It was a Middle East tour to celebrate ending what Donald Trump called “3,000 years” of conflict and it lasted less than 12 hours.
Leaders lined up to flatter the US president, the Israeli parliament gave him a hero’s welcome, hostage families chanted his name and Arab leaders gathered for a “peace summit” in Egypt, posing for photos as the self-proclaimed peacemaker cajoled them into giving a thumbs-up to the cameras.
Even Trump’s critics conceded that he had achieved a significant breakthrough, securing a ceasefire to the two-year war in Gaza and the release of Israeli hostages with his unique, pugnacious brand of diplomacy.
But after Trump declared “peace in the Middle East”, the question for the region is whether the president now believes his job is done.
While the US, as Israel’s biggest benefactor, has long held unique leverage over the Jewish state, few American presidents have shown the willingness to exercise it so freely.
Though that helped secure international backing for Trump’s 20-point plan to end the conflict between Israel and Hamas, the deal’s implementation is in the early stages. The far harder measures — including Hamas’s disarmament and Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza — lie ahead.
Nobody can think “‘we got a ceasefire, we got the hostages out, and the rest will take care of itself’”, said Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat senator who has criticised both Trump and former president Joe Biden’s handling of the war. “The rest will not take care of itself.”
The ultimate success of Trump’s plan is predicated on his ability and willingness to remain engaged and keep pressure on the warring parties, particularly Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump pushed the Israeli prime minister — whom he lauded as “one of the greatest wartime” leaders — to accept the deal, while forcing him to deliver a humbling apology to Qatar for a missile strike last month targeting Hamas’s political leaders in Doha.
“Trump is in a strong position,” said Van Hollen. “But the question is whether he has the political will and stamina to do it.”
The plan has scant details on how Trump’s “Board of Peace” will ensure Gaza’s future governance and security. It expects Hamas to give up its weapons — but the militant group has yet to agree to do so, while Israel has made no guarantees that it will withdraw from Gaza.
“There’s still no clear structure and sequencing to this process, nothing that takes you from point A to point B in a specific timeframe, with clear commitments and deliverables,” said Emile Hokayem, the director of Middle East regional security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Hokayem and others also worry about Trump’s attention span.
“Trump’s attention is simultaneously the great currency and the greatest unknown,” he said. “He may over-involve himself or simply turn away, creating real uncertainty over an already uncertain process.”
In the first tumultuous nine months of his second term, Trump’s foreign policy focus has shifted between halting the conflict in Gaza, to trade wars and ending Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
He has already claimed to have ended seven other wars, including those between India and Pakistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. But in most cases his administration has helped pause flare-ups to long-running conflicts, while not addressing their root causes.
The Israel-Palestinian crisis is among the world’s most complex, enduring conflicts, with spoilers on all sides and a history of failed US-led attempts to resolve it.
In the decades of hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians and Arab states, there have been six peace accords; five Nobel Peace Prizes awarded; more than 30 hostage or prisoner swaps; and at least six Gaza ceasefires, including two since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack — both of which collapsed.
Yet Trump — who was silent when Israel broke one of the earlier, US-backed ceasefire agreements in March — was already on Monday speaking of a “historic dawn of a new Middle East” as he basked in adulation.
He even suggested he would like to follow up with a deal with Iran, saying it would be “great” before checking himself, adding: “First we have to get Russia done.”
Michael Makovsky, president of the pro-Israel Jewish Institute for National Security of America in Washington, predicted that Israel could restart its war in Gaza once Trump’s “misplaced” optimism over the likelihood of Hamas’s disarmament wears off.
“If they resume this offensive that they’ve paused for this deal, they’re going to go in much harder, because they don’t have the hostages to worry about,” Makovsky said.
A first glimpse of the many potential flashpoints emerged within an hour of Trump leaving Israel for the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
After Hamas released the 20 living hostages, Israeli defence minister Israel Katz warned that the militants were moving too slowly to return the bodies of 28 deceased hostages — potentially a “gross violation of the agreement”, to which Israel will respond “accordingly”.
Netanyahu also declined to attend the summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, where European and Arab leaders, including Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, gathered to endorse Trump’s plan.
One reason is that he did not want to be forced to engage with Abbas, whose PA administers limited parts of the occupied West Bank, according to a person familiar with the Israeli government’s thinking.
Arab and Muslim leaders, who Trump expects to fund Gaza’s massive reconstruction and supply troops for an international stabilisation force that is to deploy in Gaza, want a greater role for the PA and moves towards the establishment of the Palestinian state.
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi urged the implementation of Trump’s deal to ultimately accomplish “the two-state solution” — a concept Trump later appeared dismissive of. “I will decide what I think is right,” he told reporters, as he boarded his plane to leave Egypt.
Netanyahu vehemently rejects both, and the plan only makes a vague reference to Palestinian aspirations for statehood — the core grievance of the conflict.
“We don’t get to peace without justice and accountability, and we have just watched the last couple of years some of the most horrific crimes in modern history,” said Yousef Munayyer, who leads the Palestine/Israel programme at the Arab Center, a Washington think-tank.
“Peace in the Middle East is not something that happens because you print out some big letters to brand a summit.”
Trump, who has relied mostly on his friend-turned-envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner rather than his secretary of state or experienced diplomats to develop and advance his plan, acknowledged at times on Monday that there was more to do on the path to peace. In the Knesset, he appealed to Israel to recognise that it “has won all that they can by force of arms”.
“You don’t want to have to go through this again,” he said.
Addressing Arab and Muslim leaders later in the day at Sharm el-Sheikh, Trump — who says he will chair the “board of peace” that is to oversee the postwar transition in Gaza — insisted he would be “a partner in securing a better future”.
With royals from oil-rich Gulf states sitting behind him, he added that there would be “a lot of money coming into Gaza”.
“You have the wealthiest, some of the wealthiest nations in the world,” he said. “The big leaders are here, the emirs and the kings and everybody.”
Those same Arab states will be banking on Trump — the self-declared most pro-Israel US president in history — to remain engaged and keep up the pressure on Israel.
Munayyer said that was what made this ceasefire and hostage deal different from others. In that sense, Trump’s insistence on “celebrating the end of the war . . . makes it much, much harder for the Israelis to return to war”, he added.
But the main takeaway from Monday’s victory lap is not that “3,000 years” of conflict, in Trump’s words, have finally concluded, but rather that “everybody wants to find a way to keep flattering this guy, because they understand that that’s the way that you keep him involved and engaged”, he said.
On Monday, Trump picked up awards from both Israel and Egypt. And four foreign officials, including the leaders of Israel and Pakistan, declared in speeches that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize — some, perhaps, hoping that will keep him focused after he missed out on the award last week.
“This plan can’t work without Trump’s attention,” said Hokayem. “It’s the key ingredient because he’s the only one who spooks the Israelis and who gets all the Arab states listening immediately.”
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