Will Donald Trump follow through with his plan for Gaza?

It was a tour of the Middle East to celebrate the end of what Donald Trump called “3,000 years” of conflict, and it lasted less than 12 hours.

Leaders lined up to adore the US president, the Israeli parliament gave him a hero’s welcome, hostage families chanted his name, and Arab leaders gathered for a “peace summit” in Egypt, posing for photos as the self-proclaimed peacemaker urged them to give their thumbs up to the cameras.

Even Trump’s critics acknowledged that he had achieved a major breakthrough, securing a ceasefire in the two-year war in Gaza and the release of Israeli hostages through his unique and feisty diplomacy.

But after Trump’s declaration of “peace in the Middle East,” the question for the region is whether the president now believes his mission is accomplished.

Although the United States, as Israel’s largest donor, has long enjoyed unique influence over the Jewish state, few American presidents have shown their willingness to exercise it so freely.

Although it did help secure international support for Trump’s 20-point plan to end the conflict conflict Between Israel and Hamas, the implementation of the agreement is still in its early stages. The most difficult measures – including the disarmament of Hamas and Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza – still lie ahead.

No one could believe: “We got a ceasefire, we got the hostages out, and the rest will take care of themselves,” said Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic senator who has criticized Trump and former President Joe Biden’s handling of the war. “The rest won’t take care of themselves.”

The ultimate success of Trump’s plan depends on his ability and willingness to remain engaged and maintain pressure on the warring parties, especially Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump pushed the Israeli prime minister – whom he praised as “one of the greatest wartime leaders” – to accept the deal, while forcing him to offer a modest apology to Qatar for a missile strike last month that targeted Hamas political leaders in Doha.

“Trump is in a strong position,” Van Hollen said. “But the question is whether he has the political will and stamina to do it.”

The plan contains few details about how Trump’s “peace council” will ensure governance and security in Gaza in the future. It expects Hamas to give up its weapons – but the armed group has not yet agreed to do so, while Israel has not given any guarantees that it will withdraw from Gaza.

“There is still no clear structure and sequence to this process, nothing that takes you from point A to point B in a specific time frame, with clear commitments and actionable outcomes,” said Emile Hakim, director for Middle East regional security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Al-Hakim and others also worry about Trump’s attention span.

“Trump’s interest is both the great currency and the great unknown,” he said. “He may over-involve himself or simply walk away, creating real uncertainty in an already uncertain process.”

In the turbulent first nine months of his second term, Trump’s foreign policy focus has shifted between halting the conflict in Gaza, to trade wars and ending Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

He has already claimed to have ended seven other wars, including those between India and Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. But in most cases, his administration helped stop the eruption of long-standing conflicts, while not addressing their root causes.

The Israeli-Palestinian crisis is among the most complex and persistent conflicts in the world, bedeviled by spoilers on all sides, and has a history of failed US-led attempts to resolve it.

During decades of hostilities between Israel, the Palestinians and Arab countries, six peace agreements have been reached; Awarded five Nobel Peace Prizes; More than 30 exchanges of hostages or prisoners; And at least six ceasefire agreements in Gaza, including two since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 – both of which collapsed.

However, Trump – who remained silent when Israel broke one of the previous US-backed ceasefire agreements in March – was already talking on Monday about a “historic dawn for a new Middle East” while basking in the adulation.

He even indicated that he would like to pursue a deal with Iran, saying that would be “fantastic” before examining himself, adding: “We have to first get things done with Russia.”

Michael Makovsky, president of the pro-Israel Jewish Institute for US National Security in Washington, predicted that Israel could resume its war in Gaza once Trump’s “misplaced” optimism about the prospect of Hamas disarming fades.

“If they resume this attack that they paused under this deal, they will come forward more aggressively, because they don’t have to worry about hostages,” Makovsky said.

The first glimpse of several potential flashpoints emerged within an hour of Trump leaving Israel for the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

After Hamas released the 20 living hostages, Israeli Defense Minister Yisrael Katz warned that militants were moving too slowly to return the bodies of the 28 dead hostages – a potentially “grave violation of the agreement,” to which Israel would respond “accordingly.”

Netanyahu also refused to attend the summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, where European and Arab leaders, including Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, met to endorse Trump’s plan.

One reason is that he did not want to have to deal with Abbas, whose Palestinian Authority administers limited parts of the occupied West Bank, according to a person familiar with the Israeli government’s thinking.

Arab and Muslim leaders, who Trump expects will fund the massive reconstruction in Gaza and provide troops for the international stabilization force that is scheduled to deploy to Gaza, want a greater role for the Palestinian Authority and move toward the creation of a Palestinian state.

He urged Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to implement Trump’s deal to eventually achieve a “two-state solution” — a concept Trump later appeared to reject. “I will decide what I think is right,” he told reporters as he boarded his plane to leave Egypt.

Netanyahu strongly rejects both, and the plan makes only vague reference to Palestinian aspirations for statehood — the core grievances of the conflict.

“We will not reach peace without justice and accountability, and in the last two years we have just witnessed some of the most horrific crimes in modern history,” said Youssef Mounir, who leads the Palestine/Israel program at the Arab Center, a think tank in Washington.

“Peace in the Middle East is not something that happens because you print some big message to describe the summit.”

Trump, who has mostly relied on his friend-turned-envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner rather than his secretary of state or experienced diplomats to develop and advance his plan, acknowledged at times on Monday that there is still much work to be done on the path to peace. In the Knesset, he called on Israel to recognize that “it has won everything it can by force of arms.”

“You don’t want to go through that again,” he said.

In his speech to Arab and Muslim leaders later in the day in Sharm El-Sheikh, Trump – who says he will chair the “peace council” that will oversee the post-war transition in Gaza – insisted that he will be “a partner in securing a better future.”

With royal family members from the oil-rich Gulf states sitting behind him, he added that there would be “a lot of money coming into Gaza.”

“You have the richest, some of the richest countries in the world,” he said. “The big leaders are here, the princes, the kings, everyone.”

Those same Arab countries will depend on Trump – the self-proclaimed most pro-Israel US president in history – to remain engaged and maintain pressure on Israel.

Mounir said that this is what made the ceasefire and hostage agreement different from others. He added that in this sense, Trump’s insistence on “celebrating the end of the war… makes the Israelis’ return to war much more difficult.”

But the main takeaway from Monday’s victory is not that “3,000 years” of conflict, as Trump put it, are finally over, but rather that “everybody wants to find a way to keep sucking up to this guy, because they understand that’s how you keep him engaged and involved.”

On Monday, Trump received two awards from Israel and Egypt. Four foreign officials, including the leaders of Israel and Pakistan, declared in their speeches that he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize — and some may hope that will keep him focused after he missed out on the award last week.

Al-Hakim said: “This plan cannot succeed without Trump’s attention.” “It is the main element because it is the only one that scares the Israelis and that makes all the Arab countries listen immediately.”