Trump, quite rightly, views the agreement between Hamas and Israel to sign off on the first phase of his peace plan as an ‘Historic and Unprecedented Event’. Nearly everyone, from the Knesset to the United Nations, is in agreement. But then Trump, being Trump, is claiming so much more. The current ceasefire signifies ‘the first steps toward a Strong, Durable and Everlasting Peace’. It might turn out to be so. Problematically, though, two of the mediators who are helping to broker the deal in which Hamas would disarm and depart Gaza – Qatar and Türkiye – share the same Muslim Brotherhood or radical Islamic ideology as the perpetrators of 7 October.

Hamas’s battle with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) was a debacle for its al-Qassam Brigades, not to mention its political leadership, but we have been here before. The 2023-25 Gaza-Israel War is the fifth such conflagration since Israel granted the territory autonomy in 2005. The boast of Hamas, more formally the Islamic Resistance Movement, is that it’s ‘an idea’ as much as a militant organisation, an idea that can never be eradicated by the IDF. And what is the Brotherhood’s big idea as far as Israel is concerned? The demonisation, delegitimisation and destruction of the Jewish state and ‘taking back’ Jerusalem in the process.

Türkiye’s Erdoğan and the Emir of Qatar have not only aided and abetted Hamas throughout the years but share its apocalyptic millenarianism. Erdoğan, as recently as a few weeks ago, affirmed his dangerous fantasy that Jerusalem was ‘a legacy entrusted to us’ by the Prophet Mohammed – translation: Israel’s capital belongs to a reconstituted Islamic caliphate, preferably a neo-Ottoman one. The inclusion of Qatar and Türkiye in Gaza’s proposed Board of Peace, which will have oversight over a new Gazan governing body, sounds a lot like putting the foxes in charge of the henhouse.

Trump, who is slated to head and chair the Board of Peace, obviously needed the leverage of the Emir of Qatar and Türkiye’s Erdoğan to expedite Hamas returning their Israeli captives. Without the remaining hostages in their possession, Hamas is exposed to full-scale IDF retribution. Simply put, handing their prisoners to Israel marks the end of Hamas’ reign of terror. But the Brotherhood’s ideology is a complex permutation of violence and politics. The disarming of Hamas, if that actually came to pass, might signify the end of the chapter but not the end of the story.

Trump, doubtless, offered Qatar and Türkiye all manner of inducements to back his peace plan. We now learn, for instance, that an agreement has been finalised to allow Qatar to build an air force facility in Idaho where its pilots would be trained to fly F-15 fighter jets. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, at the announcement of the new air base, did not even try to hide the Trump administration’s indebtedness to Qatar playing a ‘substantial role’ in securing a Gaza ceasefire and the return of the hostages.

Hamas – Qatar probably concluded – had played its last card with Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and the subsequent propaganda war against the IDF, the culmination of two decades of demonising and delegitimising Israel. With Gaza reduced to rubble, it might be time for Qatar’s royal family to redirect their focus to the West Bank. There is also their mission to infiltrate America’s elite universities with billions of dollars courtesy of the Qatar Foundation. And, of course, all those ‘Free Palestine’ groups, such as Students for Justice, do not pay for themselves. Just as disconcertingly, perhaps, are the number of those in America’s political class – including some key members of the Trump administration – who have been on Qatar’s payroll.

To take an optimistic view, at least from the perspective of Prime Minister Netanyahu, Donald Trump hopefully knows what he is doing. It is not as if he hasn’t been a great ally of Israel in the past – recognising Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the Jewish state and its sovereignty over the Golan Heights, not to mention employing B-2’s to deliver the coup de grâce in the recent Iran-Israel War. Moreover, Trump gave Netanyahu the imprimatur to rain down ‘all hell’ should Hamas renege on the hostage deal. Besides, Trump knows full well that even though Hamas is now a shadow of its former self, it won the propaganda war hands down. To do so, of course, it had to sacrifice tens of thousands of Gazans; such are the calculations of radical Islamic terrorism.

On the propaganda front, however, Hamas might have met its match in Donald Trump. Back in February this year, the boast that he would ‘take over’ Gaza and build a ‘Riviera on the Mediterranean’, in which ‘unlimited amounts of jobs and housing’ would be created, was met with incredulity. Now, having been made designated head of Gaza’s Board of Peace by not only Israel but every government in the Middle East and the broader Islamic world, excluding Iran and Yemen, Trump can pursue his vision of a ‘Riviera on the Mediterranean’ built on the cleared ruins of Hamastan.

In truth, a hyper-modern, coastal enclave dominated by high-rise hotels and other examples of urban gigantism, generously financed by the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and other Gulf states, is eminently doable. Maybe it is more accurate to call such an entity ‘Dubai on the Mediterranean’ but, in any case, it would contrast sharply with how Gaza City fared under the despotic rule of Hamas. Trump’s Gaza, if it eventuates, will stand as a powerful rebuke to the Islamic Resistance Movement and Islamic Jihad. This ultramodern version of Gaza is no more likely to be a modern-day democracy than the United Arab Emirates or Bahrain, and yet Dubai 2025 is surely a better outcome than Berlin circa 1945. The Emirate of Gaza would also be a contender for membership of the Abraham Accords, a Sunni Muslim-Israel pact in which the psychosis of the Muslim Brotherhood has no place.