Donald Trump claims to have extracted a 60 day “ceasefire” in Gaza. If it works, a two-month suspension of the bombing of the enclave and killings at human feeding pens would be welcome. But it will solve nothing because both Israel’s rulers and Hamas have the same core beliefs that begin “from the river to the sea …”
“Israel will be sovereign” – or “Palestine will be free”. The former is part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party’s founding documents – the latter is a chant often taken to mean that Israel should, along with its population, be extinguished.
The only solution to these mutually exclusive slogans is tolerance and hope. Trump’s ceasefire offers neither. Violence and impunity have created a landscape of horror – Trump isn’t the guide out of it.
Hamas is blood soaked, murderous. It has sacrificed tens of thousands of innocent civilians to the Israeli war machine in its long campaign to shatter any chance that Palestinians might ever hope for their own state and freedom, alongside Israel, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.
Hamas remains the dominant force in Gaza. It has, and will, mistake world-wide public dismay at what Israel has done to the Strip for endorsement of its zero sum agenda. It will take the 60 days as a breather and a rearming opportunity.
The struggle for Gaza’s population will be how to resist the temptation to take up emigration opportunities. Israel has smashed their world into rubble and dust and thereby may deliver on the Netanyahu government’s clear desire to flush Gaza’s 2.2 million survivors into the Egyptian Sinai desert and beyond.
A poll conducted in May this year showed that 43 per cent of Gazans were now willing to emigrate – anywhere.
The Palestinians have nowhere to turn for leadership. Seven months ago, 36 per cent of all Palestinians said they support Hamas and 21 per cent said they support Fatah, which dominates the West Bank. Support for Hamas over the past seven months has decreased by 4 percentage points, according to the poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.
Marwan Bargouthi, the most popular Palestinian politician with 50 per cent support, is in an Israeli jail serving several life sentences.
Since the murder of nearly 1,200 people and the abduction of 240 from Israel by extremists led by Hamas on October 7 2023, Israel has waged a war of staggering brutality against Gazans. The indictments of Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, then defence minister, for war crimes and the issuing of arrest warrants isn’t done lightly by the International Criminal Court.
Israel has changed. There is a battle raging internally for its soul as Netanyahu continues to do everything he can to stay in office – he is facing corruption charges. He has temporarily suspended plans to destroy the independent judiciary but that will come back. Meanwhile the population is showing signs of radicalisation.
Some 82 per cent of Israeli Jews support the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, according to a recent poll by Pennsylvania State University. And 54 per cent strongly support this. It asked 1,000 Jewish Israelis if they supported the idea that all the people in towns conquered by Israel should be killed – in the same way that Jericho was flattened in the bible – 47 per cent backed the idea of mass slaughter. The results of this survey were published in Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The left-wing publication has also published allegations that the Israel Defence Force has deliberately killed more than 400 Gazans seeking food aid since May.
Trump has leverage over Israel. He has cut foreign aid almost entirely around the world except there and Egypt. Before slashing help to the world’s neediest, the Jewish state received up to 20 per cent of America’s total overseas aid.
According to the Watson Institute of Public Affairs, the US provided Israel with $22.7 billion in military aid in the first year of its Gaza campaign.
“Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign aid since its founding, receiving about $310 billion (adjusted for inflation) in total economic and military assistance,” according to a November 2025 report by the US Council on Foreign Relations.
Trump says he is putting pressure on Netanyahu, who is shortly to visit the White House. But the US president has previously endorsed the ethnic cleansing of Gaza with the fantasy of settling its population in neighbouring countries while turning it into a beach resort.
His calls for a ceasefire warn that life will get worse of Gazans – they don’t focus on any kind of option that would undermine the standing of Hamas with hope.
The US instead has been silent as Gaza has been carpet bombed and Jewish settlers run amok on the West Bank where illegal Israeli settlements have marched across the landscape and physically obliterated the space where a Palestinian state could ever take form.
If Trump wants to earn the Nobel Peace Prize which he thinks he already richly deserves, he needs to end Israel’s impunity by ending the subsidies that allow it to make war.
Hamas and its fellow recidivist travellers to Armageddon can only be put out of business if the Palestinians, who already despair of all their leaders, can be offered a path that isn’t towards more generations of apartheid, occupation and indignity.
Trump could help end a zero sum grand guignol by forcing Israel to back away from its “river to the sea” policies while Hamas’ demands of sovereignty in the same space can be swept aside by a genuine return to Palestinian faith in liberty.
Not long ago two thirds of people on both sides thought that it would be possible for two nations to live side by aside between the River Jordan and the Med. They need freeing from the subsidies that traps them in misery there.
