It wasn’t mission accomplished, but it was good enough for now.
“This is a big day,” President Trump said on Friday, hailing the latest development in a peace agreement he has proposed between Israel and Hamas: The militant group had agreed to begin discussing the return of hostages.
The president’s remarks, delivered in a brief video message recorded in the Oval Office, were a relatively measured addendum to an earlier social media statement, in which he said he believed Hamas was “ready for a lasting PEACE” after nearly two years of war. In its response to the proposal, Hamas ignored several requirements the Israelis had made, including the demand that the group relinquish its political power.
“We’ll see how it all turns out,” Mr. Trump said. “Very importantly, I look forward to having the hostages come home to their parents.”
For Mr. Trump, the deal comes first and the details come later, even when it comes to one of the most complicated and grave conflicts in the world. (“Stay tuned!” wrote Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, on social media as Mr. Trump taped his remarks.)
In the span of an afternoon, Mr. Trump accepted Hamas’s conditional agreement, a move that applied pressure to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to keep the momentum going in order to secure the timely return of people stolen during the war. Mr. Trump has also demanded that Israel stop bombing Gaza.
Late Friday, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said that Israel was preparing to carry out the first stage of Mr. Trump’s plan for the immediate release of all the hostages, “to bring the war to an end in accordance with the principles set forth by Israel, which are consistent with President Trump’s vision.”
It was a unsubtle reminder that Mr. Trump had, just days ago, given Mr. Netanyahu his “full backing” to eliminate Hamas should it not agree to the terms of the 20-point peace proposal the pair had presented at the White House. Unlike Mr. Trump, Mr. Netanyahu is very concerned with the details of the plan, and he has been able to persuade the president before of his need to use military force against Israel’s enemies.
“Everybody’s trying to jam everybody else,” said Steven A. Cook, the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
In potentially giving up a prime leveraging tool, Hamas may be betting that Mr. Trump’s promise to treat everyone involved “fairly” means that he will rein in Mr. Netanyahu. By reminding Mr. Trump that he agreed to let Israel proceed in its campaign if Hamas violates the peace process, Mr. Netanyahu is reserving the right to torch the agreement.
Mr. Trump, for his part, has said he just wants peace. And a deal. And maybe a Nobel Peace Prize.
When Mr. Trump and his advisers were negotiating with Mr. Netanyahu over the terms of the initial proposal, it all came down, as it often does with Mr. Trump, not to diplomatic intricacies but to his background in New York City real estate.
Mr. Trump and two top advisers — Steve Witkoff, the Middle East peace envoy, and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law — approached the fraught negotiations much like they would a business deal, according to a person familiar with the negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them. Their thinking was: Nothing is zero-sum. Anticipate what the other side wants, and then try to give that to them.
“Trump is not a details guy,” said Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. “The question is: ‘Do you want a deal?’ And if you want a deal, the politics and the diplomacy can be fudged.”
The details, of course, could quickly upend the path toward lasting peace. In its Friday statement agreeing to release hostages, Hamas said that it was willing to “hand over the administration of the Gaza Strip to a Palestinian body of independent technocrats.” But Hamas has also made clear that it wants to have a say in “the future of the Gaza Strip and the inherent rights of the Palestinian people.”
That claim conflicts with a portion of the peace plan, endorsed by both Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu: that Hamas “and other factions agree to not have any role in the governance of Gaza, directly, indirectly, or in any form.”
Still, Mr. Trump has moved two intractable sides closer to an agreement that could see the release of all of the Israeli hostages held in Gaza, as well as the bodies of those who have died.
“At least we have some consensus that everyone can start working on this without necessarily getting stuck in the weeds,” Mr. Elgindy said. “The immediate need is: Hostages are released. The bombing stops. There’s a surge in aid. All of the rest can be worked out.”
For all of his enthusiasm, Mr. Trump has not yet been able to close the deal on Gaza or in Ukraine, the site of another conflict that he promised to solve shortly after taking office. In August, when he announced that he would meet President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Alaska to discuss a peace plan between Russia and Ukraine, he was confident that peace could be achieved within days.
The meeting ended without a concrete deal. At the time, Mr. Witkoff said that no cease-fire agreement had been reached, in part because Mr. Trump had “pivoted” toward other areas of discussion.
That war continues.