Israeli tanks and heavy combat vehicles were filmed in Gaza on Friday, reportedly withdrawing from parts of the enclave as phase one of the ceasefire plan is set to take effect.
Published On 10 Oct 202510 Oct 2025
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Sami Al-Arian on the Gaza ceasefire deal and the key conditions required for it to hold.
Sami Al-Arian, a professor at Istanbul Zaim University, talks about the Gaza ceasefire deal and the key conditions required for it to hold.
Published On 10 Oct 202510 Oct 2025
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Congratulations are in order for President Trump. He said he would bring home Israel’s hostages and end the horrific fighting in Gaza, and that appears to be exactly what he is doing with this week’s deal. While many of the ideas that went into Trump’s 20-point peace plan predated his reelection, he and his team deserve a standing ovation for translating those ideas into a practical proposal, defining a first phase that was both big and digestible and putting together all the pieces that made its agreement possible.
Success, however, does have its downsides. Remember the Pottery Barn rule of foreign policy, made famous during the Iraq war? “You break it, you own it.” We now have the Trump corollary: “You patch it, you own it.”
Despite coming to office eager to shed America’s Middle East commitments, Trump just took on a huge one: responsibility for a peace plan that will forever bear his name. On Oct. 6, 2023, the day before Hamas’ assault, Arab-Israeli relations were poised for the historic breakthrough of Saudi-Israel normalization; two years later, Arab-Israeli relations — including Trump’s first-term Middle East peacemaking achievement of the Abraham Accords — are hanging on by a thread. By offering a plan that promises not just an end to fighting in Gaza but building a full and enduring regional peace, the president has taken on the task of repairing the damage wrought by Hamas’ unholy war. In other words: fixing the Middle East.
How Trump fulfills this not inconsequential responsibility has major consequences for America’s role in the region and in the world. The Chinese are watching whether, when the going gets rough, he will have the mettle to maintain a broad alliance. The Russians are watching whether the president will strictly enforce the letter of the deal or let certain unpleasant aspects slip. The Iranians will be watching whether Trump will find himself so drowning in the details of Gaza reconstruction that he won’t be able to stitch together a repeat of the highly successful Arab-Israeli coalition that protected Israel a year ago from Iran’s barrages of ballistic missiles and drones. And all these adversaries — and others — will wonder whether the intense U.S. focus needed to ensure implementation of this deal will distract the president from their own areas of mischief.
Those are some of the international stakes. There’s a difficult road ahead in achieving the deal itself. Some of the most vexing challenges will include:
Getting this far was a huge achievement. Ensuring effective execution — never a strong suit for a “big idea guy” like Trump — is a thousand times more difficult. This can’t be done with a small team of White House officials chatting on Signal. It will require an army of — please excuse the term — experts: experts in military command and control, experts in ordnance removal and disposal, experts in civilian rehabilitation and reconstruction, experts in communication and community engagement. Corporate subcontracting can address some of this, as can the impressive talents of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, but don’t be fooled into thinking that a consulting company or a former foreign official can pick up the slack of the entire U.S. government. This plan, after all, has Trump’s name on it, not Deloitte’s or Blair’s.
The president has at least one more vital task in this matter. He must explain to the American people why we are doing this. For nearly 20 years, American presidents of both parties have said they wanted to pivot away from the Middle East, but they continually find themselves entangled in the region’s often byzantine conflicts and politics. Americans deserve to know why the “America First” president has decided that American interests are intimately bound up in the success of this peace plan. Our domestic divisions notwithstanding, fair-minded people on both sides of the aisle will be rooting for Trump’s success in this peace deal.
For now, sure, the president should enjoy the accolades and celebrate the coming release of Hamas’ hostages. The morning after will come soon enough.
Robert Satloff is executive director of the Washington Institute.
Israel’s government has approved the plan ‘for the release of all captives’, fighting in Gaza to stop within 24 hours.
Published On 10 Oct 202510 Oct 2025
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US President Donald Trump said on Thursday that Iran is seeking to work on a broader Middle East peace deal after lending its support to his plan to bring a ceasefire to the Gaza Strip, Anadolu reports.
“Iran wants to work on peace now. They’ve informed us, and they’ve acknowledged that they are totally in favor of this deal. They think it’s a great thing, so we appreciate that, and we’ll work with Iran,” Trump said as he prepares to head to the Middle East this weekend.
“As you know, we have major sanctions on Iran and lots of other things. We would like to see them be able to rebuild their country too, but they can’t have a nuclear weapon,” he added.
Trump was alluding to strikes he authorized on Iran’s nuclear program in June, which he and his senior officials have maintained completely destroyed any Iranian nuclear capability.
The US president said during a Fox News interview Wednesday evening that Tehran was “about one month, maybe two months, away from having a nuclear weapon” when he launched the attacks during the 12-day war between Iran and Israel.
Trump earlier announced that Israel and Hamas agreed to the first phase of a 20-point plan he laid out Sept. 29 to bring a ceasefire to Gaza, release all Israeli captives being held there in exchange for around 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, and a gradual withdrawal of the Israeli forces from the entire Gaza Strip.
A second phase of the plan calls for the establishment of a new governing mechanism in Gaza without Hamas’ participation, the formation of a security force comprising Palestinians and troops from Arab and Islamic countries, and the disarmament of Hamas. It also stipulates Arab and Islamic funding for the new administration and the reconstruction of the Strip, with limited participation from the Palestinian Authority.
Arab and Muslim counties have largely welcomed the plan, but some officials have also said that many details in it need discussion and negotiations to be fully implemented.
US President Donald Trump pressed Israel’s prime minister to agree to a ceasefire deal.
A ceasefire agreement for Gaza – and cautious hope among Palestinians for an end to two years of genocide.
US President Donald Trump announced the deal after putting pressure on Israel to agree.
What impact has the war had on Israeli-United States relations?
Presenter: Nick Clark
Guests:
Yossi Mekelberg – Senior consulting fellow at Chatham House
Rami Khouri – Distinguished fellow at the American University of Beirut
Tahani Mustafa – Visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations
Published On 9 Oct 20259 Oct 2025
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WASHINGTON — At a moment when hope for peace seemed lost, senior U.S. officials, led by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in 2012 that would be touted for years as a historic diplomatic achievement. She would later campaign on her strategic prowess for the presidency against Donald Trump.
In 2014, a similar ceasefire was brokered between the two parties during yet another war by Clinton’s successor, John Kerry, also seen at the time as a diplomatic coup. But in the first 72 hours of that ceasefire, without clarity on the precise lines of an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas operatives ambushed an Israeli Defense Forces patrol decommissioning a tunnel, throwing peace in doubt. The remains of the Israeli soldier caught in that raid have been held by Hamas ever since.
History shows that Trump’s achievement this week, brokering a new truce between Israel and Hamas after their most devastating war yet, is filled with opportunity and peril for the president.
A lasting ceasefire could cement him a legacy as a peacemaker, long sought by Trump, who has harnessed President Nixon’s madman theory of diplomacy to coerce several other warring parties into ceasefires and settlements. But the record of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shows that consistent interest and engagement by the president may be necessary to ensure any peace can hold.
Hamas and Israel agreed on Wednesday to implement the first phase of Trump’s proposed 20-point peace plan, exchanging all remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas since its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel in exchange for 1,700 detainees from Gaza, as well as 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences in Israel.
Only the first phase has been agreed to thus far.
Guns are expected to fall silent Friday, followed by a partial withdrawal of Israeli forces that would initially leave roughly half of the Gaza Strip — along its periphery bordering Israel — within Israeli military control. A 72-hour clock would then begin after the partial withdrawal is complete, counting down to the hostage release.
Achieving this alone is a significant victory for Trump, who leveraged deep ties with Arab partners built over his first administration and political clout among the Israeli right and with its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to bring the deal to a close.
The president’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, had been working toward a ceasefire for months, starting back during the presidential transition period nearly one year ago. He found little success on his own.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio writes a note before handing it to President Trump during a White House meeting Wednesday.
(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)
It was Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law who designed the Abraham Accords in Trump’s first term and maintains close ties with Netanyahu and Arab governments, took an unofficial yet active role in a recent diplomatic push that helped secure an agreement, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter.
“None of this would have happened without Jared,” the source said.
Speaking with reporters from the White House, Trump took a victory lap over the truce, claiming not only credit for a hostage and ceasefire deal but the historic achievement of a broader Middle East peace.
“We ended the war in Gaza and really, on a much bigger basis, created peace. And I think it’s going to be a lasting peace — hopefully an everlasting peace. Peace in the Middle East,” Trump said.
“We secured the release of all of the remaining hostages,” he added. “And they should be released on Monday or Tuesday — getting them is a complicated process. I’d rather not tell you what they have to do to get them. They’re in places you don’t want to be.”
An opening emerged for a diplomatic breakthrough after Israel conducted an extraordinary strike on a Hamas target in Doha, shaking the confidence of the Qatari government, a key U.S. ally. While Doha has hosted Hamas’ political leadership for years, Qatar’s leadership thought their relationship with Washington would protect them from Israeli violations of its territory.
Trump sought a deal with Qatar, a U.S. official said, that would assure them with security guarantees in exchange for delivering Hamas leadership on a hostage deal. Separately, Egypt — which has intelligence and sourcing capabilities in Gaza seen by the U.S. government as second only to Israel’s — agreed to apply similar pressure, the official said.
“There’s an argument here, that presumably the Qataris are making to Hamas — which is that they lost, this round anyway, and that it’s going to take them a very long time to rebuild. But the war must come to an end for the rebuilding to start,” said Elliott Abrams, a veteran diplomat from the Reagan, George W. Bush and first Trump administrations.
“On Friday, the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced, and he won’t get it,” Abrams said, adding that, if the deal falls through, “I think the Israelis are going to be saying to him, ‘This is a game. They didn’t really accept your plan.’”
“I don’t think, in the end, he’ll blame the Israelis for ruining the deal,” Abrams continued. “I think he’ll blame Hamas.”
Israel and Hamas may have agreed to the first phase of a United States-backed ceasefire deal, but contentious differences between the two sides still remain, particularly when it comes to the fate of the Palestinian group’s weapons.
Israel has long insisted that Hamas surrender all of its weapons if its two-year war on Gaza is to end, as well as demanding that the group relinquish governance of the Palestinian enclave and dissolve itself as an organisation.
list of 3 itemsend of list
For its part, Hamas has publicly rejected calls to give up its weapons, but experts say that the group has expressed openness in private to hand over some of its arsenal.
“When it comes to disarmament, this is where you have seen the biggest shift in Hamas’s position,” said Hugh Lovatt, an expert on Israel-Palestine with the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).
“[Hamas officials] have said in private to interlocutors that the group may be open to a decommissioning process of Hamas’s offensive weapons,” he told Al Jazeera.
Negotiations over Hamas’s arsenal could torpedo the ceasefire and prompt Israel to resume its genocidal war on the destitute and beleaguered Palestinian population in Gaza, analysts said.
An armed group has the right to bear arms and resist an occupying power in line with international humanitarian law – the main framework referenced to protect civilians in times of war.
Yet, Israel and its Western allies have historically demanded that Palestinian factions give up armed resistance as a precondition to launching a peace process ostensibly aimed at ending Israel’s occupation over Palestinian territories.
This was the framework underpinning the Oslo Peace Accords in the 1990s, signed by then Palestinian and Israeli leaders.
Israel is likely to try and make similar demands this time around, but Hamas is unlikely to completely disarm, according to Azmi Keshawi, a Palestinian from Gaza and a researcher with the International Crisis Group (ICG).
He said that he could only envision Hamas surrendering some “offensive weapons” such as short-range and long-range missles.
However, he believes Hamas will never give up its small arms and light weapons, nor hand over a map of its sophisticated tunnel network, which it spent decades building to resist Israel.
“[Hamas] will only give up [light] weapons when there is no need for these weapons. This means they will only hand them over to a Palestinian leadership that assumes control of a state after Israel ends its occupation,” Keshawi told Al Jazeera.
Hamas was the largest of several armed groups in Gaza before Israel began its war on October 7, 2023, after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel.
Some of these groups include Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
These groups have long been committed to waging armed resistance against Israel, and it is unclear to what degree they have been degraded by Israel’s relentless carpet bombing over the last two years.
During Israel’s genocide – recognised as such by scholars, the United Nations and human rights groups – Israel has also propped up notorious gangs to steal and profiteer off the little aid it has allowed into the Gaza Strip.
Many Palestinians in Gaza believe Hamas should preserve some military capabilities to stop these gangs from exploiting a possible power vacuum, Taghreed Khodary, an analyst on Israel-Palestine who is from Gaza, told Al Jazeera.
“Israel created gangs and gave them weapons and guns to kill their own people [in Gaza]. Now Israel wants to expel Hamas, but Hamas is needed to maintain internal security,” she said.
“Hamas is very good at providing security,” she stressed.
Lovatt, from ECFR, added that Hamas may be willing to cooperate with an interim task force deployed to provide security and oversee a partial decommissioning of its weapons.
However, he said that Hamas would only agree to coordinating with such a force if its mandate clearly stipulates that it will not counter “terrorism” in any way.
“I’m sure there is very little appetite in Western capitals to play that ‘counterterrorism’ role, and it certainly wouldn’t be acceptable to Hamas. It would expose the international task force as explicitly serving Israel’s goals,” Lovatt told Al Jazeera.
Throughout Israel’s genocide, Israel has claimed that its war aim is to ostensibly dismantle Hamas. But Keshawi, the ICG researcher, said Hamas will never be fully defeated.
He predicts the group will absorb thousands of destitute and vengeful young men into its ranks in the coming years. To many people, he said, Hamas is not merely an organisation, but an “idea” that symbolises resistance.
“The [group] has set an example for the whole Arab world. They fought a war that nobody thought they could fight, even though the cost was very high,” Keshawi told Al Jazeera.
Still, Lovatt said the group remains pragmatic and is willing to make concessions to extend the ceasefire for as long as possible.
He noted that the sustainability of the ceasefire ultimately hinges on US President Donald Trump and other Western leaders reining in Israel and its maximalist demands.
“There is a very high risk that Israel is able to win the argument in Western capitals … that Hamas must be fully demilitarised [before the occupation ends],” he said.
“If that happens, then it will be a new pretext for Western states to let Israel off the hook as happened under the Oslo Accords,” Lovatt told Al Jazeera.
On November 7, 2023, children stood before cameras at al-Shifa Hospital and spoke in English, not their mother tongue, but in the language of those they thought might save them. “We want to live, we want peace, we want to judge the killers of children,” one boy said. “We want medicine, food and education. We want to live as other children live.” Even then, barely a month into the genocide, they had no clean drinking water, no food and no medicine. They begged in the colonisers’ language because they thought it might make their humanity legible.
I wonder how many of those children are dead now, how many never made it to this moment of “peace”, and whether they died still believing the world might answer their call.
Now, almost two years later, US President Donald Trump posts that he is “very proud” of the signing of the first phase of his “peace plan”. French President Emmanuel Macron praises and commends Trump’s initiative, while Israeli leader Yair Lapid calls on the Nobel Committee to award Trump a peace prize. Leaders have lined up to claim credit for ending a genocide they spent two years, and the previous 77, funding, arming and enabling.
But Gaza never needed saving. Gaza needed the world to stop killing it. Gaza needed the world to simply let its people live on their land, free of occupation, apartheid and genocide. Gaza’s people merely needed the objective, legal and moral standard generously afforded to those who murdered them. Gaza’s genocide exposed a world that preaches justice yet funds oppression, and a people who turned survival itself into defiance.
All that to say, glory to the Palestinian people, to their steadfastness and to their collective power. Palestinians refused to submit to a narrative imposed upon them, that they were beggars seeking aid, “terrorists” who needed to pay, or anything less than a people whose dignity deserved to be upheld without reservation or degradation.
Gaza did not fail. We did. Gaza resisted when the world expected it to break. Gaza stood alone when it should never have had to stand alone. Gaza endured despite international abandonment, despite governments that funded its destruction and now celebrate themselves as peacemakers.
As a man of faith, I am reminded of this:
“When they are told, ‘Do not spread corruption in the land,’ they reply, ‘We are only peacemakers!’” (Quran 2:11)
Nothing says peace like two years of starvation, bombardment and mass graves, when, instead of delivering food, they delivered shrouds.
And while Gaza bled, the powerful perfected the art of denial. And when I see the people of Gaza celebrating in the streets, I know that this celebration belongs to them alone, not to Donald Trump, who has announced he will visit the region to take credit for what he calls a “historic occasion”, and not to Western leaders who profited from Gaza’s devastation while pretending neutrality. The people rushing to cameras to claim credit are the same ones who made the genocide possible, who funded it with billions in military aid, armed it with precision-guided missiles and provided diplomatic cover at the United Nations while repeatedly vetoing UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions. The United States approved an additional $14.3bn in military aid during the genocide, bypassing congressional oversight multiple times to rush Apache helicopter missiles, 155mm artillery shells, night-vision equipment and bunker-busting bombs that landed on the heads of families as they slept.
Those of us sitting in the comfort of the West should feel shame. Americans like to imagine themselves on the right side of history. We tell ourselves that had we lived during Jim Crow or the Holocaust, we would have done anything to stop it. But we have 340 million people in America, and we could not stop our tax dollars from funding extermination. We could not even deliver baby formula, as we watched babies’ bodies waste away. Many sat in complicity, made excuses for the inexcusable, blamed Palestinians for their own deaths, and turned away from the horror because acknowledging it would have meant confronting our own government’s role in funding it. Our failure did not eclipse Palestinian agency; it made it more visible.
The only pressure that mattered came from the people Israel could not silence, Palestinians who livestreamed their own deaths so the world could not claim ignorance or accept Israel’s falsehoods as truth. Gaza survived because of its own resistance, a resistance to which its people are entitled. The ceasefire came because Palestinian steadfastness broke something the bombs could not touch, because the facade of Israeli victimhood crumbled under the weight of livestreamed atrocity, and because global public opinion turned against Israel despite every effort to manufacture consent for genocide. What it accomplished is written in civilian death rolls, not in security. That is what forced this ceasefire.
Palestine’s most celebrated poet, Mahmoud Darwish, knew how this would go: “The war will end. The leaders will shake hands. The old woman will keep waiting for her martyred son. That girl will wait for her beloved husband. And those children will wait for their heroic father. I don’t know who sold our homeland. But I saw who paid the price.” Now they broker peace between the killer and the killed, the butcher and the slain, and call it progress. The price was paid in Palestinian blood. And somewhere, an old woman, a new bride or an orphaned daughter is still waiting for their loved ones to come home.
There must be full accountability, not just for Israel but for every government and corporation that made this genocide possible. There must be a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel immediately, economic sanctions until there is complete withdrawal from occupied territory, freedom for the more than 10,000 Palestinian hostages, and reparations for reconstruction determined and distributed by Palestinians themselves. War criminals must be prosecuted at The Hague, regardless of which nation objects. This is just the start. Justice is not a diplomatic option; it is the minimum measure of our shared humanity.
The “peace” Trump’s plan promises died with every child in Gaza, every displaced family, and every day the world called genocide “self-defence”, ignoring the International Court of Justice’s 2004 ruling that an occupier cannot claim self-defence against the occupied.
The only just future is complete liberation — one democratic state with equal rights for all, beginning with Gaza’s right to determine its own fate without siege, without occupation and without foreign control disguised as peacekeeping. But first, the people of Gaza have earned the right to mourn, to count their dead and bury them properly, and above all, to feel this small moment of joy. Palestinians have earned, through unimaginable suffering, the right to define what freedom looks like. The rest of the world has no standing to tell them otherwise.
For those of us in the West, we must make sure that the world does not return to normal. We cannot be lulled back to sleep by the temporary cessation of air strikes while the occupation continues. Israel cannot continue as if it did not commit the gravest crime of our generation. The hundreds of thousands of martyred and maimed Palestinians demand justice that cannot be denied.
We cannot rest until the entire system of occupation and apartheid is dismantled and replaced with liberation. This is only the beginning. Free Palestine, from the river to the sea.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
US President Donald Trump says the Hamas-held captives in Gaza will be released “Monday or Tuesday” as part of his ceasefire plan creating “peace in the Middle East”. He added it is time for the war to end after Israel’s “big retribution” to Hamas’s October 7th attack.
Published On 9 Oct 20259 Oct 2025
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“He’s much more popular today than we he was five days ago.” US President Donald Trump said Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu “should be very popular right now” because of the US-backed ceasefire, but if he is voted out of office, “that’s politics”.
Published On 9 Oct 20259 Oct 2025
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French President Emmanuel Macron urged full support for the US plan to end the Gaza war, calling for a permanent ceasefire, release of all captives, and humanitarian access. Macron, however, blasted expanding West Bank settlements, which he said threaten Palestinian statehood and regional peace.
Published On 9 Oct 20259 Oct 2025
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A government spokesperson has laid out how Israel will implement the first phase of US President Donald Trump’s peace plan in Gaza, saying it will start after today’s Israeli government cabinet meeting.
Published On 9 Oct 20259 Oct 2025
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Turkiye’s President Erdogan says Ankara will join a ground task force to monitor the Gaza ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, as part of a US-brokered deal under President Trump. He added Turkiye will also help rebuild Gaza under the new truce.
Published On 9 Oct 20259 Oct 2025
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TEL AVIV — After two years of devastating war that killed tens of thousands, left millions displaced and pulverized much of Gaza into an apocalyptic moonscape, Israel and Hamas have agreed to the first phase of a deal involving an exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian detainees.
Though Israel had still not formally ratified the pact, it was expected to do so Thursday evening, and celebrations had already broken out in the country. The news was greeted with relief and joy in Gaza, where Hamas said the agreement would end the war and lead to Israel’s full withdrawal from the enclave and to the entry of desperately needed aid.
The deal caps months of torturous ceasefire negotiations and delivers a denouement to a generation-defining fight in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Posting on his social media platform Truth Social on Wednesday, President Trump announced the two sides had signed off on “the first Phase of our Peace Plan,” which would involve the hostage-detainee swap along with the Israeli military’s withdrawal from parts of Gaza — “the first steps towards a Strong, durable, and Everlasting Peace,” according to Trump.
“BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS,” he wrote.
News of the agreement triggered celebrations across Gaza, with residents exhausted by Israel’s no-holds-barred assault that had upended their lives, erased entire families and brought famine to the enclave expressing cautious hope.
“I never thought I’d see this day. We’ve been wanting it to come for months now, and then suddenly it happened so fast,” said Ali al-Azab, 34, from the central city of Deir Al-Balah in the enclave.
“We’ve been living in fear for so long, waiting for the next bomb to come, to lose another friend. But I also know the war isn’t over yet.”
Word of the ceasefire came early Thursday morning in Gaza, as Mohammad Rajab, 62, was still asleep. His son-in-law, he said, was the first to hear the good news.
“We’re like drowning people clutching at straws,” he said, adding that the ceasefire meant for him the chance “to return to a normal life.”
In Tel Aviv’s so-called Hostage Square, the area of this coastal city that has become the de-facto gathering point for Israelis’ large-scale protests to end the war and bring the hostages home, the mood Thursday was jubilant, with people dancing as they waved Israeli and American flags.
Many sported stickers on their shirts with the words “They’re returning,” in reference to the hostages, replacing stickers that had before depicted the number of days they had spent in captivity. At one point, a man blew a shofar, the traditional musical horn used in Jewish rituals, to the crowd’s applause.
Udi Goren, 44, a travel photographer whose cousin, 44-year-old Tal Haimi, was killed on Oct. 7, 2023, and taken to Gaza, said his “first instinct was a sigh of relief.”
“For the first morning in two years, we can actually have a true smile because we finally see the end: The end of the war, of fallen soldiers, of hostages being tortured and starved, of the horrific sights from Gaza.”
He credited Trump for pressuring the belligerents to get the deal done.
“There was no real intervention until what we’ve just seen with President Trump finally saying enough is enough,” he said.
The deal, which is more of a framework centered on a 20-point plan Trump released last week, would see all 48 hostages — 20 of them alive, the rest deceased — released. Hamas officials have said in recent interviews that retrieving bodies of dead hostages will take time, as many are in collapsed or bombed-out tunnels or under the rubble. Those alive could be released as early as Sunday or Monday.
Israel will release 1,700 Gaza residents detained during the war, along with 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences in Israel. For every Israeli body returned, Israel will release the bodies of 15 Gaza residents.
Hamas said on Thursday it had handed over the list of prisoners to be released to mediators, and would announce the names once they were agreed upon.
Earlier reports claimed the ceasefire had already begun, but Israeli airstrikes and artillery still continued to pound the enclave Thursday, with health authorities in the enclave saying at least 10 people were killed and dozens injured.
Footage taken by Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera depicted tanks shelling Gaza’s main coastal road to prevent Palestinians from gathering in the area. Civil defense crews warned people attempting to return to the north of the enclave from doing so they received confirmation Israeli forces had left.
In a statement to Israeli daily Times of Israel, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the ceasefire would begin Thursday evening after the government officially ratifies the agreement. The government is set to vote on the agreement at 6 p.m. local time, according to Israeli media.
The Israeli military said in a statement it had “begun operational preparations ahead of the implementation of the agreement” and would adjust deployment lines “soon.” Meanwhile, it was still “deployed in the area,” it said, and the military’s Arabic-language spokesman said in a statement that Gaza City was still surrounded by the army and that returning to it was dangerous.
The ceasefire will be accompanied by a surge of aid into the enclave, a crucial component of the agreement meant to alleviate a crushing, months-long Israeli blockade that had triggered famine in parts of the enclave, according to aid groups and experts. Aid groups and the Palestinian Health Ministry said more than 400 people had died of starvation in recent months.
Writing on X, Cindy McCain, executive director of the World Food Program, said the group was “on the ground and ready to scale up operations.”
“But we need to move NOW — there is no time to waste,” she wrote.
The war began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas militants blitzed into southern Israel, leaving 1,200 people — two thirds of them civilians, according to Israeli authorities — and kidnapping some 250 others.
In retaliation, Israel launched a furious response that has so far killed 67,183 people, encompassing more than 3% of the enclave’s population and including 20,179 children, the Palestinian Health Ministry says. Though it does not distinguish between civilians and fighters, its figures are seen as reliable.
Yet much remains unclear, including the fate of Hamas’s arsenal and what sort of presence, if at all, Israel will maintain in the enclave.
Speaking to the Qatari channel Al-Araby TV, Hamas official Osama Hamdan said Israel would pull out militarily from all populated areas in Gaza — including Khan Yunis, Rafah, and Gaza City by Friday. Another spokesman, Hazem Qassem, said in an interview with Al Jazeera on Thursday the group will not be part of Gaza’s governance in the future. but that the group’s arms were to “guarantee the independence of Palestinian decision-making.”
Other Hamas officials have said handing over weapons would only occur as part of a move towards an independent Palestinian state.
Despite Trump’s rhetoric, the agreement remains far from the comprehensive peace agreement he has promised. And its success kicks up thornier questions for Netanyahu, a deeply unpopular leader with many Israelis and whose critics accuse of prolonging the war to guarantee his political survival at the expense of hostages’ lives.
Implementing the agreement is likely to alienate his right-wing allies in the government, including extremist figures such as Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has called for Gaza to be emptied of Palestinians. He said in a statement on X that he will vote against the deal.
He added the government had “an enormous obligation to ensure that we do not return to the Oslo track,” referring to the Oslo peace process, and to becoming “addicted again to artificial calm, diplomatic embraces, and smiling ceremonies, while mortgaging the future and paying horrific prices.”
At Hostage Square, Israelis demonstrated their rage at Netanyahu and others associated with his leadership during the war. When Benny Gantz, an Israeli opposition leader who served in Netanyahu’s cabinet until last year walked through the crowd, hecklers shouted at him “to go home,” accusing him of claiming a success he had not earned.
“When the war began, Gantz joined Bibi and saved him instead of bringing down his government,” said Einat Mastbaum, a 50-year-old Hebrew teacher, employing Netanyahu’s nickname.
Yet even politicians’ presence couldn’t detract from the happiness of the crowd, according to Mastbaum, who has been coming to Hostage Square every week for the last two years.
“I’m so excited,” she said, her voice cracking as tears appeared in her eyes.
“Today I’m crying from happiness and hope, not sadness.”
Times Staff Writer Bulos reported from Tel Aviv. Special correspondent Bilal Shbeir contributed from Al-Balah, Gaza Strip.
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the United Nations is “prepared to move now” and deliver food, water, medical, and other assistance to Palestinians in Gaza amid the Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal.
Published On 9 Oct 20259 Oct 2025
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EXPLAINER
In the first phase of the ceasefire plan, Israel will remain in control of nearly 60 percent of the Gaza Strip.
In the early hours of Wednesday morning in Gaza, United States President Donald Trump announced that Hamas and Israel had agreed on the first phase of his ceasefire and captive-exchange plan.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump stated : “ALL the hostages will be released very soon, and Israel will withdraw their troops to an agreed upon line.”
The “agreed upon line” refers to a vague map shared by Trump on October 4, showing an initial Israeli withdrawal zone marked in yellow, later dubbed the “yellow line” by Trump officials.
After negotiations, Israel has agreed to the initial withdrawal line, which we have shown to, and shared with, Hamas. When Hamas confirms, the Ceasefire will be IMMEDIATELY effective, the Hostages and Prisoner Exchange will begin, and we will create the conditions for the next… pic.twitter.com/0VfaMSOqQ1
— Trump Truth Social Posts On X (@TrumpTruthOnX) October 4, 2025
By Sunday or Monday, Hamas is expected to release about 20 living captives, along with the bodies of about 25 others, while Israel will free some 2,000 Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons. Final details have yet to be confirmed.
Israel currently controls more than 80 percent of Gaza’s 365sq km (141sq miles) area, including areas under forced evacuation orders or designated by Israel as military zones.
Once the deal is signed, fighting would be expected to end immediately, and Israeli forces would withdraw to the line marked in yellow.
The final map has not yet been published following negotiations in Egypt, but based on the October 4 map, the area inside the yellow line represents approximately 155sq km (60sq miles), leaving about 210sq km (81sq miles), or 58 percent of Gaza, under Israeli control, as verified by Al Jazeera’s Sanad team.
Most notably, Israeli forces will remain in several previously populous Palestinian neighbourhoods, including:
In addition, Israel will continue to control all crossings in and out of Gaza, including the Rafah crossing with Egypt.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been displaced multiple times throughout two years of war and are desperate to return to their homes, but the continued Israeli presence in these areas makes that unlikely in the near term.
According to the 20-point plan announced by Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on September 29 – developed without any Palestinian input – Israel is to withdraw its forces in three phases, as shown on an accompanying crude map, with each phase marked in a different colour:
Even after the third withdrawal phase, Palestinians will be confined to an area which is smaller than before the war, continuing a pattern of Israel’s control over Gaza and its people.
Many questions remain about how the plan will be implemented, the exact boundaries of Palestinian territory, the timing and scope of Israeli withdrawals, the role of the International Stabilization Force, and the long-term implications for Palestinians across both Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Video shows emergency service crews celebrating the announcement of a ceasefire deal with chants and sirens. The U.S.-brokered agreement aims to end the two-year Gaza conflict, but residents reported ongoing Israeli attacks ahead of the formal start of the ceasefire.
Published On 9 Oct 20259 Oct 2025
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“There’s a lot of fingers pointing at him [Netanyahu] saying that the same deal could have been reached a long time ago.”
Executive Director of The Soufan Center, Colin Clarke, explains whether the agreed ceasefire between Israeli and Hamas in Gaza is sustainable.
Published On 9 Oct 20259 Oct 2025
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WASHINGTON — A peace plan for Gaza touted by President Trump as a historic breakthrough is facing its first test this week after Israel and Hamas agreed in principle to an initial list of terms that could end the war.
The 20-point American plan reflects an administration losing patience with Israel, while also leveraging its relationships with Arab partners to finally pressure Hamas into a deal that would release the Israeli hostages still in its custody two years since the Oct. 7 attack.
On Wednesday evening, Trump said both parties had agreed to the first phase of his plan, securing the hostage release in exchange for a limited Israeli troop withdrawal.
“I am very proud to announce that Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first Phase of our Peace Plan,” Trump wrote on social media. “This means that ALL of the Hostages will be released very soon, and Israel will withdraw their Troops to an agreed upon line as the first steps toward a Strong, Durable, and Everlasting Peace.”
The president’s push comes amid an unexpected and growing divide within the Republican base over support for Israel — once seen as a bedrock of the alliance — and as Trump presents himself as a global peacemaker, ahead of the announcement of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.
The president is expected to travel to the region over the weekend to secure the deal.
“All Parties will be treated fairly!” Trump wrote. “BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS!”
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People attend a pro-Palestinian vigil and protest on Tuesday outside Columbia University.
(Adam Gray / Getty Images)
One former senior Biden administration official who worked on the Gaza crisis told The Times that Trump’s 20-point plan “is credible,” if not fully baked, and that Trump’s position of influence over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may give the proposal “a real chance of success.”
Devastated after two years of war, Hamas had seen its continued holding of the hostages as its only remaining leverage to ensure later stages of a peace agreement are implemented by the Israelis. Trump’s plan demands an immediate release of all of the hostages, both dead and alive, in an initial phase, preceding reconstruction of the Strip that removes Hamas from power.
An opening emerged for progress in the talks after Israel conducted an extraordinary strike on a Hamas target in Doha, shaking the confidence of the Qatari government, a key U.S. ally. While Doha has hosted Hamas’ political leadership for years, Qatar’s leadership thought their relationship with Washington would protect them from Israeli violations of its territory.
“A lot of this stems from the Israeli attack on Hamas in Doha,” said Elliott Abrams, a veteran diplomat from the Reagan, George W. Bush and first Trump administrations. “The Qataris panicked, and went to Trump to ask for defense and assurance that Israel would never do that again. And I think he had a price: to deliver Hamas.”
“Can they deliver Hamas? They can deliver the guys in Doha,” Abrams continued. “They can threaten them with expulsion. They can tell them that they’re living in fancy hotels, but they can be Palestinian refugees tomorrow morning. But the relationship between those people and the leadership on the ground is very unclear.”
U.S. officials believe it is the Egyptians, more so than the Qataris, with intelligence, sourcing and leverage on the ground in the Gaza Strip that can bring Hamas’ chain of command in compliance with a settlement. But whether Egyptian leadership is willing to exert its leverage is unclear. An unusual Egyptian military buildup in the Sinai Peninsula, in violation of the Camp David Accords that have secured Israel’s peace with Egypt since 1979, is causing widespread concern in diplomatic circles over Cairo’s intentions.
Talks over Trump’s plan have moved from Doha to Cairo.
“If talks in Cairo focus solely on the first phase of the peace plan — the release of hostages and prisoners, the first Israeli withdrawal in Gaza and the flood of humanitarian goods — there is a good chance of success,” said Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute. “But if the talks range into subsequent phases of the plan, including Hamas disarmament and deployment of third-country troops to Gaza, it will likely get bogged down as has been the case before.”
Trump’s diplomatic push has also exposed growing concern within his administration over the damage Israel’s continued military campaign is inflicting on its global reputation — and on its support within the United States.
Over the weekend, speaking with an Israeli news outlet, Trump said that Netanyahu had “gone too far in Gaza, and Israel has lost a lot of support in the world.” It came amid reports that Trump had scolded Netanyahu over his initial reaction to Hamas’ willingness to negotiate over the plan.
“Whether you believe it was justified or not, right or not, you cannot ignore the impact that this has had on Israel’s global standing,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told CBS News on Sunday.
Much of the world supports Trump’s plan, which would see a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee oversee governance in the strip, and an international coalition funding the reconstruction of its economy and infrastructure. Palestinians would not be forced to leave the territory.
The proposal comes amid signs that Israel is rapidly losing support within the United States, with new polls showing 59% of Americans disapprove of its actions. A Pew poll showed that 55% of Republicans said they view Israel favorably — but that a growing generational divide, across party lines, risks eroding support for Israel over time.
“I think it’s gone on too long,” Megyn Kelly, a conservative commentator and former Fox News host, said last week on the Fifth Column Podcast. “I know what Hamas does, trust me. And I’ve been covering it. But that doesn’t mean that the devastation and destruction can go on forever.”
Other prominent figures on the right, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and commentators Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, have become more vocal criticizing Israel in recent months.
“Israel’s now taken out Hezbollah, it’s decimated Hamas, it had a war with Iran that we almost got dragged into,” Kelly added. “It’s time to wrap it up in this American’s view. I am entitled to that opinion. And I will not be shamed out of it by being called an antisemite.”
Netanyahu and his closest allies, including Ron Dermer, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs and a former ambassador to Washington, have long believed that Israel is best served relying more on deep ties to the American right than on Jewish Americans overall or on balanced bipartisanship. Increased opposition to the war among MAGA Republicans may force Netanyahu’s team to expedite its end.
Whether discontent on the right is driving Trump to push for a peace deal is unclear. But his personal involvement could prove key to success, regardless of his motives, Satloff said.
“The key new factor that is giving a chance to phase one is President Trump’s intense personal interest in freeing the hostages and the desire of key Arab players not to disappoint him,” Satloff said. “But we shouldn’t exaggerate the importance of even this critical factor — the entire house of cards can still collapse.”
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More to come,
Michael Wilner
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