Trump’s Gaza deal may not go down well with everyone – but for now, it’s a beacon of optimism

When the peace deal came, it came quickly.

Rumours had been spreading over the course of the day, anticipation grew. A source told me that a deal would be done by Friday, another said perhaps by Thursday evening.

Israel and Hamas agree to peace deal – live updates

They were both wrong. Instead, it came much sooner, announced by Donald Trump on his own social media channel. Without being anywhere near the talks in Egypt, the president was the dominant figure.

Few will argue that he deserves the credit for driving this agreement. We can probably see the origins of all this in Israel’s decision to try to kill the Hamas leadership in Doha.

The attack failed, and the White House was annoyed.

Arab states started to express themselves to Trump more successfully, arguing that it was time for him to rein in Benjamin Netanyahu and bring an end to the war.

They repeated the call at a meeting during the UN General Assembly, which seems to have landed. When the president later met Netanyahu, the 20-point plan was born, which led to this fresh peace agreement.

Does it cover everything? Absolutely not. We don’t know who will run Gaza in the future, for a start, which is a pretty yawning hole when you consider that Gaza’s fresh start is imminent.

We don’t know what will happen to Hamas, or to its weapons, or really how Israel will withdraw from the Strip.

But these talks have always been fuelled by optimism, and by the sense that if you could stop the fighting and get the hostages home, then everything else might just fall into place.

In order to agree to this, Hamas must surely have been given strong assurances that, even at some level, its demands for Palestinian self-determination would bear fruit. Otherwise, why would the group have given up their one trump card – the 48 hostages?

Once they have gone, Hamas has no leverage at all. It has precious few friends among the countries sitting around the negotiating table, and it is a massively depleted fighting force.

So to give up that power, I can only assume that Khalil al-Hayya, the de facto Hamas leader, got a cast-iron guarantee of… something.

Arab states will greet this agreement with joy. Some of that is to do with empathy for the Palestinians in Gaza, where 67,000 people have been killed and more than 10% of the population has become a casualty of war.

But they will also welcome a path to stability, where there is less fear of spillover from the Gaza conflict and more confidence about the region’s economic and political unity.

Trump’s worldview – that everything comes down to business and deal-making – is welcomed by some of these leaders as a smart way of seeing diplomacy.

Jared Kushner has plenty of friends among these nations, and his input was important.

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For many Israelis, this comes down to a few crucial things. Firstly, the hostages are coming home. It is hard to overstate just how embedded that cause is to Israeli society.

The return of all 48, living and dead, will be a truly profound moment for this nation.

Secondly, their soldiers will no longer be fighting a war that, even within the higher echelons of the military, is believed to be drifting and purposeless.

Thirdly, there is growing empathy for the plight of the Gazans, which is tied to a fourth point – a realisation that Israel’s reputation on the world stage has been desperately tarnished.

Some will object to this deal and say that it is too weak; that it lets Hamas off the hook and fails to punish them for the atrocities of October 7.

It is an accusation that will be levelled by far-right members of Netanyahu’s coalition government. It could even collapse the administration.

But for most people, in Israel, Gaza, across the Middle East and around the world, it is a moment of relief. Last week, I was in Gaza, and the destruction was absolutely devastating to witness.

Whatever the compromises, the idea that the war has stopped is, for the moment at least, a beacon of optimism.