Since returning to the White House, US President Donald Trump has struck an increasingly blasé tone toward Israel’s war on Gaza. As the enclave descends into famine and some of his closest US political allies declare that a genocide is taking place, the limits of his apathy are being tested.
“Where are Trump’s red lines? How much human misery and death and destruction is he willing to accept in Gaza until he says enough?” Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, told Middle East Eye.
Trump said this week that “real starvation” was occurring in Gaza, in an apparent jab at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has denied the charge. Trump said anyone who viewed the images of emaciated children in Gaza would say it was terrible “unless they’re pretty cold-hearted or, worse than that, nuts”.
Trump, who gutted USAID, sidelined the United Nations in Gaza and ran on the pledge of distancing the US from foreign entanglements, is now forced to answer questions about a famine in a distant Middle Eastern enclave because he hasn’t given enough attention to a ceasefire, experts say.
“What we are watching play out [in Gaza] is Israel free from any American focus, interests or pressure,” Aaron David Miller, a former State Department official and Middle East negotiator, told MEE.
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Miller said there is a “pattern” to Trump’s approach to Gaza and other foreign hotspots.
“[He] wants to end the fighting in Ukraine but not the war. Similarly, he wants to bring the hostages home and create a better humanitarian situation, but is not interested in spending the time on the underlying issues to end the war,” he said.
‘Only Palestinians’
Last week, the US surprised many when it decided to halt its efforts to negotiate a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
Experts say that while Trump will take a ceasefire in Gaza if he can get one, there has been no sign he is willing to extend time and serious political capital to get it.
Shortly after taking office in January, he was asked about a now-defunct truce that his incoming administration helped broker. “That’s not our war, it’s their war. But I’m not confident [in the ceasefire holding],” Trump said.
Trump’s interest in a ceasefire has only waned since touting it as a major diplomatic victory – and a sign of things to come for the self-proclaimed “peacemaker president” – before even taking office.
In fact, the most airtime Trump has since spent on Gaza was in February, when he skipped over the hard task of ensuring ceasefire talks between Hamas and Israel continued, as part of their collapsed three-phase deal. Instead, he said he wanted to take over Gaza and turn it into a “Middle East Riviera” after forcibly displacing the Palestinians.
That “Trump plan” has become one of Netanyahu’s stated war objectives, but Trump was never married to the idea, experts and diplomats say.
‘The US is never going to ensure a permanent end to the war in Gaza. Hamas knows that’
– Rose Kelanic, Defense Priorities
He stopped talking about it after he was dissuaded by King Abdullah of Jordan and other Arab allies, MEE reported. However, Trump’s instincts for a flashy deal underscore how he views Gaza, Elgindy said.
“The ceasefire for Trump, like most American politicians, has always been about the hostages. If Palestinian lives are saved as a result, that’s a good thing. If the war ends, that’s fine. But it’s not the goal. After all, they are only Palestinians. There is no payoff for Trump.”
Of course, the US’s Arab allies are worried about a ceasefire because their populations are boiling with anger at Israel. Therefore, they have tried to entice Trump and Israel into a deal.
The oil-rich Gulf monarchs who can splash out on AI chips and American weaponry have the best access to Trump, diplomats say. The US president says he wants a normalisation agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Riyadh has made a Gaza ceasefire a precondition for any expansion of the 2020 Abraham Accords. Saudi Arabia also says Israel needs to take irreversible steps towards the creation of a Palestinian state.
So far, none of that has been enough to convince Trump to confront Netanyahu over ending the war on Gaza. Instead, Trump lashed out at Hamas on Friday, saying they were to blame for the US decision to pull out of the talks.
“I think they want to die, and it’s very bad. It got to a point where you’re going to have to finish the job,” Trump said.
The US has publicly blamed Hamas for the collapses in ceasefire talks since the Biden administration started negotiations in 2024. But analysts and diplomats almost overwhelmingly agree that Israel unilaterally broke the last ceasefire in March when it resumed attacking Gaza despite Hamas handing over the captives as required by the deal.
“The president’s preference would be to let Israel continue to pursue its military operations. If the pictures weren’t so catastrophic, he’d probably allow the Israelis to keep going,” Miller told MEE.
More than 60,000 Palestinians have now been killed by Israel’s offensive, which started in response to the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 attack on southern Israel.
‘We are watching Israel free from any American focus, interests, or pressure’
– Aaron David Miller, former Middle East negotiator
Hamas is a US-designated terrorist organisation, but the Trump administration broke with decades of precedent to boycott the group when it negotiated the release of a dual US-Israeli captive in May.
The deal went through smoothly. Trump’s special envoy for hostages even sat down for a plate of knafeh – a Palestinian pastry – with senior Hamas officials in one round of talks.
Hamas insists that any agreement it reaches with Israel to release the remaining 20 living captives – all military-aged men – will lead to a permanent end to the war. The group says it will relinquish governing Gaza, but has made no commitment to disarm and has resisted going into exile.
This week, Qatar, Egypt and Saudi Arabia joined the European Union in calling for Hamas to disarm and saying they would support peacekeepers in Gaza.
The statement also called for a two-state solution on the pre-1967 war borders that would reserve all of Gaza, the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem for a Palestinian state. Israel rejects this plan. Arab officials say they are not optimistic their overtures will sway Israel to give up attacking Gaza.
In his own way, Trump has acknowledged Hamas’s claim that they can’t trust a ceasefire in Gaza to hold. The ceasefire that was under negotiation was structured with three phases, similar to the deal Israel broke earlier this year.
The first phase calls on Hamas to release captives in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from parts of Gaza, more aid entering the enclave, and Palestinian prisoners being freed. The second phase includes crucial talks to permanently end the war and Israel’s full withdrawal from Gaza. The third phase deals with future governance and reconstruction.
“They (Hamas) know what happens after you get the final hostages,” Trump said last week. “Basically because of that, they really didn’t want to make a deal… They lose their shield. They lose their cover.”
Netanyahu says he wants to fully destroy Hamas and maintain total security control over the Gaza Strip, even after the captives are released. Netanyahu’s finance minister and national security minister also support the reconstruction of Israeli settlements in Gaza.
“The US is never going to ensure a permanent end to the war in Gaza. Hamas knows that and it’s correct in not trusting the US. The US has given them no reason to. Trump has been transparent about it,” Rose Kelanic, director of the Middle East programme at Defense Priorities, a Washington think-tank that argues for restraint in US foreign policy, told MEE.
Arab and American officials say privately that achieving a ceasefire in Gaza would require Trump to go up directly against Netanyahu. Trump has shown he is only willing to do so on a select few issues.
‘Inject this in my veins’
In Yemen, where missiles are still being fired at Israel, Trump reached an independent ceasefire with the Houthis.
He has lifted sanctions on Syria and is signalling recognition of a Turkish zone of influence there, irritating Israel.
Trump launched unprecedented strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, but as the smoke cleared from Israel and Iran’s so-called 12-day war, the US attack’s impact looks less certain, and Trump quickly moved to defuse tensions with Iran, rejecting the wider offensive Netanyahu had hoped for.
Inside the US, Trump counts pro-Israel donors among his base. The most prominent deep-pocketed one is the billionaire Miriam Adelson. His family members have also toyed with the annexation of Gaza.
Trump’s “Riviera” plan echoed one discussed by his son-in-law and former advisor, Jared Kushner.
But American conservatives – especially young ones who backed Trump in 2024 and are tuned into podcasters like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens – are increasingly critical of Israel.
According to one Pew poll, 50 percent of them hold an unfavourable view of Israel. They are especially mobilised by attacks on Palestinian Churches and US aid going to Israel’s military.
During the Israel-Iran conflict, Trump said he ordered Israeli warplanes not to bomb Iran to preserve a ceasefire he negotiated. “They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” Trump told reporters when asked about Israel and Iran.
He blamed both countries when his deal appeared shaky, but let it be known he was more upset with Israel. “I’ve got to get Israel to calm down now,” he said.
‘If the war ends, that’s fine. But it’s not the goal. After all, they are only Palestinians. There is no payoff for Trump’
– Khaled Elgindy, Georgetown University
His base lapped it up. “I loved it when he dropped the F bomb talking to the press…He was like, both of them have gone crazy… I was like, inject this in my veins right now,” Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene told Carlson on a podcast in June.
This week, Greene, a staunch Trump defender, became the first Republican member of Congress to declare Israel’s war on the enclave a genocide.
If Trump were looking to energise part of his base, particularly as his promise to end the war in Ukraine looks to be flagging, he could take a harder line on Israel and even threaten to withhold offensive arms provided by US taxpayers, analysts say.
“Trump has more political freedom to stand up to Netanyahu than any other US president,” Kelanic, at Defense Priorities, said.
“Netanyahu is a Trump frenemy. A lot of his base doesn’t support him. But somewhere along the line, Trump came to the conclusion that the ceasefire collapse is all Hamas’s fault, so he has given Israel backing to pursue maximalist policies.”
‘For strategic reasons’
To be sure, Trump has given unparalleled support to Israel closer to its borders. The Trump administration has made it clear that it won’t oppose Israeli strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Israel received a rare censure from the US when it bombed a Catholic church in Gaza and settlers attacked a Palestinian Christian town in the occupied West Bank, but nothing that would disrupt the flow of billions of dollars in US aid.
The Trump administration also let the killing of a 20-year-old US citizen in the occupied West Bank pass by with nothing more than a statement urging an investigation.
With ceasefire negotiations going nowhere, the famine in Gaza is deepening, and Israel is doubling down. This week, Haaretz reported that Netanyahu’s government could begin officially annexing the occupied West Bank in the coming days. The report said annexation would be tied to a lack of progress on a Gaza ceasefire.
While Netanyahu is losing support in the US, polling from inside Israel suggests the very topics Trump would need to confront him on to achieve a permanent end to the war in Gaza are widely popular inside Israel.
For example, the Israeli polling firm, Geocartography Knowledge Group, found 82 percent of Israeli Jews support the forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza.
Experts say that if Trump continues to disregard the need for an end to the war on Gaza – extending beyond the release of Israeli captives – he will have more challenges to deal with in the Middle East.
People in both Jordan and Egypt, two US partners, are seething with anger over the images of starving Palestinians corralled into cages as they try to get food.
Egypt and Jordan believe Israel sees the starvation crisis as an opportunity to move ahead with plans to forcibly displace Palestinians, Arab officials tell MEE.
This week, a police station in southern Cairo was stormed by men who said Egypt was complicit in the genocide of Palestinians. With his government under pressure, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi made a rare video address to Trump, calling on him to end the war in Gaza.
“There is no perspective from ‘America First’ where Israeli operations benefit US national interests. Ending the genocide, frankly, needs to happen for moral reasons, but also strategic reasons,” Kelanic said.
