By Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS
The terrorists' brazen post-ceasefire crackdown on rivals and dissidents mocks Trump’s promise to disarm them and shows they believe that they’re not going anywhere.
Returning to Washington after his triumphant visit to Jerusalem to address the Knesset and to help welcome home the remaining hostages he helped free from Hamas in Gaza, President Donald Trump said something important. Asked about the 20-point deal between Israel and Hamas that he brokered to end the post-Oct. 7 war in Gaza; Trump made it clear that he wasn’t going to let the terrorists get away with reneging on the next steps to implement the accord.
Speaking at the White House on Tuesday, Trump stated that his “people” were told by Hamas that they would disarm, as is called for in the Israel-Hamas peace plan he put together with mediation from key Arab leaders.
‘We will disarm them’
“I spoke to Hamas, and I said, ‘You’re going to disarm, right?’ ‘Yes, sir. We’re going to disarm.’ That’s what they told me,” Trump told reporters, initially describing it as a direct conversation. “We have told them we want them to disarm, and they will disarm. And if they don’t disarm, we will disarm them, and it’ll happen quickly and perhaps violently, but they will disarm,” Trump said.
He returned to the same theme two days later, when, after it appeared that the terrorists ignored the first threat by posting the following on Truth Social: “If Hamas continues to kill people in Gaza, which was not the deal, we will have no choice but to go in and kill them. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
That’s exactly what supporters of Israel, plus those who have been worrying about what will follow the liberation of the hostages, wanted to hear. That was especially needed after it was reported that Trump administration officials were downplaying Hamas activity in Gaza these past few days as not violating the deal.
Trump deserves enormous credit for pushing through a deal that freed all 20 of the living hostages who were kidnapped during the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab assault on Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023. As part of the deal, the Jewish state was forced to release 2,000 Palestinian security prisoners, including many with blood on their hands, serving life sentences for murdering Israeli citizens. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also agreed to halt the efforts to eradicate Hamas in its last remaining strongholds and pull back the Israel Defense Forces to a line inside Gaza.
But the essential provisions of the deal, outside of freeing the hostages, were that Hamas would disarm and relinquish power in Gaza. Only if that were accomplished could the threat of a revived Hamas-run Palestinian terror state in Gaza be removed, and along with it, the guarantee that the Islamists could not make good on their promises to repeat the atrocities of Oct. 7 over and over again.
But the genius of the plan is also its weakness.
Special envoy to the Mideast Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a senior advisor in the first Trump administration, are being lauded far and wide as having carried out a diplomatic coup. As respected historian Niall Ferguson wrote in The Free Press, they chose not to follow the playbook that experienced diplomats and members of the foreign-policy establishment have used in the course of their nearly always unsuccessful efforts to make peace in the Middle East. Instead, they treated the situation as they would a real estate transaction. This was the same pattern Kushner used when pulling off the signature foreign-policy accomplishment of Trump’s first term: The 2020 Abraham Accords, in which four Arab and Muslim countries normalized relations with Israel and went on to build diplomatic, economic, technological and tourism ties.
They didn’t say ‘yes’ to surrender
Yet their most recent success also hinged on their willingness to liberally interpret Hamas’s response to Trump’s terms for ending the Gaza war.
In a crucial White House meeting with Netanyahu, Trump insisted on the Israelis agreeing to all 20 points. That included both the ones that were clearly in line with the Jewish state’s war goals on the hostages and the surrender of Hamas, as well as the ones about which they were skeptical. The Netanyahu government took a dim view of the points about mythical non-political Palestinian technocrats running postwar Gaza. They are equally leery about the creation of an international body that would supervise the reform of the corrupt Palestinian Authority, in addition to the Strip’s rebuilding and a peaceful transition to what might eventually become a path to statehood.
But at Trump’s insistence—and with him bluntly telling them their international isolation was a problem they needed to address—Netanyahu gave an enthusiastic “yes” to all of it.
But despite what Trump is saying, that wasn’t Hamas’s response. Their answer to his demands was “yes, but … ,” not a blanket agreement.
They agreed to release all of the living hostages right away. But they said that the terms of their disarmament and surrender of power would have to be subject to later negotiations.
That gave away what most observers thought was their only leverage to stay in place. But they appear to have come to the conclusion that holding onto the hostages was an impediment to their survival rather than a guarantee of it. By essentially satisfying the most urgent and emotional of the American and Israeli demands, they have put themselves in a much stronger diplomatic position. Equally important, the ceasefire and the partial Israeli withdrawal give them a lifeline to rearm and retake control of those parts of the enclave that are no longer in the hands of the IDF.
Ferguson and others have lauded Witkoff and Kushner for hearing only the “yes” and not the “but” that followed it. Reportedly, this took the Islamists by surprise. But without the U.S. decision to treat that ambivalent reply as good enough to sell as both sides agreeing to the deal as a whole, the hostages would not have been freed, and the shooting would have continued.
Mass killings in Gaza
Yet now that the hostages are back home and the posters with their faces (so often torn down or vandalized by pro-Hamas thugs) are being taken down, the American peacemakers must confront the fact that Hamas has no intention of being disarmed, let alone giving up Gaza to some sort of theoretical technocratic and international government.
As even The New York Times reported this week, events on the ground in Gaza are showing that Hamas is deadly serious about asserting that it is “the dominant force” in the Strip.
To do that, they are carrying out brutal mass killings of members of clans that oppose Hamas rule and other dissidents. They are doing it via public executions that have been captured on video.
This was condemned by the Palestinian Authority, which understands that this is nothing more than a repeat of what happened 18 years ago when Hamas seized control in a bloody coup during which they ousted from Gaza members of the Fatah Party that autonomously rules Arabs in Judea and Samaria.
Yet so-called human-rights groups, and those leftists and Islamists who demonstrated against Israel over the past two years while falsely labeling its efforts to defeat Hamas as “genocide,” are predictably and conspicuously silent about what is now happening. Just like the claims of false “genocide” and famine have evaporated now that Israel agreed to end the war, so, too, has the concern of the international community about the human rights of Palestinians. As more objective observers have long noted, the only time the world takes note of the condition of Palestinians is if Israelis can be blamed, whether fairly or not, for their misfortunes.
Their hypocrisy is a given. So, too, is the moral equivalence with which American liberals treat the right of Israelis to live in peace and security, along with the positions of Arabs and Muslims who think that they have the right to do whatever is necessary to ensure the elimination of the one Jewish state on the planet and the genocide of its people.
Israel’s willingness to agree to one-sided ransom deals to save its citizens and cede territory while giving Hamas a respite in the war will earn it no credit from its foreign critics, who think its very existence is a crime. Contrary to the hopes and expectations of some in Israel and the Jewish world, those spreading antisemitic propaganda about Israel aren’t observing any ceasefire in their war on it.
Hamas’s real answer
All this remains secondary to the basic conundrum now facing Trump. His threats about “quickly” and “violently” disarming Hamas are exactly what needed to be said, though it must be pointed out that it’s obvious that any disarming of Hamas—no matter how expeditious or violent—would almost certainly be carried out by Israeli troops, not Americans.
With its current behavior—making no secret of its reasserting control over every inch of Gaza evacuated by Israel—Hamas is sending a loud message back to Trump. And it clearly says that they neither care about nor believe his threats.
Hamas’s leadership has come to the not-unreasonable conclusion that Trump is too invested in the illusion of peace and that Israel doesn’t want to resume the fighting.
Those who care about Israel or the well-being of Palestinians must hope that they’re wrong about him. Trump doesn’t like to be double-crossed over anything, let alone having the hard-won laurels of a peacemaker that he so treasures ripped away from him by a bunch of barbarous terrorists. And Netanyahu has shown with his enforcement of the terms of the ceasefire with Hezbollah in Lebanon that he isn’t willing to go along with turning a blind eye to Palestinian non-compliance with the terms of Trump’s plan.
Yet it’s hard to imagine any of those countries that took part in the peace conference about the future of Gaza, convened earlier this week by the Americans in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, approving a resumed Israeli military offensive in Gaza simply because Hamas was not obeying the terms of an agreement to which they never actually agreed.
Hamas is not popular among those European and Middle Eastern governments that chose to confer about Gaza’s future. Still, these are the same nations that have largely appeased the terrorists or, in the case of Turkey, openly aid them.
The terrorist group wants there to be no confusion about the insistence that it’s not going anywhere, and it is prepared to shed as much Palestinian blood as needed to back that up.
Hamas intends to rule Gaza and rebuild it as a terrorist fortress from which it can resume a genocidal war on Israel and the Jews. Nothing other than Trump’s insistence on Hamas complying with his 20-point plan—and giving Israel the green light to ensure that they do—stands between them and a return to the reality of Oct. 6, 2023. A ceasefire existed then, and Hamas ruled an independent Palestinian terror state in all but name. If that is to be avoided, it will require more than empty threats from the president.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
