Trump and Netanyahu are selling a Gaza peace plan that does not exist outside of a press release.
President Trump announced Thursday that Hamas has agreed to disarm and Israel will withdraw its forces under a phased arrangement. Yesterday he announced the same framework as a done deal. Today both sides are still disputing what they agreed to.
Hamas says it consented only to give up heavy weapons, not assault rifles, not a full disarmament, and certainly not Israeli hands on its guns. Israel’s national security minister rejected the draft publicly. An Israeli official said the government demands genuine demilitarization before it pulls troops back. The core argument that has deadlocked these talks since the start — Hamas wants withdrawal before giving up weapons, Israel wants the weapons before it gives up the land — remains exactly where it was the day the truce was signed.
The machinery to make any of this real does not exist. The new Palestinian police force that would be the one collecting those guns is still in the earliest stages of taking shape. Thousands of applicants are being run through paperwork, but none have been hired, let alone trained to do the job. The International Stabilization Force the administration originally sold as 20,000 troops across Gaza has an initial complement of 10 to 20 people, and not one of them has crossed into the territory yet. A U.S. military official told reporters it might be months before even limited operations can begin.
A president does not get to announce a thing and make it so. Somewhere in this town, I have had customers bring me a truck that will not start and tell me the salesman promised it runs like new. The paperwork said one thing, the engine said another, and the man who signed the contract is not the one left holding the bill. That is what is happening to two million people right now. Trump filled out the sales ticket. The people of Gaza are the ones who have to drive the truck.
I have been watching these announcements for nine months. Since the ceasefire took effect, Israel has expanded its control to nearly 70 percent of Gaza’s land. More than a thousand people have been killed by Israeli attacks since the truce. About 80 percent of the 2.1 million residents are displaced, and roughly half of them are living in aid-dependent encampments. A mother of four in Gaza City, Dina Hamada, told reporters what that looks like from the inside. “Every time we allowed ourselves to hope, reality ended up crushing us.” That is the receipt. The administration has its press release. She has her children.
Trump is under mounting pressure because of the war his country is fighting with Iran, which has roiled global energy markets and opened new fronts in Lebanon and Yemen. He needs something that looks like a win before the next news cycle eats it, and a ceasefire announcement that dissolves under inspection by Friday afternoon still gives him that. Netanyahu faces elections later this year and cannot afford to lose the right-wing coalition partners who have already rejected this deal. Hamas, hammered by years of assault and watching its popular support drain away, is trying to keep itself in the conversation by appearing to negotiate while surrendering nothing material on the ground. Every one of them is running a version of events that does not match what is actually happening, and every one of them has been doing it long enough that they cannot in good conscience claim surprise.
What a real plan would require is plain, and it has been plain for months. Verified disarmament needs a trained, trusted Palestinian police force on the ground, not a pile of vetting files with not a single officer ready to work. A stabilization force needs a functioning chain of command, not a handful of troops sitting outside the border waiting for permission that has not come. A withdrawal needs sequenced security guarantees that both sides have actually accepted, not the same argument about who moves first that has been going in circles since the first phase of the truce. The people who could have built these things have chosen not to. The cost of that choice is being paid by people who had no part in making it.
Eisenhower, in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, warned that an alert and knowledgeable citizenry is the only thing that can hold the weight of a government that grows faster than the people can see it. Sixty-five years later, we are being handed a peace plan whose chief virtue is that it fits on a camera backdrop, while the people living under it count their dead and wait for a police force that has not been hired. A deal that is contradicted by every party at the table, backed by a force that has not deployed, and enforced by a police contingent that has not been trained is not a deal. It is a press release with a body count attached. The distance between what was announced and what is real is the space where people continue to die.