The Israeli jets over the Red Sea launched a volley of missiles that arced high into the atmosphere and came down on a residential neighborhood in Doha, Qatar, where Hamas representatives were discussing the possibility of a plan to end the war in Gaza.
The September 9 strike was a stunning provocation by Israel: negotiation by bombing the negotiators. Even more than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s other aggressive acts in West Asia over the past year, this one so rankled government officials both in the region and in Washington that it threatened to blow up the prospects for a ceasefire.
But 20 days later, Netanyahu and President Trump stood together at the White House, declaring support for a plan that could end the nearly two-year-old war. Trump, with typical hyperbole, labelled it “a big, big day, a beautiful day, potentially one of the great days ever in civilisation”. Netanyahu, more cautious, said the proposal “achieves our war aims”.
The brazen Israeli attack failed to kill its targets. But it motivated an angry Trump and his advisers to pressure Netanyahu into supporting a framework for ending the war, after months in which the President appeared to have given the Israeli leader a free pass to continue assaulting Hamas even as the death toll and suffering among Palestinian civilians rose to levels that left Israel increasingly isolated.
The plan got a boost on Friday night when Hamas said it had agreed to release all of the Israeli hostages held in Gaza as well as the bodies of those who had died, in response to the peace proposal introduced by Trump.
But the question is whether Hamas’s response, in the end, will satisfy Israel and the White House. The statement, for example, did not address key elements of the American proposal that called on the group to give up its arms, which has been a major demand of Israel.
“This is a big day,” the President said in a celebratory video from the Oval Office. “We’ll see how it all turns out. We have to get the final word down in concrete.”
Even if the plan moves forward, the challenges of carrying it out would remain substantial. Some cracks have emerged in the support of the coalition of Arab and Muslim nations that have signed on. Netanyahu watered down some elements of the proposal in a way that leaves him with considerable flexibility to continue managing the conflict on his terms.
Efforts to bring lasting peace to West Asia tend to end in frustration, if not outright failure. But in bringing several of the parties together, the push by Trump and his advisers at a minimum showed promise and built on his first administration’s success in negotiating the Abraham Accords, the agreement that normalised relations between Israel and a number of Arab nations.
There is at least some optimism that what happened over the 20 days that followed the Israeli strike on Qatar — secret, high-stakes diplomacy among nations that long ago had lost trust in each other’s motives but who ultimately agreed on a path to end the war — could prove to have an enduring effect after two years of devastation begun by Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
It was a process that brought Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, back into his old role as West Asia negotiator. It forced Netanyahu into a humbling apology. And it left Hamas with what could be a final opportunity to head off an open-ended Israeli offensive.
“Whether or not the peace deal proves effective, the act of unifying Arab and Muslim nations around a plan also backed by Israel was perhaps the Trump administration’s most successful act of diplomacy,” said Ned Lazarus, a professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
Kushner had been the West Asia envoy during Trump’s first term, and in the years since he has forged close business relationships with the leaders of numerous Persian Gulf monarchies. In recent months, he had been working with Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, on a postwar plan for Gaza, which they presented to the White House in August.
New York Times News Service