Trump declares end to Gaza war, ‘dawn’ of new Mideast

What happened

Israel and Hamas completed the first phase of President Donald Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan Monday, with Hamas freeing the final 20 living Israeli hostages it seized two years ago and Israel releasing about 1,700 Palestinian detainees and some 250 serving life sentences. Trump flew to the region Monday to speak before Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, and meet with Arab and European leaders at a Gaza “peace summit” in Egypt that neither Israel nor Hamas attended.

Who said what

“This long and difficult war has now ended,” Trump told the Knesset. “You know, some people say 3,000 years, some people say 500 years — whatever it is, it’s the granddaddy of them all.” This isn’t “only the end of a war,” he added. “This is the historic dawn of a new Middle East.” Most of his speech “drew raucous cheers from Israeli lawmakers,” The Associated Press said, but his suggestion that Israel pursue a peace deal with Iran “elicited a muted response.”

The release of prisoners and hostages prompted "cheering, hugging and weeping” among waiting crowds in Tel Aviv and Gaza, Reuters said. Yet “even as Israelis and Palestinians reveled in split-screen scenes of tearful reunions with pale and frail-looking loved ones, many pitfalls and questions remained over the future of the Gaza Strip,” The New York Times said. Notably, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “did not join” Trump in “declaring that the war in Gaza was over.”

The Gaza agreement “represents a significant diplomatic triumph” for Trump and a “vindication of his unorthodox” brand of diplomacy, The Wall Street Journal said. But now that Monday’s whirlwind “victory lap” is over, his “ability to pursue a broader regional settlement will be tested by his own instinct to move on now that the fighting in Gaza has been halted.”

What next?

The “fragile ceasefire in Gaza” may have been the “easiest part” in the “long and tortuous” process, the AP said. “Key details of the peace plan” remain unclear, including “how and when Hamas is to disarm,” when Israel will withdraw from Gaza and what the proposed security force and future government will look like.

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