The Gaza peace Trump announced, and the rejection Netanyahu delivered

Donald Trump took to social media on Thursday, 30^th July, to announce what he called a breakthrough: a phased agreement under the Board of Peace requiring the Palestinian Resistance to disarm and Israel to withdraw. The optics were of a president closing out a genocide he, and his predecessor, enabled for two years.

The Palestinian Resistance agreed to the plan. Israel rejected it.

Imagine if the Resistance had rejected the fifteen points by reasonably conditioning disarmament on an end to Israeli occupation. We don’t have to imagine Trump’s reaction. He’d have condemned them by nightfall and held them responsible for killing the peace plan.

Israel gets a different standard. On Sunday, 9^th August, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet: “I want to clarify this: Israel rejects the 15-point document.”

Rather than call out Israel for sabotaging his own plan, Trump waved away Netanyahu’s rejection as mere election posturing, as if that was acceptable. Trump’s dismissal didn’t go unnoticed. Three days later, Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, doubled down declaring that Israel will not withdraw, not from Gaza, not from Lebanon and not from Syria

Last May, I wrote an article: “Stop blaming Netanyahu, stupid,” where I argued, it was never one man. It’s the Zionist Project itself, and the Israeli public that keeps ratifying it. A poll released last summer found 76 percent of Israelis believe the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza was a mistake. Half of all Israelis now say they’d support renewing Jewish settlement inside Gaza itself — a figure that climbs to 83 percent among the ultra-Orthodox and 67 percent among religious Jews. And in a finding that goes to the heart of how Israelis have rewritten their own history, 56 percent now believe that if the 2005 disengagement had never happened, 7^th October would have been far less likely.

Withdrawal, in other words, has been recast in the Israeli imagination as the original sin, not occupation, and not Israel’s pre-7^th October starvation siege.

In rejecting Trump’s plan, Netanyahu is pandering to his voting base. He is giving the Israeli Jewish majority exactly what they’ve told pollsters they want. He’s competing against political challengers who reject any withdrawal from Gaza.

Trump excuses this as political “posturing,” as if it’s temporary, when in fact, it is creating a status quo to be normalized after the election.

As usual, Israel responded to Trump’s plan in two days of intensive strikes across Gaza, murdering 26 Palestinians and wounding 76. The single ugliest strike hit medicine warehouses attached to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah, one of the last facilities in central Gaza still able to treat large numbers of patients. Two of four storage buildings were destroyed and two more badly damaged. The target was a “dangerous storage” of intravenous fluid, dialysis supplies, intensive-care medication, in a place where half the dialysis machines didn’t work and kidney patients were dying because treatment sessions keep getting cut.

These weren’t abstractions. In Gaza City’s al-Sousi Tower, a strike killed Abdullah Abu Taif, 33, his pregnant wife, Abeer Anan, 29, their five-year-old son, Azzam, and where medics recovered the remains of an unborn child from the rubble. Near Khan Younis, a strike murdered Mahmoud al-Hams, 38, his wife, Fatima, 37, and their young daughter. An elderly couple, Kamal and Huda Abu Muailiq, were killed in their home near Deir el-Balah the same night.

This’s how Israel translates Trump’s “breakthrough” on the ground.

It is how Netanyahu sends a message to American presidents, as he did nearly a year ago when he openly defied Trump’s calls to stop bombing Gaza. Palestinian children’s blood becomes the currency of political pressure.

With every refusal to heed Washington, Netanyahu demonstrates that he can ignore an American president’s demands without consequence, while the credibility and authority of the U.S. president are diminished in the process. Netanyahu’s arrogant message is unmistakable: Israel can defy Washington, and Washington will absorb the political cost.

In October 2025, Israel secured the release of Israeli captives under a deal conditioned on ending the war. It got what it wanted immediately and did not deliver on its side. Since the ceasefire of October 10, 2025, Israel has violated it more than 4,000 times, murdering 1,300 Palestinians — more than all the Israelis, soldiers and civilians, killed on October 7. This is while food aid deliveries was two third less than what the agreement promised. The territory Israel was supposed to withdraw from has instead expanded from 53% to 70%. Any withdrawal Israel may now negotiate, if any at all, will start from that expanded line of occupation, not the yellow line agreed at the ceasefire.

A president who announces a peace deal to the world has no agency of his own. He is too weak to bring himself to hold Netanyahu to account for rejecting his own plan; a political eunuch, unable to rein in a potentate whose country survives on U.S. political and financial largesse.

Trump’s Gaza legacy does not differ from Biden’s. Both stood impotent before Netanyahu’s rejection. Two subservient leaders who had shown over again that Israel does not answer to Washington, Washington answers to Israel. They leave behind a legacy of enabling an Israeli genocide and two consecutive Israel-first administrations.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.