The Real Trump Factor in the Gaza Deal

Opinion|Trump and Netanyahu Are Now Inseparable

Praise for President Trump’s diplomacy in brokering a cease-fire in Gaza has mostly focused on how he persuaded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to accept a deal. Many assume that Trump threatened to withdraw U.S. support from Israel, or otherwise pressured the Israeli leader into capitulating.

But there is a more convincing explanation for Mr. Trump’s success. Far from merely menacing Mr. Netanyahu with consequences, the American president’s key intervention was to give a political lifeline to the deeply unpopular Israeli leader. The secret of Mr. Trump’s success with Mr. Netanyahu was offering carrots on domestic politics — not sticks on foreign policy.

There were, of course, important external factors that laid the groundwork for the deal. Both Israel and Hamas had finally concluded that continuing the war was a losing proposition. For Hamas, Israel’s operations over the past year have been devastating. The group’s ability to maneuver and resupply itself is hobbled; its cash flow has been severed; and its top leaders have been eliminated. Outside Gaza, Hamas’ supporters in the Axis of Resistance have also been degraded by Israel’s strikes across Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran itself. Hamas found itself isolated in the region and increasingly unpopular in Gaza.

For Israel, the war had reached a tipping point. Its operational gains no longer outweighed the collapse of Israel’s international standing, the erosion of bipartisan American support over civilian casualties in Gaza or the strain on Israel’s war-weary military. The new phase of the war that Mr. Netanyahu announced over the summer — in which Israel aimed to hold most of the Gaza Strip and once again clear northern Gaza of Hamas — committed the Israel Defense Forces to an unsustainable drain on munitions and manpower.

Israel’s broad-daylight strike against Hamas political leaders in Doha, Qatar, also created an opening. Two years of rising fury in the Muslim world over the agony in Gaza were already putting stress on leaders across the Middle East. Many privately supported dismantling Hamas but would not risk potential domestic backlash by appearing to back Israel’s military campaign. But Israel’s Doha strike brought the Gaza war to them — and threatened to upend their unwritten contracts between government and governed. The unhappy Gulf leaders had Mr. Trump’s ear, and they used it.

This brings us to the role of Mr. Trump himself, whose critical contribution was less about pressuring Mr. Netanyahu than diving deep into his political quagmire. President Biden never wavered in his support for Israel’s campaign to dismantle Hamas after the horrors of Oct. 7. But Mr. Biden’s team also applied pressure — including withholding certain munitions and publicly calling out likely Israeli war crimes — to push Israel to protect civilians and increase humanitarian aid. When Mr. Trump returned to office, he ended any daylight with Mr. Netanyahu on Gaza. Mr. Trump did not object when Israel halted all humanitarian aid to Gaza in March. He did not threaten to withhold U.S. support, despite alarming indicators of famine in the Gaza Strip and rising reports of civilian casualties.