Ten months ago, few in Washington’s foreign policy establishment believed a lasting ceasefire in Gaza was possible, let alone one brokered largely by the United States. Today, that ceasefire is still holding — imperfectly, unevenly, but holding — and it stands as one of the signature achievements of President Trump’s second term.
The deal, announced in October 2025 and formalized weeks later when the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2803, ended two years of devastating war between Israel and Hamas. Under the agreement, Hamas released the roughly twenty living hostages it still held, along with the remains of those who had died in captivity, in exchange for the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Israeli forces withdrew from significant portions of the Gaza Strip, and humanitarian aid began flowing back into the territory at a scale it hadn’t seen in years.
President Trump personally flew to the region to see the agreement signed, and the resulting “Board of Peace” — an international transitional body Trump himself chairs — was tasked with overseeing Gaza’s reconstruction and eventual handover to Palestinian governance. Special envoy Steve Witkoff and senior adviser Jared Kushner did the granular, months-long negotiating that got both sides to yes; Trump provided the political muscle and the willingness to spend his own credibility on an outcome most predecessors had avoided even attempting.
A Real Accomplishment, With Real Limits
To be clear-eyed about it: nobody serious is calling Gaza a finished success story. Nine months in, independent trackers and the UN’s own reporting note that the ceasefire’s harder second-phase commitments — Hamas’s full disarmament, the Israeli military’s complete withdrawal, and a durable governance structure for Gaza — remain largely unrealized. Hamas has resisted decommissioning its weapons, arguing Israel hasn’t fully honored its own obligations on aid and troop movements. The humanitarian situation in Gaza, while improved from the height of the war, is still described by aid groups as dire.
Supporters of the President don’t dispute any of that. Their argument is different: that getting the guns to stop firing and the hostages home at all was the genuinely hard part, the part that eluded every prior administration that tried and failed to broker even a temporary truce. Everything since then — the messy, grinding work of disarmament and governance — is the kind of slow, frustrating diplomacy that follows almost every ceasefire in history. It’s evidence the job isn’t finished, supporters say, not evidence the deal was fake.
The Wider Regional Bet
The ceasefire was never really just about Gaza. It’s the centerpiece of a broader Trump-era wager that a Middle East built on direct dealmaking — leaning on Gulf states, Israel, and even old rivals to sit at the same table — can accomplish more than decades of multilateral process ever did. That’s the same logic behind the earlier Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states during Trump’s first term and which the administration has continued trying to expand.
It’s also, supporters argue, the logic behind the administration’s separate pressure campaign on Iran, which has continued in parallel with the Gaza effort: the theory that a region only stabilizes when Washington is willing to apply real leverage rather than manage crises indefinitely.
An Honest Reckoning Still Owed
None of this means the region is calm. Violence between Israeli settlers and Palestinian communities in the West Bank has continued to escalate this year, drawing criticism from human rights monitors and, notably, from lawmakers in both parties who’ve pushed the administration to do more to rein it in — a reminder that “peace through strength” still has unfinished business closer to home than Gaza or Tehran.
For MAGA supporters, the fair takeaway from the past year isn’t that the Middle East is solved. It’s that an American president who was willing to negotiate directly, put his own name on a deal, and follow through with a physical presence in the region got further, in ten months, than a generation of conventional diplomacy managed. Whether that opening gets built on — in Gaza, in the West Bank, and beyond — is the next test of the doctrine, not proof it already failed.
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