On the evening of Saturday, Oct. 4, Donald Trump called Benjamin Netanyahu to deliver a message: the war in Gaza was over.
Trump’s envoys had brokered a deal with mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey to end two years of bombardment and bloodshed. The following Monday, the President told Netanyahu, they were going to announce the agreement—and the Israeli Premier had to accept it. “Bibi, you can’t fight the world,” Trump told him, recounting their conversation in an interview with TIME. “You can fight individual battles, but the world’s against you.”
Netanyahu pushed back, but Trump wasn’t having it. He launched into a profanity-laced monologue cataloguing all he’d done for Israel as President: moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing its sovereignty over the Golan Heights, brokering the Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states, even joining Israel’s strikes on Iran in June. Trump could no longer stand with Netanyahu, he suggested, if the Prime Minister didn’t sign onto the pact. “It was a very blunt and straightforward statement to Bibi,” says Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, “that he had no tolerance for anything other than this.” (Netanyahu’s office declined to comment.)
By the end of the call, Netanyahu had agreed to a two-phase deal that included a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, secured the return of Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners and detainees, allowed aid shipments into the ravaged enclave, withdrew Israeli forces from parts of the Gaza Strip, and opened negotiations for a final settlement. If it holds, the accord would end the longest war in Israel’s history, one that killed some 2,000 Israelis and nearly 70,000 Palestinians.
The deal marks a milestone in Trump’s ongoing bid to reshape the modern Middle East. During the past nine months, the President has attacked Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and helped degrade its standing in the region. Isolating Tehran hastened the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, and new governments in Damascus and Beirut have signaled a desire to restore ties with Washington. He has bombed Houthi targets in Yemen, leading to an agreement that the rebel group would no longer target U.S. vessels in the Red Sea. Now he has used a real estate dealmaker’s sensibility—an instinct for leverage, for cajoling counterparts through flattery and the threat of force—to push a peace deal on Hamas and Netanyahu, two seemingly intractable enemies. The U.S. President is “breaking all the long-held assumptions of Middle East diplomacy,” says Michael Oren, the historian and former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. “Trump is coming back and saying: We’re going to re-establish America’s hegemony here. And he’s done it—so far.”
Trump traces his achievements so far to his willingness to use America’s military might. Through the assassination of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in his first term and his decision to strike three Iranian nuclear facilities last spring, Trump earned enough goodwill among the Israeli public and stirred enough fear among the nation’s adversaries to bring both parties to the bargaining table. “It would have been impossible to make a deal like this before,” Trump says of his attacks on Iran. “No President was willing to do it, and I was willing to do it. And by doing it, we had a different Middle East.”
Of course, the cease-fire remains fragile, and the deal could still unravel. Hamas has yet to return the remains of all the deceased Israeli hostages, prompting Israel to close the Rafah crossing and restrict aid. Videos on social media show Hamas gunmen executing rivals in the streets. On Oct. 19, Israel accused the militant group of violating the cease-fire after attacks on Israeli soldiers. In the span of a week, the situation grew precarious enough that Trump dispatched Vice President J.D. Vance to the region in a bid to hold the agreement together.
The next phase is even thornier. It includes defining the scope of Israel’s military withdrawal and the structure of a peacekeeping force; disarming Hamas; and determining who will govern postwar Gaza. “Those are very difficult things to do,” says Dan Shapiro, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel under Barack Obama. Among the risks, Shapiro says, is that Trump could “end up with kind of a frozen conflict in the current situation, with Israel controlling half of Gaza, Hamas controlling the other half, suppressing its own people, and no real reconstruction.”
For those reasons, experts fear the peace may prove fleeting. But Trump’s foreign policy has also defied the predictions of his critics. His “America First” creed—once synonymous with isolationism and retreat—has evolved into an unconventional form of personalized diplomacy unburdened by doctrine. While he has shown himself content to let Russia have greater dominance over Europe and China exert its will in the Indo-Pacific region, he has asserted U.S. power in the Middle East in surprising ways. Trump has deepened Washington’s ties with Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Doha. He expects Saudi Arabia to normalize ties with Israel and join the Abraham Accords by year’s end. He tells TIME he intends to visit Gaza soon, as U.S. partners hammer out a plan to reconstruct the Strip. Soon he envisions greater economic integration between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The bullish vision of what all this could mean would be transformative: rail lines from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf; free-trade agreements between Israel and its neighbors; the establishment of a new regional energy grid; Saudis vacationing in Tel Aviv.
In Trump’s telling, this regional reset would be impossible without one essential ingredient: himself. “The most important thing,” he tells TIME, “is they have to respect the President of the United States. The Middle East has to understand that. It’s almost the President more than the country.”
Trump was en route to Charlie Kirk’s funeral on Sept. 21 when he summoned his top aides and allies to his private cabin aboard Air Force One. Gathered around the table were his chief of staff Susie Wiles, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Witkoff was patched into the conversation by phone.
The group had a problem to deal with. Israeli warplanes had recently struck Hamas operatives in Doha, who were visiting a compound to discuss cease-fire negotiations. The attack violated the sovereignty of Qatar, a U.S. ally and the chief mediator with Hamas. The assault enraged Trump. “That was terrible,” Trump says now, calling the decision “a tactical mistake” on Netanyahu’s part. Yet for U.S. negotiators, it also represented an opportunity. The assault was a warning to Arab leaders that the war in Gaza would not stay confined there.
Trump, meanwhile, saw a chance to use outrage over the attack to coax regional leaders to the table. “This was one of the things that brought us all together,” Trump says. “It was so out of joint that it sort of got everybody to do what they have to do. If you took that away, we might not be talking about this subject right now.”
The President’s approach to the region took shape in his first term. He entered office without foreign policy experience. He handed the Middle East portfolio to Kushner, his son-in-law and a fellow real estate developer, who approached the matter less as a traditional diplomat than as a dealmaker. When Trump followed through on his campaign vow to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the U.S. embassy there, the Palestinians broke off contact with Washington. That rupture gave rise to a new approach to the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rather than accept the conventional wisdom that Israel could not integrate with the Arab world without first making peace with the Palestinians, Trump’s team sought to flip the formula. They called it the “outside-in” strategy: build peace from the periphery inward.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump was in touch with Netanyahu. The Israeli Prime Minister visited him at Mar-a-Lago that July. It was an open secret that Netanyahu was rooting for Trump’s return to the White House as President Joe Biden pressured him to halt the onslaught on Gaza. But Netanyahu’s relationship with Trump was fraught as well. Trump left office furious at the Israeli leader—first for withdrawing from a planned 2020 joint strike on Soleimani (a claim Israel has denied), and later for becoming one of the first world leaders to congratulate Biden on his election victory in 2020. Netanyahu was eager for a rapprochement.
When TIME brought up Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah and regime change in Syria, the President interrupted. “All of those attacks were done under my auspices, you know, with Israel doing the attacks—with the pagers and all that stuff.” He was referring to Israel’s covert operation in September 2024 that targeted Hezbollah officials by detonating thousands of pagers, killing dozens and inflicting a psychological scar on the terrorist group for succumbing to such a sophisticated security breach. Biden was still in the White House, and Trump was a candidate. “They let me know everything,” he says. “And sometimes I’d say no—and they’d be respectful of that.” (A Biden representative declined to comment. A Trump spokesperson later said the President misspoke and was referring to Israel’s recent strike on Doha.)
After Trump won in November 2024, Witkoff traveled to Washington to meet with key members of Biden’s foreign policy team: National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East Brett McGurk, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Constrained by the Logan Act’s restrictions on private citizens negotiating foreign policy, Witkoff secured approval from the Biden team to hold talks with Israeli and Arab interlocutors. Even as the Biden Administration continued its own diplomacy, a new sense of possibility had begun to take hold. “Hamas was signaling that they wanted to gain some political capital with the Trump Administration,” Witkoff told me. “Beyond political capital, they were afraid of him.”
The day before Trump’s second Inauguration, Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire, and Hamas released 33 hostages. But the fighting resumed in short order. Trying to keep talks on track, Trump had invited Netanyahu to the White House in February, when he proposed relocating Gaza’s population and remaking the Strip into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Experts say the outlandish idea galvanized Arab negotiators and regional mediators to expedite a peace process. “The President scared the hell out of them when he came up with the Riviera idea,” says Nimrod Novick, a former senior adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and now a fellow with the Israel Policy Forum. “Never mind the Riviera, but for them to host 2 million Gazans for the duration of reconstruction or beyond was unthinkable on several grounds.”
The theater of conflict soon expanded. Israeli forces struck Iran’s nuclear facilities in June, unnerving a White House that feared the bombing campaign would derail its efforts at diplomacy. Yet Netanyahu, through careful planning, was able to enlist Trump to join the campaign, according to a senior Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the conversations.
At their meeting in February, Netanyahu had agreed to give Trump a 60-day window to engage in talks with the Iranians on a nuclear agreement, expecting that they would prove fruitless, according to an Israeli official familiar with the matter. When they produced no resolution, Netanyahu launched the attack. At first, a White House official says, Trump was frustrated—the offensive jeopardized the Administration’s hopes of a nuclear deal with Tehran. But Trump warmed to the idea of joining the strikes, seeing their impact and concurring with Netanyahu’s assessment that the Iranians were trying to manipulate him. On June 22, Trump unleashed U.S. bunker-buster bombs that crippled Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, according to U.S. and Israeli officials.
Then Netanyahu targeted Hamas leaders in Doha. The assault provoked a crisis that Kushner and Witkoff were determined not to waste. “We had an opening,” Kushner says. “It’s just an element of how the President thinks.” The pair worked the U.N. General Assembly circuit, hashing out a 20-point plan with Qatari mediators, Egyptian and Turkish interlocutors, and Israeli officials. The proposal called for an immediate cease-fire and hostage exchange, Israeli security guarantees, the demilitarization of Gaza, and a new civilian governing authority.
When the document reached the President, he scheduled a meeting with leaders of Arab states in a large room at the U.N. on Rosh Hashanah. Joined by Witkoff, Wiles, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump began the session, U.S. officials say, with a long soliloquy about ending the killing and achieving a lasting peace, the goal that has eluded statesmen since the founding of Israel. Then he went around the table, soliciting each leader’s counsel. Prince Faisal, representing the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and King Abdullah of Jordan voiced support for the framework.
The negotiations picked up steam from there. Regional leaders, including the Turks and Qataris, helped lean on Hamas. Turkey, a member of NATO, provided a boost by offering Hamas’ political leaders protection from Israeli strikes if they came to the table, says Soner Cagaptay, a Turkish scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Turkey has quite a bit of sway over Hamas’ political wing,” he says, “and I think Ankara used that influence.”
Trump applied pressure too, warning that if the militant group refused to disarm or attempted to subvert the deal, it would face “complete obliteration.” The demand was clear: the return of every Israeli captive, no longer in stages. “I said, ‘No more of that. You’re giving us the f-cking hostages, all of them,’” Trump says.
The threat drew credibility from the recent strikes on Iran. “The real clincher was Trump’s willingness to use military force,” says Oren. “The previous Democratic administrations were very averse to using military force. They preferred soft power. Soft power is not widely respected in the Middle East.”
Trump’s popularity in Israel—where his approval ratings dwarfed the Israeli Premier’s—gave him leverage over Netanyahu. He knew to embrace Netanyahu in public while pressuring him in private to halt the fighting, aides say. “He would have just kept going,” Trump tells TIME. “It could have gone on for years. It would have gone on for years. But I stopped him, and everybody came together when I stopped him.”
That much may be true, but Israelis and Palestinians alike understand that the success of Phase Two will depend on Trump’s willingness to stay engaged—on his leverage with Netanyahu and his influence over the region’s key players. “If the guarantors of this process want it to succeed, it will succeed, particularly the Trump Administration,” says Khaled Elgindy, a former Palestinian Authority negotiator.
But there are also ways, he adds, that the pact could crumble. One question is the extent to which an international peacekeeping force will allow the Palestinians to choose their own future governance. Israelis and other Arab powers insist Hamas cannot play a role. But the Islamist group, which the U.S. classifies as a terrorist organization, is “not going to negate itself as a political movement,” Elgindy says. “I don’t think folks in Israel are open to any kind of Hamas participation in anything going forward, and that even if Hamas consents to a technocratic government, they will see that as illegitimate.”
Trump himself may care little about the specifics of Gaza’s postwar order so long as he can claim credit as a peacemaker. But it is difficult to negotiate when there is no unified Palestinian leadership, a dynamic Netanyahu spent decades cultivating by keeping Hamas in Gaza and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank divided. “They don’t have a leader right now,” Trump tells me. “At least a visible leader. And they don’t really want to, because every one of those leaders has been shot. It’s not a hot job.”
Trump says he likes Mahmoud Abbas, the aging head of the Palestinian Authority, but suggests it’s unlikely he would be the right person to lead postwar Gaza. One option is calling on Israel to release Marwan Barghouti, the imprisoned Fatah leader who has spent more than two decades behind bars for allegedly directing the murder of four Israelis and one Greek Orthodox monk during the Second Intifada. “I was literally being confronted with that question about 15 minutes before you called,” Trump says. “So I’ll be making a decision.” Many regional observers believe Barghouti is the only figure capable of uniting the Palestinians; polls show him as a leading candidate in a hypothetical election for President of the Palestinian Authority.
Netanyahu, meanwhile, faces rebellion from right-wing ministers who want to block a path to Palestinian statehood and annex the West Bank. Trump warns such a move would meet fierce U.S. resistance. “It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries,” he told me. “Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.” Already, he has had to enforce the deal’s terms, sending Vance to Israel to ensure that neither Netanyahu nor Hamas allow the agreement to unravel. Netanyahu briefly halted humanitarian aid to Gaza, citing Hamas’ failure to return the bodies it had promised and its attacks on Israeli targets, while Vance, Kushner, and Witkoff pressed ahead with reconstruction talks to sustain momentum.
In the meantime, Trump’s gaze has shifted beyond Gaza. He wants to expand the Abraham Accords, most dramatically through normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have placed two conditions on the table: an end to the fighting and a credible path toward Palestinian sovereignty, even if not necessarily full statehood. Trump believes both are within reach. “I think Saudi Arabia is going to lead the way,” he says. “We don’t have the Iran threat anymore. We don’t have any threats anymore. We have peace in the Middle East.”
Peace in the Middle East is, of course, a florid exaggeration. Yet Trump has achieved a cease-fire that returned the last living hostages to Israel and, for a moment at least, opened the door to a new chapter in the region. “Israel was so intent on the hostages, I was actually surprised,” Trump says. “You would have thought they would have sacrificed the hostages in order to keep going, right? The people of Israel wanted the hostages more than they wanted anything else. And we got the hostages.”
The question now is not only whether the fragile architecture of the deal will hold. It’s whether Trump can sustain the kind of focus required to turn a momentary reprieve in the fighting into something lasting. It would require the kind of obsessive focus that Jimmy Carter brought to Camp David—long nights, endless details, a diplomacy of sheer endurance. When I ask whether the new regional dynamics can outlast him, Trump doesn’t hesitate. “While I’m there, it’s going to only get better and stronger, and it’s going to be perfect,” he says. “What happens after me? I can’t tell you that.”—With reporting by Simmone Shah
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