By March, the Trump administration had found, less than two months into office, what the Biden administration had often found previously: Benjamin Netanyahu can talk a very nice game toward the United States, but ultimately does not feel compelled to be driven by its wishes because US leaders consistently (and in a bipartisan way) have not made him feel he has to take them seriously.

Trump officials were drunk on their own Kool-Aid around the time of the ceasefire. They truly felt it was a historic win. Rather than analyze why the Biden administration was not able to get a deal and what was the actual US leverage that did bear fruit to a degree in January, they seemed to think that strength and Trump’s mere personality would be enough to sustain this.

Netanyahu made it clear that wasn’t the case. He first imposed a siege and then two weeks later launched a full-scale offensive, going back into Gaza, that is still ongoing. It’s important to remember that Israeli forces have again and again gone into areas that they previously said they had cleared successfully, while the death toll among Palestinians rises.

The other important thing to remember here is the role of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s consigliere for the Middle East and for broader questions of international diplomacy, Talking to Trump administration officials, people close to Witkoff, I heard a lot of faith in his capabilities and his approach. Some people on his team would push the narrative that they were outcome-oriented rather than process-oriented.

Some Arab leaders felt that Witkoff, being a businessman, not someone from the foreign policy establishment, would be more wary of Israel and more open-minded. You did see a willingness from the Trump administration to even negotiate directly with Hamas, producing outcomes like the freedom of an Israeli-American hostage, Edan Alexander.

But all of that goodwill that Witkoff had basically got them through March, April, and May. President Trump went to the Middle East in May, and the focus very much had shifted from Gaza to Syria. Witkoff’s promises of being an unbelievably effective mediator really began to look hollow in that period.

Now, he’s still Trump’s chief negotiator with the Israelis and with Hamas. He most recently was talking to hostage families, saying, “we’re going to bring them all home.” But there isn’t the same degree of faith because the Trump team have fallen back into the same trap as the Biden team, where they are being led by Israel rather than playing a leading role themselves.

I’ll finally note also that with the renewed Israeli offensive in Gaza, going into the areas where they have previously been, we have seen the United States not only greenlight the offensive but even cheering them on, in a clearer way than you saw under Biden. The military-first, pro-war narrative of the Netanyahu government now has many more open cheerleaders in Washington.

In terms of Trump’s interest, it’s useful to remember that he sees himself as the peer, not merely of other foreign leaders in general, but particularly of a certain brand of leader — the wealthy authoritarians of the Persian Gulf. Netanyahu was thrilled to hear about Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” scheme, where he was talking about the mass expulsion of Palestinians and clear war crimes. But the reason you saw the president go back on it quite quickly was that it horrified the entire region.

Those Arab leaders had a channel to Trump in a way that they didn’t have a channel to Biden. Trump started to face that pushback, particularly in private and through Witkoff, his Middle East envoy, who has been having extensive WhatsApp conversations all the time with leaders from these Arab governments.

They were not saying out of the goodness of their hearts that they didn’t want to see Palestinians expelled en masse, and there is certainly interest on their part in moneymaking around Gaza. But as the region has become more volatile amid Israel’s now almost two-year war, there is a real sense of regime anxiety and instability in these countries. Trump was told that his “Gaza Riviera” plan was going to stymie anything else he wanted to achieve with Middle Eastern states.

All of that said, it was an opening for Netanyahu and particularly for the most extreme-right members of his government like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who had been talking about a reoccupation of Gaza. This is an idea that is not endorsed by all Israelis, but the ones who believe in it really, really believe in it.

The fact that Trump was even elucidating the idea that this was a possibility — suggesting it might be a positive thing, suggesting it might even be humane —  gave Netanyahu grounds to go ahead and pursue his continued offensive by March. It made a very clear statement about Trump’s view of the humanity of Palestinians. It essentially took the effective but quiet US policy of seeing Palestinian concerns as fundamentally secondary and fundamentally unequal and translated that into open policy.

I’d also add that the timing of that moment is relevant to Trump’s own domestic brand and goals. That was when you saw the Trump administration begin the ongoing crackdown on US universities and the antiwar movement, particularly using the claim that any questioning of the war on Gaza represents antisemitism or tolerance of antisemitism.

That was a narrative that the Biden administration didn’t wholeheartedly endorse. The Trump administration has gone all the way to where Netanyahu wants it to go. Not only is it going to equate the state of Israel with all Jews, including those in the Unites States, where the majority of American Jews have never been to Israel. The administration also gave Netanyahu an indication that Trump was using his approach to Israel to cover and justify a broader domestic agenda of control.

This has involved effectively extorting universities like Columbia, Brown, and Harvard, and pursuing the deportations of activists like Mahmoud Khalil. People like Khalil have been used as totems to show the Trump administration’s willingness to twist the entire process of foreign policy and to challenge the First Amendment, so there’s a domestic link to that foreign policy choice.

You’re right to locate the genesis of the GHF in that broader environment around Trump. That is where, over the course of decades, a hardline pro-Israeli narrative has tried to undercut the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which has been the backbone of humanitarian aid for Palestinians during this war. It has been essential for them across the diaspora and in Gaza for years.

But there has been such a wellspring of hatred and often deceptive descriptions of UNRWA and the UN more broadly. You see the claim that the UN as a whole is poisoned against Israel, and humanitarian organizations working with the UN are then implicated. That narrative in the right-wing ecosystem here in the United States is now at an all-time high. It was already there prior to October 7.

As US officials failed to effectively counter it by saying, “look, we’ve probed UNRWA, independent investigations have looked at UNRWA, we’ve worked with them — this is not a branch of Hamas,” that failure led to the undermining of the professional humanitarian aid system, which knows how to get aid to people effectively and without aid seekers being killed en masse.

The system was clearly on the chopping block by the time the Trump administration took office. There was a slashing of global humanitarian funding right at the start of Trump’s term. But when it came to Israel-Palestine, there was a sense that here was the opportunity to finally root out this apparatus that they hated.

It was too tempting for people in the Trump ecosystem, by which I mean many Christian Zionists and some hardline pro-Israel voices in congress. They found it so appealing to say, “we can just replace this root and branch and build something different.” It’s clear that “different” has not translated to “better.”

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation emerged from discussions among Israeli officials, academics, some US veterans and security contractors who remain involved (particularly a company called Safe Reach Solutions), and the US consulting conglomerate, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which has now abandoned and disavowed the project.

As this scheme evolved, there was a surreal and chilling sense, when you’re talking about human lives, that they thought they could find some tech-based, non-governmental, non-NGO solution that would work. Based on my reporting, I haven’t found evidence of deliberate fostering of the scheme by the Trump administration, but the people who wanted to see it instituted found the administration to be happy customers.

Once it was unveiled in May, the US government, having initially said, “we aren’t necessarily involved in this,” very quickly became the first major donor to the GHF. The executive chairman Johnnie Moore has been close to the Trump movement going back to 2016, before many other Republicans and evangelicals were willing to embrace Trump. They’ve brought him in and he continues to be a spokesperson, but he’s not an aid expert. His chief role is to be an American voice and face for this deeply controversial program.

The US role has been enabling continued mass death among Palestinians, including by malnutrition and dehydration at the extreme and accelerating rates we are now seeing. But there is still so much focus on PR and spin. Almost two years into this conflict, you still have the idea that if Israel can just tell a better story, it will look a little better and a little different.

Part of that has involved asking, “how do we remove these independent aid operators?” You see UN officials and now EU officials having visas denied and being told they can’t visit Gaza. Of course, foreign journalists have not been let in unsupervised for the whole duration of this war. Then on the flip side, you have the GHF saying, “we’re giving people food, we’re delivering tens of thousands of items and ingredients daily — how dare you say we’re not helping?”

The GHF, of course, roundly rejects the idea that its forces and the troops defending it are deliberately targeting Palestinians and often denies killings took place, even though hospital workers and family members can identify where their relatives were killed. There have been not just shootings, but also air strikes at these locations.

There’s such a strong desire to avoid engaging with the reality of the Palestinian experience, which at this point is famine and what one doctor described to me as “auto-digesting.” Children’s bodies are eating themselves in Gaza because of choices over aid.

Brett McGurk is the architect for much of what the United States has done in relation to the Gaza war. Recently he put out a piece through CNN talking about what Israel should be doing differently and framing it in terms of how Israel can be seen as a benevolent party. The focus remains perception rather than saving human lives.

You have to see the twelve-day war between Israel and Iran in June as a direct challenge to Trump’s stated goal, which was a new nuclear deal. Of course, Trump ripped up the previous deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), but there are still remnants of it on which some kind of international agreement could be crafted.

Trump had put Steve Witkoff and others, including some well-qualified technical experts, on the case of negotiating with the Iranians. You had these high-profile US-Iranian negotiations taking place, which were never going to produce a deal in the short timeframe that Trump and Witkoff identified, given the technical difficulties of a new agreement and the deep gap in trust between the United States and Iran.

That said, I think that the Israelis, based on my understanding, were able to amplify the sense that a deal was not achievable or that military pressure would actually make Iran more likely to cut a deal. The Israelis moved right before Witkoff was set to have another round of negotiations with the Iranians.

That led to an impression of US–Israeli coordination, and there were people in the Trump administration very much trying to spin Washington reporters into writing that this was their master plan all along. However, based on my conversations with people in the MAGA movement, I think there was a lot of ass-covering and ex post facto justification involved in that, because Trump was then plunged into a week of deep uncertainty.

The idea that Trump would go in and provide the US military support that the Israelis were looking for to amplify their attacks was very much in question. I can remember sitting with Steve Bannon, Trump’s long-time guru of far-right ideology, the week before he made the decision about launching a US attack on Iran. Bannon and others in the MAGA movement were very much pushing Trump to hold off, presenting Netanyahu as a bad actor and saying that the United States risked being pulled into an unpredictable spiral.

There was a live possibility that that they might be successful in talking Trump back, but ultimately they were not able to do that. I was out in public in DC that night when Trump ordered the attacks, and there was a sense of shock. People’s phones were buzzing, and the longstanding possibility of a US war with Iran, which has been discussed for decades, suddenly seemed real.

The fact that we got there does not mean that there was some kind of grand strategy by Trump and Netanyahu. It shows you the pull of the hawkish national security establishment, particularly in Washington. A figure to pay close attention to is Erik Kurilla, the outgoing chief US military commander for the Middle East, who has been very wary of Iran. The Israelis see him as one of the best bets for guiding US involvement toward Iran, and Kurilla has come to be closer to Trump, who loves generals.

You have the combination of a particular hawkish figure with a decimated foreign policy apparatus under Trump, which means that there are not many people recommending moderation. Those who are in positions of power, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, are largely sycophants. Then you have a longstanding joint enemy of the United States and Israel, so why would you not take a swipe at it?

Having said all that, the reason why I don’t see a master plan — and I think we’re in a scarier place now — is that as the attacks began and continued, it was never clear what their goal was. The narrative started with the idea of sweeping regime change, with some people even saying, “we’re going to bring back the Shah of Iran” — a ludicrous prospect that’s quite offensive to the many Iranians who feel that he doesn’t represent them in any way. It then shifted towards the objective of crippling Iran’s nuclear expertise and making it easier for Trump to cut a deal.

As the dust settled, with a carefully choreographed Iranian counterattack, you saw a resumed effort to explore some kind of nuclear agreement between Iran and the United States. But that is coming after huge societal shock within Iran that has diminished what pro-Western sentiment remained. There is deep anxiety within the regime that they could face the same outcome as Hezbollah or Hamas, which many Israeli officials have openly spoken about.

The trust deficit in negotiations is now even wider, and the rally-’round-the-flag effect among Iranians, based on people I’ve spoken to in the country, is much higher than before. I don’t think the outcome has brought things to where Netanyahu or Trump wanted them to be. Unfortunately, while it’s always foolish to make predictions, I think we will be looking at the prospect of US-Israeli attacks on Iran resuming in the next six to nine months, because they haven’t left a basis for diplomacy.

The Trump administration’s willingness to use every tool in the American arsenal has instilled a sense of fear among foreign governments that is driving their decisions, including over Gaza. You see that with the governments that are considering Palestinian statehood, among them quite powerful US allies and, for the first time, permanent members of the UN Security Council.

You are also seeing it with countries like Norway, which has a major sovereign wealth fund that has been advised for years to divest from Israeli companies involved in the occupation. It is now actively considering that move, but Norwegian officials say they’re also afraid of how the Trump administration might react.

The push-pull consideration for those governments is that Donald Trump will not last forever. If you are in Paris, London, or Oslo, you are thinking about what global order will look like in ten or fifteen years. Is it worth it for you to smash everything — every kind of faith in institutions, every kind of international principle?

Of course, the situation varies country by country. For France, I think it’s a legacy issue, and linked to a broader sense of European sovereignty, not being guided by the United States, and so retaining world power, status, and respect. For Britain and Canada, there are domestic political aspects, but they have been weaker. That reflects to a degree the failure of their domestic leaders on other fronts.

The Trump administration will continue to oppose these efforts, but it has handicapped its own diplomatic apparatus. While Trump and his officials are willing to use measures like tariffs if governments annoy them, rallying major opposition to force London, Paris, or Ottawa to back down will be very hard. You don’t have the necessary expertise at the State Department any more after cutting so many positions.

Trump, for all his own personal idiosyncrasies, loves Britain, and even likes Macron to some degree. I don’t think you’ll see an organized Trump administration response, although I do think you’ll see an organized Israeli response. That’s where the rubber will hit the road on this issue. European governments — in conjunction with Arab governments, as we’ve seen the French and the Saudis work together — don’t want to feel steamrolled by Israel.

That attitude is driving some of this as well. European governments have maintained sanctions on violent settlers, including Yinon Levy, who was sanctioned by the United States under Biden and is now accused of shooting a prominent Palestinian activist in the West Bank. You could see other steps from European governments to make clear that they don’t want to feel totally neutered on this issue.

There was already anxiety at the ICC about these potential measures before Trump reentered office, because his first administration took similar measures over ICC investigations of US military activity in Afghanistan. But the ICC has felt so much more on notice this time because it has been willing to question Israel over Gaza.

Not only has it felt the pressure from the United States as the chief world power. It has also  risked losing support from other backers, like European states. There has certainly been a chilling effect at the ICC. It has led to a slow-rolling of work, and made its work technically harder to do because tools like email just can’t be accessed.

If the United States can identify further ways to obstruct the work of the ICC, it will do so. That depends on technical expertise. I would zoom the lens out a bit further and ask if this is being done as part of a mapped-out strategy to undermine accountability efforts over Israel, because that takes a lot of work and consistent attention, or is it being done to rile up pro-Israeli voices and right-wing supporters of Trump.

I broke the news in July that the Trump administration was putting sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for Israel-Palestine. That was a move she condemned. She has been a strong voice for Palestinian rights and a critic of Israel. It’s not yet clear what impact those sanctions will have on her, but she seems undeterred. The actual effect of that move against Albanese was that for a day or maybe a week, it made people in the pro-Trump, pro-Israel universe thrilled.

But the undeniable reality of what’s happening in Gaza — the reams and reams of evidence of violations of international statutes — is not going anywhere. While the United States can slap on more sanctions and condemnations, after a while, it just sounds like noise, whereas on the other side, there is so much evidence and so much public anger that is not going away.

I think that’s why the Trump administration also misdiagnosed how serious people were about this issue. They won over significant number of Arab Americans by saying, “we’re going to stop the war,” without providing details on how. Those people have come out and said, “we are disappointed in Trump — we no longer support Trump — he broke his promise.”

That sense of disillusionment with the US foreign policy establishment means that any steps the Trump administration continues to take against the ICC or other institutions are just being met with so much skepticism by foreign governments and even by Americans themselves.

The clear shift towards greater skepticism of Israel is a big reason why Israeli officials and their defenders on the world stage are getting to be more anxious. It’s not necessarily driven by good faith concern over Palestinian children starving to death. It’s driven by the sense that Israel, which cannot operate its military without US support and receives upwards of three billion dollars a year, may not be able to secure that kind of commitment anymore.

That’s a sentiment cross-cutting the two parties. In the Republican Party, younger people — the ones who are listening to Tucker Carlson or the podcaster Theo Von — are demonstrating that they don’t necessarily see overwhelming support for Israel as part of their political identity and brand. It’s linked to the “America First” narrative — why are we sending money overseas when we don’t have healthcare, our roads are in desperate repair, etc.?

That narrative is being fomented and encouraged by the likes of Steve Bannon. When I was talking to him this summer, asking how the MAGA disillusionment over Iran translates into the future of Republican politics, he discussed how he someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has called what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide, is very likely to remain in a leading position and perhaps take over.

People like Tulsi Gabbard and others who have come up around Trump and have more heterodox views on foreign policy are not going to outright abandon or even condemn Israel. But the sense of special treatment will diminish, and the appetite for that on the Republican side is gone.

Let’s look at congress, which is a lagging indicator of US political opinion, but an important one, because it tells you where US political elites are in this country. In congress, you have not seen Republicans break with Israel on a legislative basis. But we recently saw a vote in the Senate where twenty-eight Democratic senators said they would have opposed a package of weapons for Israel.

That would have inconceivable even a year ago. At the elite level, the Democrats are starting to catch up with where many in their party have been over Gaza for more than a year now, saying that they have had enough of a blank-check policy. I see a parallel here with another devastating conflict where Democrats ultimately shifted their position over US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. The United States enabled horrifying consequences through the impunity it provided to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Few Democrats were criticizing this policy under the administration of Barack Obama, who initiated it. Two years into the Trump administration, it was a defining foreign policy issue for Democrats and became something that their 2020 presidential candidates needed to have positions on. Many of the people who ironically went into the Biden administration and enabled a similar approach for Israel said, “we’re not going to do this again — we’ve learned lessons from this.” They felt they had to issue that mea culpa.

On Gaza, I think there’s going to be an even greater impetus for accountability among Democrats. As we get closer to midterm elections next year and then the presidential election in 2028, I expect attempts by Democrats in Congress to rein in unrestrained US support for Israel and to seek greater accountability. I also expect a more permissive environment — not in society, of course given the crackdown the Trump administration is pursuing — but a more permissive environment in official circles to express skepticism over US policy on Israel.

The basic outline for a possible Israel-Hamas deal is still one based on a truce and the release of hostages. From the Israeli and US standpoint, that would essentially mean a sixty-day phased truce that would not address Hamas’s priority, which is a permanent end to the war, but it would mean a halt in fighting with the release of some living hostages and negotiations over prisoner swaps.

The sticking point has always been, do the Israelis just want to use that pause to resume the war and what they’re now talking about as a permanent occupation of Gaza? That’s a red line for Hamas.

Hamas has, of course, been degraded and lost effective control over much of Gaza. That has led to lawlessness — it’s not as if it has led to some kind of perfect Palestinian society. It has led to a more dangerous, horrifying society, with more gangs and more looting, which the Israelis have then decried.

But Hamas still has the bargaining chip of around fifty hostages, twenty of them still alive. The price for Hamas of reaching such a deal has certainly gone up. I don’t know if the United States and Israel have anything to offer other than talking about further military pressure, which Hamas has already shown is not going to lead to the release of living hostages. So we’re at an impasse.

Another reason for the impasse concerns the mediators, Qatar and Egypt. It’s been clear throughout that Egypt in particular, which helped Israel institute a blockade of Gaza, has not been driven by concern for Palestinians so much as by its own interest in making money off the border crossings into Gaza while preventing mass expulsion of Palestinians into its own territory.

Qatar, which did express greater concern for Palestinians, has also prioritized a close relationship with Trump, in the context of right-wing voices in the United States being quite anti-Qatar. The Qataris are cautious — they don’t want to be seen as too close to Hamas. That all means that I am not hearing the sense of urgency in the approach to mediation that I have heard in previous periods, or the sense of hope.

As we saw previously with the Biden administration, the overwhelming US posture has been one of blaming Hamas for stubbornness and recalcitrance in the talks, which clearly has not led to a shift in the group’s position. Telling Hamas leaders how bad they are has not prompted Hamas to say, “oh, you’re right, we’re bad — we’re going to cut a deal with you.” On the other hand, the initial approach of the Trump administration between January and April, which involved nudging and questioning Israel to an extent, did produce results.

We haven’t seen the Trump team resume that approach. I’m curious to see if that does happen. Apart from Witkoff, there are other figures in the Trump orbit worth looking at, such as Tom Barrack, the US ambassador to Turkey and now Trump’s special envoy for Syria, who is very well connected across the region.

Is there some sort of agreement that could come out of his indirect discussions with Arab leaders? That’s possible. But the formal ceasefire negotiations, especially as Israel continues to escalate its attacks and its talk of permanent control, really appear to be faltering.