Aletho News

Trump wanted to play peacemaker, Netanyahu made sure he failed

By William Van Wagenen | The Cradle | January 27, 2026

“My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier. That’s what I want to be: a peacemaker and a unifier.”  — US President Donald Trump’s second inaugural address in January 2025.

Within a year, Trump had ordered unprovoked strikes on Iran and Venezuela, and his signature peace deals in Gaza and Syria lay in ruins. In both cases, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posed as a supporter of Trump’s efforts – only to systematically sabotage them from within.

Gaslighting Gaza

During the transition into his second term, Trump’s team played a central role in finalizing a 15 January 2025 ceasefire in Gaza that halted major fighting and secured the phased return of Israeli captives held by Hamas since 7 October 2023. Trump then publicly embraced that outcome during his inauguration, stating: “I’m pleased to say that as of yesterday, one day before I assumed office, the hostages in the Middle East are coming back home to their families.”

The first phase of the deal halted Israeli bombing, saw 33 captives freed, 2,000 Palestinian prisoners released, and allowed humanitarian aid to flood Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians began returning to northern areas. The next phase, which aimed to end the war entirely and release the remaining captives, never materialized.

However, Netanyahu immediately undermined Trump by refusing to authorize his team to negotiate the core elements of phase two of the ceasefire in talks that were supposed to begin on 3 February 2025.

“While Israel signed on to the deal,” the Times of Israel wrote, Netanyahu “refused to even hold talks regarding the terms of phase two.” Instead, he suddenly “insisted that Israel will not end the war until Hamas’s governing and military capabilities have been destroyed.”

As the end of phase one approached, Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, tried to salvage the deal by submitting a bridge proposal that would have seen the first phase of the ceasefire extended by several weeks, in exchange for the release of five Israeli captives.

Though Hamas spokesman Abdel Latif al-Qanoua publicly stated the resistance movement “looked at the proposal positively,” Netanyahu rejected this proposal as well, sabotaging Trump’s ceasefire once again.

Instead, on 2 March, one day after the phase two should have begun, Netanyahu finally agreed to extend the first phase for another 42 days, until the end of the Passover holiday.

He sabotaged talks by blockading Gaza, cutting off essentials, and pushing two million Palestinians toward famine. The Trump White House publicly backed Israel’s siege, saying it would “support” the blockade, effectively endorsing the collapse of its own peace initiative.

Netanyahu then put the nail in the coffin of Trump’s plan by unilaterally ending the ceasefire. On 18 March, Israel unleashed a “shock aerial offensive,” killing more than 400 Palestinians, including five senior Hamas officials and many women and children, in just one day.

“We never expected the war to return,” said Ibrahim Deeb, after 35 members of his family were killed in a strike on their home in a neighborhood in Gaza City.

Netanyahu’s actions not only nullified the ceasefire but also openly defied the White House. PBS later confirmed that Israel’s shock offensive in March was the “culmination” of Netanyahu’s “efforts to get out of the ceasefire with Hamas that he agreed to in January,” the agreement Trump had championed.

Netanyahu derails Trump’s 20-point plan

Undeterred, Trump pushed forward a new ceasefire alongside a 20-point peace plan, which took effect on 10 October, and was later passed at the UN Security Council in November 2025. Hamas complied, releasing all captives, alive and dead. Tel Aviv responded by violating nearly every term of the plan.

The ceasefire stated that “all military operations, including aerial and artillery bombardment, will be suspended, and battle lines will remain frozen.”

However, Israeli bombing continued, killing at least 442 Palestinians over the next four months, including through air strikes, shelling, and gunfire across Gaza. According to The Lancet, the ceasefire barely improved the “horrific” situation in Gaza.

Despite pledging to freeze battle lines, Israel kept bombing Gaza, killing hundreds more. It refused to withdraw from the agreed areas, expanded its military presence west of the so-called “Yellow Line,” and shot Palestinians attempting to return to their homes.

Future phases called for staged withdrawals of Israeli troops to around 40 percent and 15 percent of Gaza’s territory, with the final stage allowing Israel to maintain a security perimeter around the enclave until it is “secure” from any “resurgent terror threat.”

However, over the next four months, Israeli forces refused to withdraw eastward from their positions along the Yellow Line. Instead, they pushed further west, conquering more territory and continuing the systematic demolition of Palestinian neighborhoods, BBC reported, based on satellite images.

Israeli forces also shot and killed Palestinians entering newly seized areas west of the line. In one case, Israeli troops shot and killed 17-year-old Zaher Nasser Shamiya even though he was on the west side of the Yellow Line.

“The tank turned his body into pieces … it came into the safe area [west of the Yellow Line] and ran over him,” his father told the BBC.

Facilitating humanitarian aid?

Trump’s plan also stipulated 600 aid trucks per day. Israel allowed just 171. Washington’s own Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) was ignored by Israeli authorities, who blocked critical items like scalpels and tent poles. As Jan Egeland of the Norwegian Refugee Council warned, “The credibility of the United States is at stake here.”

On 30 December, Israel undermined Trump’s plan further, barring 37 international NGOs, including Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Oxfam, and Mercy Corps, from operating in Gaza.

A “Board of Peace” and international force meant to administer Gaza never materialized, as Netanyahu stonewalled amnesty offers for Hamas fighters. Trump hoped to start disarming the resistance with a pilot program, offering fighters safe passage abroad. Netanyahu responded by ordering their assassination.

The destruction of this pilot scheme sealed the fate of Trump’s Gaza project. Without Hamas being disarmed and a civilian authority in place, Trump’s vision of Gaza as a neoliberal “Riviera in the Middle East” collapsed.

Undermining peace in Syria

Netanyahu did not stop at Gaza. In Syria, he again undercut Trump’s attempts at diplomacy.

Both Washington and Tel Aviv supported self-appointed Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa’s rise to power in Damascus as part of the CIA’s Operation Timber Sycamore. However, Trump and Netanyahu have pursued different policies toward Syria since Sharaa, the ex-Al-Qaeda leader who went by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Julani, toppled former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in December 2024.

After Sharaa’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) takeover of the Syrian capital, the Trump administration immediately sought to bolster Sharaa’s legitimacy.

On 20 December, Trump sent Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf to Damascus to meet Sharaa and pave the way for removing his and HTS’s terrorist designations.

While Netanyahu celebrated Sharaa’s entry into Damascus, even taking credit for it, Israel nevertheless began implementing a policy of keeping its northern neighbor “weak and fragmented.”

Israeli forces swiftly launched 480 airstrikes to destroy Syrian military assets and invaded southwest Syria, seizing 155 square miles of territory, including positions atop Mount Hermon, a strategic peak straddling the Syria–Lebanon border.

Despite covertly providing weapons, medical assistance, cash, and even air support to HTS during the 14-year war against Assad, Israeli officials continued to refer to Sharaa as a terrorist in the media after he finally reached power.

Israel also lobbied to keep brutal US sanctions in place, in part through the influence of US Congressman Brian Mast, a dual US-Israeli citizen and former soldier in the Israeli army.

In contrast, Trump promoted Sharaa, granting him a personal meeting in Riyadh on 14 May after calling for the removal of the sanctions the day before.

After the meeting, Trump praised Sharaa, who spent years dispatching suicide bombers to kill civilians in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, describing him as a “young, attractive guy” with a very “strong past.”

Trump soon dispatched his special envoy, Tom Barack, to facilitate a peace agreement between Syria and Israel.

“It starts with a dialogue,” Barrack stated during a visit to Damascus in which he raised the American flag over the US ambassador’s residence. “I’d say we need to start with just a nonaggression agreement, talk about boundaries and borders.”

Trump continued to promote Sharaa in the following months, despite massacring thousands of Alawite civilians on Syria’s coast in March and hundreds of Druze civilians in the country’s southern Suwayda Governorate.

In contrast, Israeli officials continued to undermine Sharaa, calling him a “jihadist terrorist of the Al-Qaeda school” in the press and pledging to defend Syria’s Druze from his Sunni extremist-dominated army, despite Israel’s covert role in “green-lighting” Sharaa’s massacres of both the Alawites and Druze.

However, Trump’s love affair with Sharaa continued in the following months, as Washington continued to lobby Tel Aviv to sign a security agreement with Damascus.

On 17 September, Sharaa said that Syria was seeking “something like” the 1974 Israel–Syria Disengagement Agreement concluded after the Yom Kippur War.

Four days later, a senior Trump administration official told Israeli media that such a security agreement was “99 percent” complete. “It’s really a question of timing and also the Syrians communicating it to their people,” the official said.

A five-hour meeting in London between Syrian and Israeli officials “fueled anticipation” that an agreement could be announced later that week, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.

Tel Aviv kills the deal

While Trump sought a Syria–Israel nonaggression pact, Tel Aviv piled on new demands, including a walled humanitarian corridor for Druze populations and permanent Israeli control of Mount Hermon. Even after Sharaa conceded to key Israeli demands, a planned security agreement collapsed at the last minute.

But Trump continued to support Sharaa, removing him from the Treasury Department’s “specially designated global terrorist list” and welcoming him to the White House on 10 November.

Trump fumed but did not retaliate. When Netanyahu bombed the Beit Jinn in late November, killing 13, Trump urged Tel Aviv to maintain a “strong and true dialogue” with Syria. Netanyahu responded by demanding a demilitarized buffer zone all the way to Damascus – a maximalist condition that ensured no agreement could be signed.

Eventually, a US-mediated mechanism was established for limited security coordination. In return, Washington gave Sharaa a green light to attack Kurdish forces in Aleppo and northeast Syria. Even then, Netanyahu’s sabotage succeeded as the broader Syria–Israel agreement never materialized.

Who’s the superpower?

Asked recently if there were any limits on his power, Trump replied: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

But recent history suggests otherwise. Trump’s ego-driven quest to play peacemaker in West Asia was thwarted not by external enemies but by a supposed ally in Tel Aviv. Netanyahu, by relentlessly undermining two major US-led peace initiatives, exposed a blunt truth about power in Washington.

As former US president Bill Clinton once said after a fraught first meeting with Netanyahu three decades ago: “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?”

January 27, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Syria, United States, Zionism