There is no doubt that US President Donald Trump would like to bring peace to Israel, Gaza, and the Middle East. But no one thinks that is really happening anytime soon.
If that is true, what is the White House’s backup/most realistic plan that it is aiming for?
Two major possible leaks in recent days could be part of a pincer movement by the Trump administration, or elements within the administration, to make sufficient progress regarding Hamas disarmament to circumvent any Israeli attempt to return to a major ground invasion in Gaza.
First came the leak that Indonesia will finally step up to be the first country to provide peacekeeping forces for the International Stabilization Force.
The number of expected troops has vacillated from a few thousand to eight thousand, and the timing of the first deployment has varied from a few weeks to longer, but it seems pretty clear that Indonesian forces are on the way four months after the October ceasefire kicked in.
While extremely slow in coming and while there were many false starts about when Indonesia and other countries would actually show up, if and when Indonesian soldiers deploy, it will be a potential game-changer.
The Trump administration will be able to claim to have achieved a concrete change on the ground to the security paradigm in Gaza.
On Wednesday, The New York Times reported on a potential Trump administration gradual disarmament strategy of Hamas.
According to the report, the US is demanding that the terror group surrender all heavy weapons that are capable of striking Israel, such as rockets and rocket-propelled grenades, but will allow the group to keep some small arms, at least initially, according to a draft plan.
Further, the report stated that an American-led team, which includes US envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, as well as Nickolay Mladenov, who led UN Middle East peace efforts from 2015 to 2020, intends to share the document with Hamas within weeks.
However, the report does not clarify who would take ownership of the weapons that the terrorists are meant to hand over or how that process would play out.
The draft plan envisions a phased disarmament, which could take months or longer to complete, according to officials cited in the report.
In his unveiling of the Board of Peace at the World Economic Forum on January 22, Kushner also focused on heavy weapons and said that Hamas has 100 days to disarm, which will conclude in early May.
However, collecting only heavy weapons would leave Hamas’s estimated 60,000 Kalashnikov rifles in their hands.
IDF sources desperately want them collected, but are highly doubtful that the US will go to the mat to get them, even if Trump is committed to doing so in a general way, since Hamas might prefer returning to war over giving them up.
Hamas may tell itself that at least in war, it would maintain its position as the most powerful group in Gaza internally.
It seems like the realistic Trump administration goal is to have collected all or most heavy weapons by May and possibly to have collected some Kalashnikovs or to have started negotiating with Hamas on that issue.
It is also hard to see phased disarmament moving faster than that, given that it took three months instead of three weeks for the second phase of the peace plan to start at all and that three weeks in, no disarmament process has even started.
No one has even made a serious statement about collecting small arms.
The one other key detail is that Israeli elections must occur by October 2026 at the latest, which means election season must open no later than early summer, and it could easily start earlier.
Trump may cut off Israeli attempts at Gaza ground op
Putting together all of these data points, it seems quite possible that Trump will push to frame the achievements of Indonesia coming to Gaza for peacekeeping and Hamas handing over its heavy weapons by early May as a basis to cut off any Israeli attempt to initiate a new major ground operation in Gaza before Israeli elections.
Sources rejected all of the above scenarios and significant aspects of The New York Times report as groundless.
But no officials will provide any timetable or concrete details about who or how the Kalashnikovs will be collected before early May.
When Kushner launched the second phase and mentioned that “personal arms” would be registered and decommissioned, the timeline and the category of weapons meant to be part of this were not mentioned.
No one has provided any additional details on this either.
Short of Hamas shooting itself in the foot by refusing even the appearance of partial disarmament, all of this makes the above scenario of Trump blocking a potential Israeli invasion of Gaza, on the basis of interim progress, a real possibility, whether it is planned or not.