It was an extraordinary day in the Middle East when, on 13 October 2025, the remaining 20 living Israeli hostages came home. The relief across Israel was palpable. There was huge joy for the hostages and their families, and thousands of Israelis celebrated on the street. I watched the videos of their reunions with rapt attention, chills running down my spine. It was an amazing and long-awaited moment given their agony of being held in captivity under extreme mental and physical duress. For the Palestinians, there was a massive sense of relief that critical humanitarian aid might soon get into Gaza. Perhaps the constant fear of Israeli bombardment would be lifted from a beleaguered population who suffered under both Hamas rule and the Israeli military campaign.

But, listening to global media commentary on a long 12-hour car ride from New England to Washington, DC, I felt the optimism for real future peace in the Middle East was way over the top. Hyperbolic statements from the Trump administration were echoed by many usually sober-minded commentators. ‘Historic’ was the operative word of the day. I imagine many journalists were too caught up in wishful thinking due to the drama that unfolded. As a veteran of far too many dashed hopes in the region, with experience of previous attempts at securing a lasting peace, I did not share this euphoria.

The implementation of the first phase of the Trump peace plan called for a ceasefire, for Hamas to release all 48 hostages, living and dead, and for Israel to release scores of Palestinian security prisoners. The Israel Defense Force (IDF) would also pull back to defined lines in Gaza. The above conditions, in fact, occurred with some degree of success, though a number of the deceased hostages remain unaccounted for.

Yet enormous and perhaps even Sisyphean challenges remain in the next phases of Trump’s plan. Particularly, and of immediate concern, the demobilisation of Hamas (which includes some form of surrender of their weapons) will be an enormous task. Already, internecine warfare has begun in Gaza, with brutal revenge killings by Hamas against rival clans, much of it captured on social media. Simply put, Hamas seem in no frame of mind to surrender their weapons. They have taken advantage of the security vacuum left behind after the Israeli withdrawal to 53 per cent of the Gaza Strip, and are operating with impunity in the areas where they remain in control, terrorising the Palestinian population while the international community can only watch from afar. I do not see a scenario in which Hamas is easily disarmed in any discernible fashion. For Trump’s peace plan to move forward, however, they must be disarmed.

With that in mind, what kind of 20,000-strong international stabilisation force will deploy to Gaza, under subsequent phases of the deal, in order to keep the peace with such violence now on rise? Numerous questions come to the fore. What Rules of Engagement (ROE) will foreign forces utilise? I was reminded recently by a former British Middle East intelligence official that during the Coalition occupation of Iraq beginning in 2003, various western coalition forces all had different rules of engagement, causing mass confusion. Do we really think that any Arab nation is going to send their troops in now, knowing that they will inevitably get into gun fights with Hamas?

After studying the conflict and serving as an intelligence officer in the region for many years, I just cannot subscribe to a simplistic notion that ‘the war is over’. Thankfully, it has stopped. A ceasefire is in place and the living hostages are home in Israel. We should commend the Trump administration for this worthy endeavour. But is it really ‘over’? Already, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz commented, only days after the Trump plan was signed, that the IDF would continue to dismantle the tunnel networks in Gaza. That seems to me to constitute some level of continued military operations in areas of Gaza both under Israel control but also into territories where Hamas remains in charge.

Perhaps my pessimistic view of real peace in the region can change after future Israeli elections, which must take place by October 2026. The current government of Benjamin Netanyahu will not be able to take any positive steps that get us to a lasting settlement. ‘Bibi’ is totally opposed to a two-state solution, and with a messianic view of the West Bank as well. This just does not mesh with a real resolution of the critical issue of Palestinian self-determination, which, after all, is a prerequisite for Saudi-Israeli normalisation. Israelis have been traumatised by the events of 7 October 2023 and perhaps in the near term are not ready to push for a Palestinian state. That will understandably take time, but the only real solution to the conflict is Palestinian self-determination. Israeli national security planners I speak with do understand this deep down.

In fact, Bibi could not even get himself to attend Trump’s 13 October peace summit in Egypt, as Trump had pressed him to do. He almost certainly feared a photo opportunity shaking Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’ hand, due to expected hysteria from his right-wing extremist coalition. That does not bode well for any type of future cooperation between Israel under Bibi and the PA, which is of critical importance to future stability in Gaza. There is no other entity besides the PA that can eventually govern Gaza in a post-Hamas scenario.

The challenges of diplomacy at this stage are massive. The Trump Administration must put the same level of commitment into ‘the day after’ as it put into the days before the hostages were released. In other words, Trump can’t get bored. Trying to find solutions that move the process even incrementally forward will be a 24/7 endeavour, over weeks and months if not years.

Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is being lauded in Israel and the US for his critical role in closing the peace deal, and rightfully so for his efforts over the last several weeks. But some history is in order. The 2020 Abraham Accords – Kushner’s brainchild that saw diplomatic agreements between Israel and several Arab states – had a tragic flaw: they left out the Palestinian question. At the time, I criticised it publicly for failing to address the plight of the Palestinians, which remains the core issue in the Arab-Israeli conflict. My fear was that the Abraham Accords were a mirage. Similar to today’s euphoria, there was not enough scrutiny of the actual flaws of that agreement.

Sadly, such trepidation appears to have been warranted, as the Accords gave Israel a false sense of security. We know how that ended. Hamas plotted and then attacked on 7 October 2023. In the end, was Israel actually safer with the Abraham Accords? The answer is an unequivocal ‘no’. The ability to travel for a vacation from Tel Aviv to the slopes at Ski Dubai – an indoor facility in the United Arab Emirates that Israelis flocked to after the Accords were signed – was ultimately meaningless in the context of what occurred on 7 October.

To be fair, Kushner did push the envelope to achieve this current deal, which deserves some praise. A highly unusual meeting in mid-October 2025 between Kushner and US special envoy Steve Witkoff, along with Hamas senior leaders headed by Khalil al-Hayya (who, ironically, the Israelis had tried to assassinate just weeks before) helped seal the ceasefire deal. My immediate thought was that this was an extraordinary direct meeting between US and Hamas (a designated terrorist group under US law), which, in essence, garnered Hamas approval to release the hostages. In return, the US provided a security guarantee that the Israeli guns would go silent. Quite astonishingly, this was a US security guarantee – for Hamas, a designated terrorist group. It was probably the right move, albeit an unorthodox one, but one can only imagine what would have happened if the administration of Joe Biden had done this. The criticisms from the Republican Party in the US would have been withering.

Finally, in Trump’s interminably long and rambling hour-plus speech at the Israeli Knesset on 13 October, he blasted his predecessors and rivals, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as well as presidents Biden and Barack Obama. Many former US diplomats and intelligence officials I spoke with believe this was highly embarrassing behaviour from Trump, though perhaps to no surprise. Unfortunately, there also appeared to be some laughter in the Knesset audience at Trump’s mockery of his US rivals. Do those Israelis not remember the nearly 18 billion dollars in US military aid that President Biden had provided to Israel in the year after 7 October? Or that, under the Biden administration, 138 hostages were released?

My advice to a good friend and former Israeli intelligence official after Trump’s Knesset speech was as follows: the current Israeli fawning over Trump and the Republican Party is highly counterproductive for the long-term bilateral relationship between the US and Israel. US assistance to Israel used to be a bipartisan issue. Yet it is clear that times have changed. Israel will be in serious trouble when the issue of continued military aid comes up under a future Democratic administration or Democratic controlled Congress, if they continue openly embracing just one of the US’ political parties.