What does President Trump actually want to see in Gaza?
It’s a simple question, yet eight months into the Trump administration’s second term, the answer still isn’t clear. If anything, U.S. policy is muddled, confusing, and at times incoherent, a consequence of Trump’s competing impulses and a prime minister in Jerusalem who is the poster-child for obstructionism.
On the one hand, Trump wants the war in Gaza to end. The nearly two-year conflict is not only one of the worst humanitarian abominations in the 21st century but has long since become a perfect case study of what my friend and colleague Will Walldorf, a professor at Wake Forest University, aptly describes as “moral hazard”—an international relations term of art that occurs when a junior partner, assured of external backing from a great power (in this instance the United States), begins acting in ways that undermine the interests of the benefactor.
There are instances when Trump is sympathetic to the crisis engulfing the roughly 2 million Palestinians who call Gaza home, illustrated most notably when he bluntly dismissed the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s absurd contention that famine inside the enclave was Hamas-aligned propaganda. At times, he has gone beyond rhetoric—in mid-January, Trump’s team helped the outgoing Biden administration facilitate a six week–long truce between Israel and Hamas that accelerated aid shipments into the Strip, got more than 30 Israeli and foreign hostages back to their families, and bought some time for Palestinian families to go back to their homes (or what was left of them).
Trump is also cognizant of just how damaging the ongoing war is to Israel’s international reputation. The war, Trump recently told the Daily Caller, “is hurting Israel. There’s no question about it. They may be winning the war, but they’re not winning the world of public relations, you know, and it is hurting them.”
Yet on the other hand, Trump has been noticeably deferential to what Netanyahu wants to do. In March, Netanyahu decided to return to fighting, breaking the Trump-sponsored ceasefire, which had been designed to bring a permanent end to the conflict and lead to the release of all the hostages currently in Hamas’s grasp. If Trump was displeased with what Netanyahu did, he didn’t show it publicly; in fact, according to reports at the time, the White House supported Israel’s resumption of the war, killing the very deal it helped negotiate two months prior. Since then, thousands of additional Palestinians have died and some of Washington’s biggest allies in Europe (the United Kingdom and France) have either formally recognized a Palestinian state or are on their way to doing so. Meanwhile, Israel’s own plans for Gaza have entered unprecedented territory, and the country itself is increasingly divided against itself.
Trump, however, has largely stayed silent through all of this, with the exception of cursory remarks about how the war needs to conclude as soon as possible. Earlier in his tenure, it would be reasonable to assume he was talking about doing so through a comprehensive ceasefire and hostage release agreement. Today, though, it sounds like he’s moving toward a different position altogether, one where the war ends after Israel’s complete and total military victory over the Palestinian terrorist groups that have ruled Gaza since 2007. “We will only see the return of the remaining hostages when Hamas is confronted and destroyed,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last month.
But perhaps the biggest contradiction in Trump’s approach is his reported support for an Israeli military occupation of Gaza that would not only kibosh whatever diplomatic process is still viable but also jeopardize the 20 Israeli hostages who are still alive. This is reportedly the concern of Eyal Zamir, the chief of general staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), much of the IDF’s top brass, as well as the families of the hostages, whose relations with the Netanyahu government have gone from bad to worse this year.
Trump’s support for the current Israeli strategy is even more vexing when one considers that Hamas, which for much of the war opposed signing temporary, piecemeal deals that provided Israel with an opportunity to return to fighting whenever it desired, agreed to put its signature on exactly that last month. This draft agreement, which would release half of the remaining Israeli hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and yet another temporary ceasefire, was the brainchild of Steve Witkoff, the man with the unenviable task of solving the Gaza problem. Yet in classic Netanyahu fashion, the Israeli premier has had a sudden conversion and is no longer amenable to the short-term truces he was pushing for months earlier. Indeed, Netanyahu didn’t even discuss the draft agreement during his cabinet meeting last weekend, calling it irrelevant, and went as far as to justify his decision to double down on military force with Trump’s pressure tactics. Trump, Netanyahu told his cabinet, is frustrated with the failure of diplomatic efforts thus far, believes Hamas is no longer interested in diplomacy and wants Israel to decisively defeat Hamas on the ground.
Is Netanyahu telling the truth? In the end, it may not matter because Trump is now essentially writing off Gaza as Netanyahu’s problem, all the while offering Israel unconditional military and diplomatic support regardless of how ineffective, counterproductive, and downright ugly the Israeli strategy is. This is a far, far cry from January, when Trump seemed genuinely committed to a diplomatic resolution in Gaza and tasked his old pal Witkoff with getting it done. Now, the U.S. policy is a mix of enabling Israel’s worst impulses and attempting to place some distance between the United States and the horrors currently unfolding in the Palestinian enclave. It’s a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too framework that is too cute by half.
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Ultimately, Gaza doesn’t matter to U.S. security interests. Washington doesn’t have any equity in how Gaza looks, whether the Palestinian Authority is allowed to return to the area, which country chooses to launch reconstruction initiatives there, or who ultimately holds an advantageous balance of power. From a macro-level perspective, the United States will be just fine regardless.
For Trump, however, Gaza does matter, if only because it’s currently the biggest impediment to every other major diplomatic initiative in the Middle East he hopes to accomplish. Whether it’s an expansion of the 2020 Abraham Accords, a Trump-mediated normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, or a peace treaty between Israel and Syria’s new government, none of it is likely to happen as long as Israeli bombs (often paid for by the American taxpayer) continue to kill hundreds of Palestinians every week. And none of it is possible if Israel formally annexes Gaza or effectively takes over the territory in some long-term permanent occupation.
In the grand scheme, Israel holds a veto over Trump’s Middle East agenda. If this isn’t moral hazard in the extreme, what is?
