Opinion | Trump's Gaza Cease-fire Is Theater Disguising Israel's Desire to Prolong the War

U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Ben-Gurion Airport in October.Credit: Evelyn Hockstein/ Reuters

The Gaza crisis appears to result from deliberate political choices by Israel and the U.S.

While the U.S. can pressure Israel, it opts not to, avoiding real diplomacy and claiming to prioritize stability.

Gaza remains caught in a cycle of suffering and destruction,

with efforts focused on managing the crisis rather than solving it.

Could it be that President Trump is intentionally trying

to lure Netanyahu into a trap of his own making?

Israeli media increasingly portrays a growing rift between U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over "the day after" in Gaza. But a closer reading – taking into account how Gaza is actually governed, how it receives supplies and the constraints it faces – reveals a different reality.

The disagreement is not about Gaza's future, but about how quickly and how visibly Israel's objectives should be consolidated.

Trump is not challenging Israeli goals in Gaza. He is seeking to accelerate their execution, package them as a political achievement and move on. Netanyahu, by contrast, continues to rely on delay, ambiguity, and controlled escalation – his usual strategy for buying time while reshaping facts on the ground.

This tension surfaced publicly after Israel's recent targeted assassination of a senior Hamas official. According to reports by Israeli journalists, Trump's irritation at the move does not stem from opposition to military force, but rather from concern that Netanyahu's controlled escalations could sabotage the staged political progression Trump wants to present as a diplomatic success.

Yet the "success" itself rests on fragile foundations.

The U.S.-promoted vision – international stabilization forces, transitional governance structures, and reconstruction pathways – faces fundamental obstacles. Few countries are willing to deploy forces into a territory Israel continues to define as "under Hamas control." This designation functions less as a security assessment than as a political veto. It allows Israel to block any arrangement that might limit its freedom of military action.

Even within Israel's security establishment, there is little confidence that Hamas can be dismantled through deterrence alone or the job can be outsourced to an international force. Still, the illusion persists because it serves a strategic purpose: Keeping Gaza suspended in a permanent interim, without sovereignty, without political resolution, and without accountability.

Israel's strategy to dismantle Hamas rests on a key demand: disarmament.

A Palestinian man carries the body of baby Saeed Abdeen, who according to the medics died due to cold weather, in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza Strip earlier this month.Credit: Ramadan Abed/ Reuters

Disarmament is repeatedly presented as the gateway to stability. But disarmament, without withdrawal, without a political settlement and without sovereignty is not a solution – it is a formula for prolonging domination. A Gaza stripped of defensive capacity while remaining under blockade and external control is not stabilized; it is neutralized.

The same contradiction defines the proposed international force. Israel insists that any such force must focus narrowly on disarmament, while simultaneously expressing distrust in its effectiveness to carry out the job and reserving the right to act unilaterally. The result is a self-defeating model: an international presence stripped of authority, legitimacy, and political horizon.

Meanwhile, Gaza's civilian reality is not resolved – it is managed. Aid becomes an instrument of control rather than recovery. Reconstruction is deferred, conditional, and securitized. Funding is discussed not as restitution for destruction, but as leverage tied to security benchmarks that remain undefined and endlessly adjustable.

Gaza City last week.Credit: Dawoud Abu Alkas/Reuters

This is where Trump's agenda becomes clearer. Even when he applies pressure, it remains firmly within Israeli parameters. He does not seek to dismantle the logic of the war; he seeks to administer its outcome efficiently. "The day after" is framed not as liberation or national rebuilding, but as governance without sovereignty: technocratic councils, stabilization bodies, and managerial solutions designed to bypass political representation rather than restore it.

This approach ignores a central reality visible on the ground: security cannot be imposed through administrative architecture alone. Fuel, food, movement, and reconstruction are already governed through layered bureaucratic controls. Without a political horizon, adding new managerial layers does not produce stability – it reproduces fragility under a different name.

The fixation on security-first formulas ensures continued conflict. An Israeli redeployment that preserves control over borders, airspace, sea access, and buffer zones is not an end to war. It is war by other means.

What is unfolding in Gaza is not a failure of mediation or a lack of American leverage. It is a deliberate political choice. The United States possesses unparalleled tools to pressure Israel but consistently refrains from using them. Israel, in turn, exploits this permissiveness to empty diplomatic initiatives of substance while using the language of "preserving stability."

Between Israel's refusal to end the war and Washington's refusal to impose that end, Gaza remains trapped – its suffering administered, its future postponed, its destruction normalized under the vocabulary of security management.

This is not a path to peace. It is the architecture of a prolonged war, carefully designed to look like progress.

Mahmoud Shehada is a humanitarian operations leader in Gaza, coordinating aid delivery, civilian protection and cease-fire efforts as well as leading critical aid convoys, evacuation operations and humanitarian negotiations with all parties to the conflict.