As President Donald Trump was flying to Jerusalem for a short trip to the Middle East, he issued a declaration of victory: The conflict that has been tearing Gaza apart for the last two years is now in the history books. “The war is over, you understand that,” Trump bellowed to reporters on Air Force One Sunday.

He was even more effusive on Monday, when he became the first U.S president in nearly two decades to address the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Given a standing ovation by Israeli lawmakers, Trump stepped onto the podium, grinning from ear to ear. “This is the historic dawn of a new Middle East,” Trump said. “Generations from now, this will be remembered as the moment that everything began to change and change very much for the better.”

Is he right? Or is Trump promoting a false dawn, with a comprehensive peace still beyond our grasp?

Granted, this is a very delicate question to ask right now. Nobody wants to dampen the jubilant mood in Israel and Gaza. People on both sides of the Israel-Gaza border have been living through hell since Hamas sparked the war on Oct. 7, 2023, and the results of the fighting have been nothing short of catastrophic. The multiple diplomatic initiatives undertaken by the mediators frequently failed, leading many people — this columnist included — to wonder if there would ever come a point when a deal could be signed. The families of the hostages in Israel were losing hope, as were the roughly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza who were caught between bombs, bullets and humanitarian desperation.

Taking all of this into consideration, there’s no doubt that Trump has scored a big diplomatic win here. The 20 Israeli hostages who are still alive are now back in the arms of their loved ones, and Gaza will be given a respite, providing international humanitarian agencies the opportunity to channel aid into the battered enclave. Although Trump’s detractors will be loath to admit it, he did what Joe Biden couldn’t. He pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into stopping the war and endorsing a 20-point plan whose elements include the prospect of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians on the road to a two-state solution — a concept that is anathema to the hard-right premier.

But there’s something that also isn’t in dispute: We are still far from the groundbreaking peace in the Middle East that Trump and his foreign policy advisers have been trumpeting for the last five days. We can certainly hope that such a peace is in the offing but to state categorically that a new age is now upon us is a bit like DJ Moore spiking the ball on the Bears’ own 30-yard line.

How Israel, Hamas and Trump act in the weeks ahead will determine whether a wider Israeli-Palestinian peace accord is viable or whether Gaza will be engulfed in another round of violence. While the Trump administration might not want to admit it, both scenarios remain possible because much of Trump’s 20-point Gaza plan is vague and unsettled. The plan contains items that will require a whole new set of complicated negotiations between two parties — Israel and Hamas — that have no trust in each other (rightly so) and are highly suspicious of the other’s motives.

Here is one example: Trump’s plan calls for the creation of an international stabilization force that would deploy to Gaza, take over security as the Israeli military gradually withdraws and serve as a placeholder until enough well-trained and internationally vetted Palestinian police officers can do the job. That sounds good in theory, but the practicalities of implementation could get tricky. First, with the exception of Jordan and Egypt, which are widely expected to serve as the principal trainers of a new Palestinian force for Gaza, nobody knows how big this international stabilization force will be or where the soldiers will come from. Trump obviously discussed all of this during his meeting with other heads of state in Egypt, but the matter needs to be settled quickly if the plan has any chance of moving forward at an acceptable pace.

Second, Trump’s initiative states that Israel will withdraw from Gaza once certain “standards, milestones and time frames” are met. Those milestones, in turn, will be determined based on criteria established by Israel, the United States, the international stabilization force and mediators such as Egypt and Qatar.

Again, this sounds perfectly reasonable. After all, Israel isn’t going to pull all its troops from Gaza unless it has high confidence that doing so won’t leave a security vacuum for Hamas to exploit. Yet what exactly are the timelines and standards? The blunt reality is we don’t know; none of this has been negotiated yet. Netanyahu, who has an ultra-nationalist governing coalition to worry about, has an incentive to drag out the implementation process as long as possible by insisting on security benchmarks that might be far too steep for any Palestinian police force to meet. If Israel holds a veto over the process — and based on what the White House has released, it sure looks like it will — then one wonders whether a full Israeli military withdrawal will even be ordered. If not, then Hamas doesn’t have much incentive to keep its end of the bargain.

Finally, there is this elephant in the room: Hamas’ disarmament. The United States, Egypt, Qatar, Israel and every other country associated with the Gaza file agree that Hamas must hand over its weapons and demobilize its fighters. However, nothing in the days since the Israel-Hamas ceasefire was signed suggests that the Palestinian terrorist group is willing to do this absent the formation of a Palestinian state. Some Hamas officials are also stressing that Hamas fighters should be integrated into a Palestinian national army. Needless to say, both of these positions are strongly rejected by Netanyahu and Israelis writ large.

You can’t blame Trump for celebrating today. But the game isn’t over yet.

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Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

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