US President Donald Trump touted it as a “historic breakthrough.”
But so far the new Gaza peace deal, announced last week and meant to help end the fighting and ease the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the coastal enclave, only seems to have resulted in another standoff between the key belligerents.
However, experts point out, there are some differences between this new peace deal and previous arrangements that could be positive.
For one thing, it is much more detailed and substantive. For another, statements by Trump indicate he might be more willing to push Israel towards accepting the deal. And finally, after resisting the idea for years, this month the Gaza-based group Hamas has agreed to disarm.
It was Hamas that sent fighters into Israel on October 7, 2023, an attack that resulted in over 1,000 deaths and sparked nearly three years of an ongoing Israeli military campaign in Gaza. The Israeli military has since killed over 73,000 people there, causing a UN independent commission of inquiry to classify its behavior as a genocide.
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One of the main sticking points of any peace plan for Gaza has been the sequencing of events. Israel has demanded that Hamas disarm before it withdraws its troops from Gaza. But up until last month, Hamas had refused to disarm until Israel withdrew its troops. This led to an ongoing stalemate.
Early in July, Hamas agreed to hand over power to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, or NCAG, a group of independent technocrats set up to govern Gaza. Later in July, the group also agreed to hand over their weapons to the NCAG.
Why did Hamas do this?
Hamas agreeing to disarm after years of promoting armed resistance against Israel should be taken seriously, says Muhammad Shehada, a visiting fellow with the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council of Foreign Affairs, who is originally from Gaza.
Hamas has been under pressure from negotiators from other countries like Egypt and Qatar and this could also be something of a political tactic “to expose that Israel is the party that is obstructing any progress in Gaza under [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s government,” Shehada concedes.
But, he added, “they would not have made such a major, historic concession unless their backs were totally against the wall and they fully understood that this is the only way forward.”
Should Israel agree to the new peace plan, there would also be no way Hamas could renege.
“They would be locked in,” Shehada told DW. “Because if they renege or violate the decommissioning arrangements, they would give Israel the ultimate pretext to resume military operations in Gaza and collapse the whole Trump deal. Hamas would then be blamed by the entire Palestinian public.”
On the other hand, Hamas probably also understands that Israel is unlikely to agree, so there’s no fear disarmament is going to happen immediately, he added.
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Israel’s political problem with peace plan
Israel expressed its displeasure with the new 15-point deal almost immediately.
“The version that has been made public does not reflect Israel’s positions,” a spokesperson for the Israeli prime minister’s office told news agency AFP.
Far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir dismissed the deal as “unacceptable” on social media, adding that “assassinations in Gaza must continue.”
Israel will hold elections in October and Netanyahu faces tough competition. If he makes any concessions on Gaza, he would likely face a public outcry and a lack of potential coalition partners from the far right.
“Netanyahu faces a critical election in less than 90 days from now and although there may be some flexibility on other issues like Lebanon or Iran, he cannot appear flexible on Hamas,” explains Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The shadow of October 7 hangs heavy and dark on Israel, and will for a very long time.”
Until elections happen, Netanyahu will try to sabotage any kind of Gaza peace deal because it would be “political suicide” for him, Shehada adds.
After a Monday meeting between Netanyahu and the US-led Board of Peace, it was announced that Hamas’ disarming and an Israeli withdrawal would now not happen in phases, as the new 15-point plan had detailed. Gradual progress would have given each side time to build trust, observers argued.
But after the Israeli complaints, the plan seemed to revert back to absolutes: Israel would only be asked to withdraw once Hamas was completely disarmed.
Would US pressure Israel?
There is really only one way to change this and that would be via pressure from the US, Shehada and other experts say.
“Israel … will be under enormous pressure from Trump to go along or risk his ire by sabotaging what he is touting as a historic success,” Alan Pino, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs wrote in an op-ed for the US think tank last week.
There has been some evidence of pressure from Trump. For example, when the US President released the 15-point plan, reports suggest he did so without showing it to Israel first.
Following the plan’s release, a senior US official gave reporters an off-the-record briefing and suggested Trump would be “very, very disappointed” if Israel did not go along with the new plan.
And, as Miller points out, “Donald Trump has said things and done things to Israel, and to an Israeli prime minister, that none of his predecessors have ever done. Nobody talked to an Israeli prime minister the way that Trump has talked to Netanyahu. Nobody opened a dialogue with Hamas without checking with the Israelis.”
All of that is unprecedented, Miller told DW. “But whether Donald Trump would be willing to impose significant and serious costs on the US-Israeli relationship is another matter altogether,” he told DW.
That could include things like cutting or restricting US assistance or intelligence cooperation and not defending Israel at the UN and other forums. But, Miller and Shehada both point out, none of that has happened.
“When you get between Donald Trump and something he really cares about, that’s a very bad and dangerous place to be,” Miller continued. “So you have to ask, what is it that that Donald Trump cares so much about that he’d be prepared to really pressure Israel? Maybe an Israel-Saudi relationship down the road, if we were on the cusp of a real breakthrough in Gaza.”
But the current reality is so far removed from that, that it’s unlikely Trump will move beyond words, Miller concluded. He’s also more likely to be more focused on using any leverage to extricate himself from the Iran war, the former adviser to the US State Department noted.
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