason Netanyahu dismissed Gallant in November.)

The Israeli right, which assumed that Trump’s bluster was aimed only at Hamas, is in shock. One clue as to what Trump may have threatened—or promised—the prime minister has come from leaks about Netanyahu’s talks with his finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich. The leader of the far-right Religious Zionist Party, Smotrich is a prominent patron of West Bank settlement. In a meeting between the two on Sunday, Netanyahu reportedly told Smotrich that “we must not harm relations with the Trump administration,” and explained that Trump would help with the government’s designs for “Judea and Samaria”—apparently referring to plans to expand West Bank settlement construction.

That promise did not satisfy Smotrich’s party. After a meeting of its Knesset members today, the party demanded a commitment from Netanyahu that he resume the war “after completion of the first stage of the deal.” This, it said, was “a condition for the party remaining in the [ruling] coalition and the government.” As of this writing, Netanyahu has not responded.

While the ultimatum is unlikely to scuttle the deal immediately, it underlines a central question: whether the first stage will lead to an agreement on the next one and a lasting cease-fire. The previous agreement, in November 2023, furnished only a pause. This one could be similar—a six-week hiatus, after which the fighting and destruction resume, while the rest of the hostages remain in Gaza.

A more lasting settlement would require political arrangements in Gaza that Netanyahu has so far studiously avoided discussing. Gaza needs a new Palestinian governing authority, with its own forces or foreign troops capable of keeping the peace. Without that, Hamas will almost certainly resume control in the shattered territory after Israeli troops pull out—and this war will have been just one particularly destructive round of fighting, but not the last. Israel should have been working with the United States, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank to create the framework for a new government in Gaza from the very beginning of this conflict. Instead, by failing to define a policy for Gaza’s future, the Netanyahu government turned the war into a highway to nowhere.

[Yair Rosenberg: Trump made the Gaza cease-fire happen]

Netanyahu’s far-right partners have pledged to reverse the 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and resume Israeli settlement there. Netanyahu has not endorsed that goal, but he has opposed any governing role for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, despite the fact that foreign partners consider its inclusion essential. Outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken emphasized as much in a speech on Tuesday.

For the second stage of the deal to succeed—for the war to end and for the remaining hostages to come home—both Hamas and the Israeli government will have to face the complex problem of Gaza’s future. Anyone who wants an end to the agony of the past 15 months must conjure up at least a quarter measure of hope. But best to hold off on any celebrations until a final deal is reached.

A good deal is one in which everyone walks away happy or everyone walks away mad. The moods must match. By this standard, the deal between Israel and Hamas is good but not great: Both groups are relishing what they are getting, and choking a bit on what they have given up. Israel is choking more than Hamas. There will be scenes of jubilation and triumph from Gazans and Israelis, and efforts by both sides’ leadership to spin the Gaza war as a victory. But for Israel and Gaza, the past 15 months have been a miserable failure, and from the perspective of negotiation, the only good news is that both sides taste some of the bitterness.

No hostages have been freed yet, and the cease-fire doesn’t start until Sunday, so all reports so far remain speculative and optimistic. The terms resemble those leaked over the past week. Israel will release a large number of Palestinian prisoners. Hamas will release in tranches the remaining hostages, living and dead, whom it seized on October 7, 2023. Nearly 100 remain. The two sides will stop fighting for 42 days, with the aim (again, speculative) of making that cease-fire permanent and ending the war. The unaccounted-for Israeli hostages include civilians, among them the Bibas children, who were nine months old and 4 years old when they were kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz, after the slaughter of their grandparents.

Hamas’s failure even to acknowledge whether these children are alive, or to allow welfare checks by the Red Crescent, has done much to convince Israelis that negotiation with the group is pointless. Why talk with someone too sadistic to let you know whether they have shot a baby or fed him? Taking civilian hostages is a war crime, and negotiating with a group that brags about taking them is more like negotiating with the Joker than with Nelson Mandela. The act of kidnapping a child is particularly taxing on one’s moral imagination. It’s no surprise that negotiations have faltered so far. Negotiating demands trust, and it’s hard to trust someone who snatched a baby.

[Franklin Foer: How Netanyahu misread his relationship with Trump]

From the beginning of the war, Israel has struggled to define its goals—in part because it is, as a country, so divided about its nature and purpose that any real goal articulated would be unsatisfactory to a large portion of its population. It was left instead with reassuring but vague slogans. “Free the hostages” was a defensible one from the start—the objective was just, and within Israel’s rights—but it concealed many harder strategic questions. What if freeing the hostages involved freeing murderers and terrorists from Israeli prisons? Evidently it does. What if their freedom was conditional on letting Hamas survive and rule Gaza?

Evidently it is. Gaza is wrecked, and tens of thousands of its people are dead. But Hamas is still the only armed force likely to rule Gaza when Israel withdraws. If the intention is to end the war, then the war will end with Hamas bloodied but unbowed. Israel estimates that only two of Hamas’s battalions remain intact, but the analyst Seth Frantzman, a professional Bad News Bear on this topic, has listed the evidence that perhaps a dozen battalions’ worth of Hamas fighters have survived. Moreover, the plans for a post-Hamas Gaza amount to squat. For more than a year, Israel and its allies have been pondering a role for the Palestinian Authority, or the Gulf States, or Egypt in providing security forces in a post-Hamas Gaza. I wonder about the mental health of those proposing this option. Are these security forces in the room with us right now? So far there is no prospect that any such group will materialize, or that anyone will want to send soldiers into a rubble-strewn urban combat zone, to contend with Hamas fighters who are themselves reluctant to disarm.

Hamas will celebrate this deal, because it will survive, and by its survival it will demonstrate the failure of the other slogan Israel adopted, which was “Destroy Hamas.” That slogan, too, was easy and just. But like “Free the hostages,” it left all the big questions unanswered, and looming ahead of it like thunderclouds. The first question was whether Israel was willing to inflict collateral civilian casualties, and absorb military casualties, at a level that experts thought would be necessary to accomplish its goal. This question is partially answered: Israel has by its own account inflicted many civilian casualties, and taken remarkably few military casualties of its own. (Before the war, analysts predicted thousands of Israeli soldiers dead in tunnel-clearing operations.)

The second question about the slogan was whether Hamas’s “destruction” meant what it seemed to mean. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used it, it sounded a lot like eradication, so that Hamas would cease to exist in any form, the way ETA and the Red Army Faction have. It would lose and close up shop, without even maintaining a token website or leaving a masked dead-ender broadcasting from a basement somewhere. The other possible interpretation of destroy would be merely to destroy Hamas’s ability to perpetrate another attack like October 7. The latter, reduced version of the slogan offered a better chance of success. But it is also less satisfying, and no longer fits on a bumper sticker.

When I talked with Israeli national-security officials last year, the most realistic of them spoke of Gaza’s future as resembling the West Bank today. The Palestinian population would live unhappily, but under the day-to-day administration of a Palestinian government. Israel would go in regularly on missions to kill or capture Hamas members. This vision is consistent with the more limited version of Israel’s goal for Hamas: to reduce it to a permanent but manageable problem. A cease-fire in Gaza, as of right now, will leave Hamas in power at a level well beyond manageable for Israel. It will probably postpone large-scale fighting rather than end it for good.

There has always been one further Israeli goal—less often articulated publicly, but shared by most Israelis and certainly by their government. That is to establish regret among Gazans for the October 7 attacks, and deterrence for future ones. Deterrence means asking Hamas, Do you enjoy the fruits of your actions? It means asking Gazans, Are you willing to accept what Hamas has dragged you into? The most distressing thing about this hostage deal is that Gazans might regret the results of the October 7 attack, but Hamas is still celebrating it. Hamas is a military organization; militaries fight, and Hamas just fought a better-armed opponent to a draw.

[Yair Rosenberg: Trump made the Gaza cease-fire happen]

Tempering this enthusiasm is a downward trend in its allies’ fortunes. In the days after October 7, Israel was skittish and concerned, because it looked possible that Hezbollah would take advantage of the country’s post-raid shock to enter the war from the north. It was not obvious that Israel, having failed to defend itself against an attack in the south, could withstand a much more formidable one in the north. After Israel’s largely successful war with Hezbollah at the end of last year, and the downfall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Israel has removed, at least temporarily, two major potential distractions. Hamas now knows that it has Israel’s undivided attention—and that prospect may have motivated it to consider offers of negotiation that it rejected months ago.

In the end, the most promising aspect of the deal is that it breaks a streak of nearly a year, during which the war in Gaza went on and on, without any clearly articulated end point or plan. Israel fought Hamas and degraded it. But fighting is a tool rather than an objective; a cease-fire at least gives civilians on both sides a spell of relief, and a moment to pause and figure out what they want out of what comes next.

Let us now praise Donald Trump. It’s hard for me not to choke on that phrase. But it was his bluster—his demand that Hamas release its remaining hostages before his inauguration, or else “all hell will break out”—that effectively ushered in a cease-fire, the beginning of the end of the Gaza war.  

Although honesty requires crediting Trump, his success was not the product of magical powers or an indictment of Biden-administration diplomacy. Trump’s splenetic threats injected urgency into floundering talks. And by allowing his envoy Steven Witkoff to coordinate with the Biden administration, the incoming president left Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with an acute sense of isolation.

Over the course of Netanyahu’s long reign, he has transformed his nation’s foreign policy. For much of its history, the Jewish state cultivated bipartisan support in the United States. Netanyahu trashed that tradition; for his own domestic purposes, he has provoked spats with Democratic presidents, bolstering his reputation among his right-wing base. At the same time, he tethered himself to the Republican Party.

As the Gaza war began to meander—and as it became clear that Israel would never achieve the “total victory” that he promised—Netanyahu dipped into this old playbook. In a video he released last June, he accused Biden of denying Israel the munitions that it needed to win the war. That charge was arguably slanderous, given the large sums of money that the United States had spent on arming Israel.

Although that strategy advanced his career, it had an obvious flaw. Because of Netanyahu’s lockstep partnership with the Republicans, he is beholden to the whims of the leader of that party. Once Trump emphatically expressed his desire to end the war, Netanyahu was stuck. To cross the incoming president would risk losing the most important pillar of Israel’s foreign support.

[Read: Trump made the Gaza cease-fire happen]

Some American observers assumed that Netanyahu wanted to extend the war into Trump’s term, during which he would have the Republican president’s permission to behave however he liked. These were, after all, like-minded politicians. But that assessment misread the Netanyahu-Trump dynamic.

Over the past four years, Netanyahu clearly has had reason to feel insecure about his relationship with Trump. Trump reportedly abhorred the fact that Netanyahu called Joe Biden to congratulate him on winning the 2020 presidential election. By acknowledging Biden’s victory, Netanyahu flunked the fundamental Trumpist loyalty test. (As Trump fumed about the episode to Axios’s Barak Ravid, he declared, “Fuck him.”) After October 7, Trump cast blame on the Israeli prime minister for failing to foresee the attack. Given this history, and all the anxieties it must surely provoke, Netanyahu was desperate to deliver for Trump, days before his inauguration, at the height of his prestige.

After months of diplomatic futility, Biden was shrewd to allow Trump and Witkoff to serve as the front men for the talks. Rather than clinging territorially to the office during his last days in power, or invoking clichés about how there’s one president at a time, he invited his successor into an ad hoc coalition in which they operated in sync, sharing the same strategy and applying combined pressure. This moment will be remembered as an atavistic flourish of bipartisan foreign policy, but it also makes me think about Antony Blinken’s eyes.

When I traveled with the secretary of state to the Middle East, and the lights of television cameras pointed at his face, I saw the toils of shuttle diplomacy in the bulging bags beneath his eyes. For months, protesters camped outside his suburban-Virginia house. They hurled red paint at his wife’s car while he kept returning to the region in the hopes of brokering a deal. Indeed, it was those months of excruciating, energetic negotiation that yielded the substance of an agreement, the gritty details of peace. That hard work should be at the center of the narrative, and maybe someday it will be, but right now it feels like a footnote.

On the left, plenty of Biden’s critics are now crowing. Many of those who hate “Genocide Joe” have always claimed that Trump would be better for the Palestinian cause, or perhaps just as bad, which justified a desire to punish Biden’s Zionism electorally. Now that strange faith in Trump will be tested, because the coming diplomacy will be even harder than ending the war. Hamas remains a fact of life in Gaza. For the time being, it’s the government there, and it has every incentive to remain an armed force. Reconstructing the Strip, rescuing it from dangerous anarchy, will require somehow navigating around that fact. I doubt that Trump cares deeply about the future of Gaza, or that he has the patience to maneuver through the tangle of complexities. But if he does, I will be the first to praise him.

Today, after 15 months of brutal war, Israel and Hamas agreed to a deal to secure the release of Israeli hostages and the cessation of hostilities in Gaza. The agreement’s first six weeks will see Israel withdraw from much of the enclave and release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, including convicted mass murderers, in exchange for Hamas releasing 33 captive Israelis—some living, some dead. Should everything proceed according to plan, subsequent negotiations would assure the release of the remaining Israeli hostages and the reconstruction of Gaza in the deal’s second and third stages.

Given the precarious nature of the deal’s phased structure, the matter is far from settled, despite the headlines and handshakes. The accord must also still be ratified by the Israeli cabinet. If that happens, the ensuing weeks will be traumatic, as returning Gazan refugees discover whether their homes are still standing, and the families of Israel’s hostages discover whether their loved ones are still alive.

The tentative agreement is nonetheless a victory for the foreign-policy teams of Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who worked in tandem with regional partners Qatar and Egypt to bring it about. The terms largely echo a proposal laid out by Biden himself in May 2024, but the incoming president dragged the parties over the finish line. What changed was not Washington’s general orientation toward the conflict. Far from turning up the heat on Israel, Trump telegraphed a further embrace of its positions during his 2024 campaign, repeatedly attacking Biden for restricting arms sales to Israel. But this posture may have helped deliver both sides: Hamas could reasonably surmise that it would not get a better deal during Trump’s presidency, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right government likely acceded to the arrangement in order to stay in the new leader’s good graces as he assumed office.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Cancel the foreign-policy apocalypse]

The Israeli far right, whose lawmakers hold the margin of power in Netanyahu’s coalition, had previously threatened to collapse the government should a deal be reached without Hamas fully vanquished from Gaza. But amid Trump’s return, the radicals have their eyes on bigger prizes, such as the annexation of the West Bank—which the Palestinians claim for their future state—and are loath to forgo such opportunities. For this reason, they will likely vote against the cease-fire but leave Netanyahu in power, allowing him to enact it.

Put another way, it’s not that Trump had a stick with which to beat Israel that Biden didn’t have; it’s that his presidency holds out the prospect of carrots that Biden would never offer. It was less the president-elect’s pressure than his potential promise that brought the Israeli far right onside. With Trump, everything is a transaction, and for his would-be suitors—not just Israel, but also Hamas’s sponsors in Qatar—the Gaza cease-fire is a down payment.

[Samer Sinijlawi: My hope for Palestine]

On the Palestinian side, the deal marks a momentary if Pyrrhic triumph for an eviscerated Hamas, which will get to claim that it outlasted the Israeli army and parade some of the released prisoners through the streets of Gaza. But with its leaders killed and its territory devastated, the group will have little to celebrate or to show for its atrocities on October 7. The terrorist organization may continue to impose its will by force, but it is deeply unpopular in its own backyard, according to recent polls.

Meanwhile, with Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar dead, Lebanon’s Hezbollah decimated, Syria’s pro-Iran regime overthrown, and Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance shattered, Netanyahu has a plausible claim to victory, should the deal hold. And if it doesn’t, or should Hamas prove insufficiently forthcoming in negotiations over the remaining hostages, he has a new American president in office who may happily underwrite a return to hostilities.

The guns might mercifully fall silent for now, but if history is any indication, the long war between Israel and Hamas will continue, in one form or another.

PM Donald Tusk says Israeli prime minister will not be detained despite ICC arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu.