‘The full monty’: Hamas told to accept Trump’s vision of Gaza peace – or else

1 week ago 2

By Luke Broadwater and Shawn McCreesh

September 30, 2025 — 11.45am

Washington: US President Donald Trump on Tuesday (AEST) cast his plan for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip as a landmark deal to bring peace after two years of catastrophic violence. But in reality, it was more like an ultimatum to Hamas.

Standing alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump unveiled a proposal to which both men had agreed. If Hamas refuses to do the same, Trump said, the US will let Israel “do what you would have to do”.

US President Donald Trump talks up his Gaza peace plan at a White House news conference.

“Israel would have my full backing to finish the job of destroying the threat of Hamas,” said Trump, who under the plan would become the temporary chair of a board in charge of the redevelopment of Gaza.

The joint appearance by Trump and Netanyahu at the White House was a clear display of unity at a moment when Trump has shown signs of frustration with the Israeli prime minister, and when much of the world has grown horrified at Israel’s prosecution of the war against Hamas in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.

But it was far from assured that Hamas would agree to their demands.

The US plan contains provisions that Hamas has said publicly it will not accept, such as its removal from power and disarmament, leaving the proposal’s future uncertain and increasing the possibility that Israel will intensify its military campaign in the enclave, with the full support of the US.

“When it comes to this plan, no one contacted us, nor were we part of the negotiations around it,” Taher al-Nounou, a senior Hamas official, said in a televised interview.

The proposal calls for an immediate ceasefire, after which Hamas would have 72 hours to return all Israel hostages, both dead and alive. In return, Israel would release 250 prisoners sentenced to life, plus 1700 residents of Gaza who were detained after the October 7, 2023, massacre.

Once all hostages are returned, Hamas members who decommission their weapons would be given amnesty.

Notably, the proposal says nothing concrete about a pathway to Palestinian statehood. While it recognises statehood “as the aspiration of the Palestinian people”, it says only that while Gaza is rebuilt and when an overhaul program by the authority “is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway” to statehood.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waves outside the West Wing of the White House on Monday.

Hamas would have to agree to play no role in governing Gaza in the future. And while Israel would pull back its forces by degrees within the Gaza Strip, it would maintain a sizable buffer zone inside Gaza’s borders “for the foreseeable future”, Netanyahu said.

Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations who worked for three Republican presidents, including Trump, said the Israel military campaign had put Hamas in such a weakened position that its leaders might have to accept the deal to save their own lives.

“It would have been a reasonable calculation for Hamas to say, ‘Look at the increasing isolation and condemnation of Israel. They will have to stop soon,‘” Abrams said. “But Trump eliminated that possibility today. Now they won’t have to stop. This really corners them.”

Netanyahu proclaimed that the proposal “achieves our war aims”. And he said he would determine whether or not Hamas was complying with the agreement.

“If Hamas rejects your plan, Mr President, or if they supposedly accepted and then basically do everything to counter it, then Israel will finish the job by itself,” Netanyahu said.

“This can be done the easy way, or it can be done the hard way.”

The two leaders originally had planned to take questions from reporters, but in the end they did not. The moment was reminiscent of Trump’s appearance with Russian President Vladimir Putin in August in Alaska, where he sought a peace deal in the war in Ukraine. Trump and Putin appeared before reporters without an agreement and declined to take questions.

While the US plan gives Netanyahu much of what he wants, it also shows that Trump has moved away from his proposal this year to force Palestinians out of Gaza as part of a redevelopment plan.

Under the latest proposal, Trump said, Palestinians would be encouraged to stay in the Gaza Strip and offered “the opportunity to build a better Gaza”.

“No one will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return,” the proposal states.

“We will encourage people to stay and offer them the opportunity to build a better Gaza.”

Still, the plan – even if Hamas were to agree to it – leaves many question marks and would deeply involve the US.

Smoke rises from an Israeli airstrike on a high-rise building in Gaza City, on Sunday.

Gaza would be governed by a committee called the “Board of Peace”, of which Trump would be the chair and which would undertake its redevelopment.

Such an arrangement would constitute “some extra work to do”, Trump said, “but it’s so important that I’m willing to do it”.

Trump has long remarked on the potential value of the waterfront property of Gaza, and he did so again Monday, lamenting the fact that Israel allowed the Palestinians to have control of the land.

“As a real estate person, I mean, they gave up the ocean,” he said “They gave up the ocean. I said, ‘Who would do this deal?’”

The “Board of Peace” would include former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. It would govern Gaza until it determined that the Palestinian Authority had reformed itself enough to take over, the plan states.

“He has created a peace plan that, if in fact Hamas accepted it in principle, would require an extraordinary lift by the United States,” said Aaron David Miller, a former longtime State Department official who is now a Middle East analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“Every single point is going to be negotiated to death.”

Miller said he was struck by how the peace proposal seemed to hinge so much on the president personally playing a role.

“Trump signed up for something that I think is going to require an extraordinary amount of American involvement and monitoring, and he’s made himself the key monitor,” Miller said.

“This is not a throwaway ceasefire agreement,” he said. “This is the full monty here, and at the top of this full monty sits one Donald Trump.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.