He may not have won the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded exactly a week ago to Venezuelan opponent María Corina Machado, but Donald Trump got his “revenge” days later when he emerged as master of ceremonies at the Peace Summit in Gaza, even though it took place in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Now between praise for the real host, “the president, the general” Abdul Fatah Al-Sisi, praise for the “tremendous heart” of the emir of Qatar, passing through the reference to the “little war that we stopped” between Armenia and Azerbaijan, whose leaders were both present in the room, to the “discreet approach” of the Frenchman Emmanuel Macron, to the “very tall and very smart” chancellor German Friedrich Merz or the “beautiful young woman”, Italian Giorgia Meloni, Trump stroked the egos of the leaders present at the meeting while boasting that there was finally peace in the Middle East.
The American president had just arrived from Israel, where he had done in the Knesset what the Jerusalem Post he said it was “a speech worthy of the Oscars”, in which he declared the end of the war in Gaza. Three days earlier, Israel had declared in force the ceasefire provided for in the 20-point agreement accepted by the Jewish State and Hamas. And that very morning, the delivery of the 20 hostages still alive out of the 251 that Hamas kidnapped on October 7, 2023, in the attack against Israel in which 1,200 people died.
Israeli retaliation began on the day of the attack and in two years of war it will have cost the lives of nearly 70,000 Palestinians, according to figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health, controlled by Hamas. The destruction and very precarious humanitarian situation in the Palestinian enclave where two million people live in a rectangle measuring 40 km by 10 km wide has increased pressure from the international community on Israel to accept a truce. A scenario that the hostages’ families also demanded to recover their loved ones.
But after the big show of Trump in Egypt, the most difficult thing remains to be done. Hamas guarantees that it does not know the whereabouts of the bodies of the hostages that remain to be delivered in the first phase of the peace plan and gaps are beginning to appear, with Israel slaughtering Palestinians who violated the yellow line behind which it retreated and Hamas executing members of rival factions, threatening to plunge Gaza into civil war.
The truce may be fragile and Trump’s commitment to maintaining it is anything but certain, but the truth is that the millionaire followed a long tradition of White House tenants who brokered peace in the Middle East – be it Jimmy Carter with the Camp David agreements or Bill Clinton with the Oslo agreements.
Having resolved, in his own words, the eighth insoluble war that Trump says has ended, the US president is already looking at the ninth: Afghanistan vs Pakistan. But will it take the tenth, and put an end to a conflict between Russia and Ukraine that he promised to end in 24 hours as soon as he comes to power, to get the Nobel he so desires? We have a year to find out, starting from the summit with Putin in Budapest that has now been announced.
Executive editor of Diário de Notícias
The post Trump’s big ‘show’ appeared first on Veritas News.
