Trump’s Gaza Plan Delivers a Narrative for Peace

For a nihilistic death cult like Hamas, the worst possible ending is to be deemed irrelevant. For Israel and its neighbors, a narrative for peace in which Hamas is irrelevant is just as important as a plan.

President Trump’s 20-point plan to end the war in Gaza was therefore important because it accomplishes both. One need only look at its ancillary effects: it sidelined the earlier Arab League plan for Gaza (which did not mention Hamas), got 8 Arab or Muslim-majority nations to support it as the path toward peace, and shifted attention among those nations from condemnations of Israel to isolation of Hamas. None of this happened to date.

Then there is the plan itself, and the particular importance of its first phase to which Israel and Hamas agreed. The return of all the hostages by Hamas – one of Israel’s two objectives in this war – is significant not only because it alleviates the national trauma that every Israeli has felt for two years. This represents the first shift in the course of the war. Hamas will have conceded its last political lifeline, thereby rendering it virtually irrelevant.

While the Nobel Committee engages in pageantry about peace, President Trump works hard to deliver it. His breakthrough in Gaza – which has been recognized even by his detractors as a historic feat – is just the most recent example of why few are more deserving than him of this recognition.

The return home of the hostages will represent the beginning of the war’s end. Although Israel and Hamas will proceed to negotiate the plan’s next phases, those discussions will take place amid a new narrative of peace, one in which Israel and its regional and global partners can engage outside of the parameters of Gaza’s circumstances. It is in that new narrative that President Trump’s peace plan for Gaza functions as a peace plan for the region, picking up from where the Abraham Accords left off during his first term.

Abraham Accords as the Region’s First Peace Narrative

During the first Trump administration, there was a shared recognition among our regional partners of the common threat to them from the Iranian regime, and that the old “peace process” model of restricting regional peace efforts to the context of a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians held our partners back economically, militarily and diplomatically.

Our partners were desperate for an American leadership that listened to them and provided an alternative. President Trump did exactly that, and on that basis introduced the Abraham Accords – the first peace deal the region had experienced in a quarter of a century.

The Abraham Accords offered not only a narrative, but an ecosystem for real peace, along with infrastructure to sustain it. Indeed, it not only survived the post-October 7 environment and the Biden administration’s failures in the Middle East, but on multiple occasions it has also provided the foundation for our partners’ rhetorical, diplomatic and military support to Israel when faced with escalation from Iran and its proxies since 2023.

So important was the narrative and power of the Accords that thwarting it – specifically imminent Israel-Saudi normalization – was one of the reported incentives for Hamas and Iran to launch the October 7 massacre. Amid its information warfare against the Jewish State, perhaps its greatest disinformation victory was not ushering in the global criticism of Israel for its prosecution of its war of necessity but questioning the merits of peace with Israel.

Losing the Plot Line

Entrapped by Hamas’s effective information warfare and lacking an overall Middle East policy from the Biden administration, our regional allies were left with no alternative in 2023 but to heed “the street” in returning the discourse to Palestinian statehood. Because the Abraham Accords were mostly downplayed during this time by the United States, Saudi Arabia could not rely on the United States to sustain narrative for peace.

In need of a narrative that resonates with its public, Saudi Arabia made normalization with Israel dependent on a “path towards statehood” for Palestinians.

Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic finesse must be acknowledged here as the phrase “path towards” means something very different from “declaration of,” and could arguably include Israel’s military operations in Gaza (viz. eradication of Hamas could be considered a step on the path towards statehood).

Whether because of their political meekness or diplomatic dimness (likely both), the leadership of our European allies seemed to miss this nuance and tried to be even more pro-Palestinian than our Arab partners in the new race to recognize Palestinian statehood, culminating in France’s theatrics at the United Nations General Assembly last month. It is no surprise that the declaration – which had no concrete plan for governance or structure for a Palestinian state – was met with little fanfare and has had no follow-through.

The Trump administration correctly rejected the call for an immediate recognition of a Palestinian state and focused its energies on the difficult details – ending the war with an immediate release of all the hostages.

The Doha Strike and the Opportunity for a Reset

Israel’s September 9, 2025, strike against Hamas political leadership on Qatari soil sent shockwaves across the world. Targeting Hamas’ political leadership, allegedly while those individuals met to review the plan the Trump team presented to them, Israel clearly aimed to affect the diplomatic process.

Israel’s decision to uncharacteristically step out of the shadows, both figuratively and literally, created a split screen between the UN General Assembly’s events and the reality on the ground.

Put differently, a declaration of Palestinian statehood – or any kind of diplomatic pronouncements for the Middle East from European capitals – did not change the fact that the Trump administration has been working hard on ending a war, and that Israel will continue to take actions its leadership deem necessary on behalf of its citizens.

The strike on Qatari soil was where the rubber met the road.

This small island nation in the Gulf is a vital partner of the United States, hosting the largest U.S. air base and mediating for the United States. Qatar provided the setting for the signing of the Doha Agreement between the Trump Administration and the Taliban in 2020, and has helped facilitate the release of American hostages – this includes the recent effort to release U.S. citizen Amir Amiri from Taliban captivity, and mediating with Hamas over the release of the hostages.

To maximize Qatar’s potential vis-à-vis Hamas and the end of the Gaza War, it too needed a reset with its neighbors.

Israel helped broker that reset through the important phone call that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had with Qatar’s Emir shortly after President Trump announced the peace plan standing alongside Netanyahu. Like the strike on Qatari soil, so too the phone call was deliberately made in public view to allow for that reset.

From Gaza Plan to Middle East Peace Narrative

The October 8, 2025, announcement that Israel and Hamas had reached an agreement on the first phase of a peace deal was notably different from earlier proposals in the context leading up to the announcement.

The aforementioned joint statement from the foreign ministers of Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt welcoming this plan notably went beyond Gaza, highlighted by this sentence: “They emphasize the importance of the partnership with the United States in securing peace in the region.”

Even the manner and tone of negotiations to end the war changed. Together with Turkey and Egypt, Qatar pressed Hamas to accept the deal – and in a rare response by the terror group they committed to review it seriously. In a September 29 statement posted by the X handle “Gaza Report,” Turkey and Qatar allegedly threatened to cut “political, economic and diplomatic” support to the terror group if it did not accept and conveyed that “the moment now is decisive, and any attempt to delay or stall could make things worse and end with the severing of relations and increased international isolation for Hamas.”

Hamas’s release of all the hostages – the living during the first phase, and the deceased during the second phase – will officially mark the beginning of the end of this war. Gaza will then enter a post-war transition period during which the other steps in the plan will likely take shape, including Hamas laying down their weapons, and an interim force beginning to govern.

However this transition proceeds, and whatever form Hamas takes in its diminished and demilitarized form, the terrorist group will have failed in one of its original objectives of its October 7 attack to divert attention away from the Abraham Accords.

Two years later, because of the Trump administration’s leadership, the narrative of peace has returned. And this time around, with Iran and its proxies irrelevant, peace has no meaningful opposition and its narrative no alternative.