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While Donald Trump boasts about his Gaza ceasefire deal, experts say the real work to end the war is just beginning. By Jonathan Pearlman.

‘Peace in the Middle East’

Palestinians walk in an intersection surrounded by destroyed buildings in Gaza City on Wednesday.

Credit: AP

At a hastily convened “peace summit” in Egypt this week, Donald Trump addressed more than 20 world leaders and described the ceasefire deal he brokered between Israel and Hamas as potentially “the greatest deal of them all”.

With his usual mix of immodesty and bombast, Trump said he and his negotiating partners had achieved a historic breakthrough that could transform the Middle East and end 3000 years of conflict.

“We have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to put the old feuds and bitter hatreds behind us,” he said.

The United States president has been widely praised for completing the deal, including by Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said Trump “succeeded in doing something miraculous”, and Hamas official Basem Naim, who thanked Trump for his “personal efforts to interfere”.

Despite Trump’s claims, however, the deal is not a road map for long-term peace. Instead, it includes a 20-point plan for resolving the two-year war and restoring stability in Gaza. The plan is light on detail and open to interpretation, and it is not yet clear whether Israel and Hamas have agreed to all parts of it. In the coming days, the deal, signed in Egypt on Monday by Trump and the leaders of Qatar, Egypt and Türkiye, will face its first set of serious hurdles.

Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former US Middle East negotiator, tells The Saturday Paper he is “relatively confident” the first phase of the deal will succeed. This phase involves immediate steps to end the war, including Israel’s withdrawal of troops to agreed lines, the release of hostages and Palestinian prisoners, and the removal of restrictions on aid flows.

Miller says this phase does not “end the war in ways that normal people would regard as the end of the war”.

“We don’t know how serious and focused Trump will be about turning phase one – which was a chance to end the war – into a process that will take weeks or months,” he says.

The next steps, according to the 20-point deal, involve the disarmament of Hamas, followed by the complete withdrawal of Israeli troops, the establishment of an International Stabilisation Force to train and support police forces in Gaza, and the creation of a transitional government led by a “technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee”.

“Each step is tricky and will require a lot of work,” says Miller. “It would mean a fundamental change to Gaza as we have known it.”

As this first phase of the deal took effect this week, the changes in Gaza and Israel were sudden and dramatic.

In Gaza, calm returned for the first time since a previous ceasefire ended in March. Residents began returning to their homes, often to find them in ruins.

Ismail Zayda, a 40-year-old returning to Gaza City, told the Associated Press: “Thank God my house is still standing. But the place is destroyed, my neighbours’ houses are destroyed, entire districts have gone.”

Local officials say the war has left 68,000 people dead, including civilians and fighters. Many thousands were children.

Saed Abu Aita, a 44-year-old in central Gaza, told The New York Times: “It’s important that the bombing has stopped, but there’s nothing to be happy about. My two daughters were killed, my home was destroyed and my health has deteriorated.”

Tess Ingram, an Australian who is in Gaza working for UNICEF, tells The Saturday Paper the ceasefire was initially greeted with joy in Gaza, followed by calm and anxiety as people prepared for their future and began to return home. She says the mood has now turned to “a strong sense of loss and grief”.

“Many people were coming back to almost nothing, to rubble,” she says. “Particularly older children, adolescents, feel that this conflict has set them back … It is mixed emotions here.”

In Israel, the ceasefire led to a wave of joy on Monday as Hamas released its remaining 20 living hostages of the 251 it seized during its attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023. Footage showed the returning hostages being embraced by weeping family members after 738 days.

“Dad Omri is home,” said the family of Omri Miran, who was seen greeting his two-year-old daughter, who had learnt to talk while he was in captivity.

Israel also began to receive the bodies of the 28 dead hostages who are due to be returned. Rotem Cooper, awaiting the body of his father, who is believed to have been killed after four months in captivity, told local media of “the unbearable contrast between all the celebrations we see here and the fact that it’s too late for him”.

As part of the deal, Israel on Monday released almost 2000 Palestinian detainees, including about 1700 who had been arrested in Gaza during the war and 250 prisoners who were serving life sentences.

In Khan Younis, a city in Gaza, Yusef Afana, a 25-year-old who spent 10 months in prison, told AFP: “The greatest joy is seeing my whole family gathered to welcome me.”

In the West Bank, Mohammad Al-Khatib, who was released after 20 years in prison for killing three Israelis, told Reuters: “We have always had hope, that’s why we continued to be steadfast.”

The main setback to the deal was a delay by Hamas in handing over the remains of hostages. Ten bodies were returned by Wednesday, including one who Israel said was a Palestinian. In response, Israel threatened to restrict aid flows but later said it would allow 600 trucks a day to enter as agreed to in the ceasefire deal. Hamas told mediators it was struggling to locate all the remains as some were in Israeli-held territory or under rubble.

Despite the rising tensions, the ceasefire deal remained in place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkWWIJy_YYo

On Tuesday, footage emerged of masked Hamas fighters carrying out public executions of eight men who were bound and forced to kneel in front of a crowd. Hamas said the men – believed to be from rival clans – were “collaborators and outlaws”.

The executions, and the return of armed Hamas members to the streets of Gaza, was a reminder of the remaining challenges to completing the ceasefire deal.

The deal envisages the disarming of Hamas and the dismantling of its tunnels and weapons stores, but a Hamas source told AFP that disarming was “out of the question”. Unless Hamas does so, Israel will not complete its withdrawal from Gaza.

Ian Parmeter, a former diplomat in the Middle East who is now at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University, tells The Saturday Paper he does not believe Hamas will disarm. He says the International Stabilisation Force should have been “sorted out in advance” and should have been deployed to Gaza as soon as Israel withdrew.

“Hamas regards itself as a resistance movement,” he says. “They will refuse to give up their weapons … Every day that the vacuum is maintained, it allows Hamas to restore their authority there, which they are already doing in a brutal way.”

Other obstacles include the proposal to eventually replace the transitional government with a permanent government. The plan envisages the Palestinian Authority, which oversees parts of the West Bank, taking control in Gaza after it has undergone an unspecified “reform program”. The authority’s 89-year-old president, Mahmoud Abbas, is unpopular among Palestinians, and Netanyahu has opposed the authority’s involvement in governing Gaza.

Then there is the reconstruction effort, which the United Nations says will cost US$70 billion and will take at least a decade.

Aaron David Miller says each of these challenges “represents a universe of complexity” and there is little chance of the plan’s success without the active backing and involvement of the White House.

“What we should be watching for now is, what is Trump doing? What is Kushner doing? What is Witkoff doing?” he says.

“In the days and weeks ahead, watch what they do, not what they say. A good sign would be appointing a senior American to work on the next steps, to engage, to … see who will pay the US$70 billion for the reconstruction of Gaza.”

Parmeter says the ceasefire is “by no means a peace deal” and “there is a very good chance that it will fall apart quite soon”.

“There are all sorts of uncertainties,” he says. “Sadly, I feel there is a good chance that the war will resume.”

At the peace summit on Monday, Trump gave a short speech and briefly spoke privately to the attendees before flying back to the US. No further details emerged about the implementation of the 20-point plan. Before leaving, Trump declared “phase two has started”.

“It’s peace in the Middle East,” he said. “Everyone said it’s not possible to do. And it’s going to happen.”

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 17, 2025 as "‘Peace in the Middle East’".

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