How the Gaza disarmament deal proves everyone right — but could spell trouble for Netanyahu

Ben Sales is a news editor at The Times of Israel

When US President Donald Trump published his triumphant Truth Social post on Thursday announcing the new agreement to disarm Hamas, remove Israeli forces from Gaza and put the Strip under the supervision of a Palestinian police force, technocrats and international peacekeepers, he ended, characteristically, on an all-caps note of vindication:

“CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL ON THIS AMAZING DEVELOPMENT, THAT EVERYBODY SAID COULD NEVER BE ACHIEVED!”

The celebration may prove premature.

Indeed, the US and its partners seem to have quietly achieved a deal that, if implemented, promises to simultaneously remove (or at least defang) the threat to Israel on its southern border, return the territory to some form of Palestinian control, and allow it to begin rebuilding.

But that’s a huge if. Israel has already objected to the agreement’s terms, Hamas has yet to lay down a single weapon, and the whole enterprise relies on parties that have opposing interests and don’t trust each other working in concert like a Swiss watch. No one will be surprised if this deal falls apart.

Still, even at this stage, this agreement represents something rare: A chance for a variety of ideological stakeholders to all claim victory.

For the entirety of the Gaza war, a pair of debates raged in tandem, with some areas of overlap.

The first debate was between Israel and its global critics. Israel argued it was fighting a war of necessity against an eliminationist terror group that had massacred Israelis and promised to do so again. Many of Israel’s critics charged that it was engaged in war crimes, ethnic cleansing, even genocide — all seeking to push Palestinians off their rightful land.

The second debate occurred within Israel, between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his opponents. Netanyahu argued that military pressure was key to defeating Hamas, and that halting the fighting before a “total victory” would pass up a crucial opportunity to safeguard Israel’s security. His opponents argued that after two years of grueling fighting, Hamas remained intact, and that he was the one passing up opportunities by refusing a deal that would have brought the hostages home earlier and saved lives.

Both sides, in both debates, can reasonably claim that this deal proves them right. Unfortunately for everyone, the agreement also proves them all wrong.

And it could put the prime minister in an impossible position ahead of Israel’s election — wanting to please both a US president who does not brook insubordination, and voters in his own base who view ceding territory as anathema.

Israeli officials have reservations about the deal, which asks its troops to pull back from territory while a terror group sworn to its destruction gradually disarms. But internationally, it’s easy to make the case that this deal supports Israel’s argument. Israel has long said that the reason it was fighting the war wasn’t wanton bloodshed, but because the threat of Hamas must be removed from Gaza following the October 7, 2023, onslaught.

Now, that demand is endorsed not just by the US but by the likes of Egypt, Turkey and Qatar. The sine qua non of this deal is that Hamas lay down its weapons, a recognition that — just as Israel has said all along — the terror group’s continued presence in Gaza was unacceptable.

Likewise, that puts Israel’s harshest critics in an uncomfortable position. If it’s implemented, everyone who has claimed Israel was out to commit genocide and resettle Gaza will be left watching as Israel succeeds in ridding itself of Hamas — and then withdraws its troops back across the border.

Israel has many critics, in the Middle East as well as the West, who seek the end of the Jewish state. But it has many others who stress that they support Israel and want to see the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside it, with both entities living in security. This deal, if implemented, would be the biggest concrete step in that direction in 20 years, even though Netanyahu has staked his reputation on refusing to countenance a State of Palestine, an idea that has scant support among Israelis, especially after October 7, 2023.

In his post, Trump described Gaza in the future as a place with “a new Palestinian police force to take responsibility for Gaza being safe for its residents and its neighbors,” and wrote later that “Gaza will finally be in the hands of a new Palestinian government that serves its PEOPLE.”

Of course, Gaza was already in the hands of a Palestinian government of sorts on October 6, 2023. But there’s a difference: Hamas’s government was a terror regime recognized by few and considered by many, foremost among them Israel, as illegitimate. This would be the opposite: A Palestinian government, or something approximating it, sponsored by the United States and accepted, if begrudgingly, by Israel.

The deal’s endorsement of that idea is a victory for all those who said Israel had no business being in Gaza. And it’s a rebuke to those in Israel who insisted that they could never responsibly cede control of security in the Strip.

Facing legions of street protests for almost the entirety of the Gaza war, demanding that he cut a deal to free the hostages and, therefore, stop the fighting, the prime minister was adamant that more military pressure was needed.

He insisted on taking over the Philadelphi corridor, then on invading Rafah, then on a more intense operation in northern Gaza before the October ceasefire. When that ceasefire occurred, he asserted, “I believed that if we applied heavy military pressure, combined with heavy diplomatic pressure, we would absolutely be able to return all of our hostages, and that is exactly what we did.”

The same could be said of this deal — that it was made possible thanks to the IDF’s sustained military pressure. Israel has been killing Hamas’s commanders and gradually taking over more territory in Gaza. Had the terror group said no to the agreement, it would have faced a future of being squeezed further and further by the IDF.

Netanyahu’s office has already said the deal falls short of Israel’s requirements for a full Hamas disarmament before any Israeli withdrawal. But the agreement itself is at least partially due to the military action he has long trumpeted, and is happening under the oversight of the American president with whom Netanyahu has tied his fate.

Two of the main critiques of Netanyahu’s handling of the war are that he passed up opportunities to make a deal, instead opting to drag out the fighting for his own political interest while hostages, soldiers and thousands of Gazans were killed, and that he hasn’t been able to achieve decisive victory on any of the many fronts where Israel has fought.

This deal at least partially vindicates those critiques. After all, the “total victory” Netanyahu long pursued has escaped him. Instead, the Gaza front may finally be sewn up not with an unconditional surrender but via a deal with Hamas, negotiated in Cairo without public Israeli participation, giving amnesty to the terror group that committed the October 7 massacre, and creating a “Palestinian government” on Israel’s border.

But the more urgent concern for Netanyahu is that he is now caught in the middle of mutually exclusive demands from two constituencies he holds dear: Trump on one hand, and his own right-wing voter base on the other.

Trump is lauding this deal as a revolutionary compromise, and is plainly coaxing Israel into it, claiming on Friday that Jerusalem is “very happy” with the agreement despite every indication to the contrary. A US official said on Thursday that the president would be “very, very disappointed” if Israel doesn’t go along.

Trump is not a president who takes well to public disagreement. And Netanyahu isn’t one to pick a public fight with him.

But in Netanyahu’s other ear, voices from the Israeli right are telling him to do just that, saying that an Israeli withdrawal is unacceptable.

On Thursday, far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir urged Netanyahu “to make clear even to our best friends: The only solution Israel is prepared to participate in is encouraging [Palestinian] emigration and the destruction of Hamas.”

Tamir Morag, the diplomatic correspondent for the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14, posted on X that the agreement had “no shortage of very problematic points that it doesn’t seem like Israel can accept.”

Trump may be at least somewhat sensitive to the political dynamics at play: A pilot zone in Gaza for Palestinians to live is reportedly set to open in November, after the October 27 election.

But the requirement that Israel withdraw from Gaza remains politically toxic to much of Netanyahu’s coalition. So this deal could spell trouble for the prime minister in the place where his critics’ voices count the most — at the ballot box.

The war with Iran has been draining for all of us in Israel. But when I heard about a high casualty incident – ballistic missile impacts in Arad and Dimona that left nearly 200 people wounded – I drank a cup of coffee, packed a bag, and headed south.

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