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US President Donald Trump may think his 20-point proposal will end the war in Gaza and solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but reality on the ground suggests otherwise.

To be sure, Trump’s proposal is the only game in town, if only because no one — not Israel; not the Palestinians, who weren’t consulted; not the Arab states — wants to get on the wrong side of the president.

While all welcomed his proposal — a set of principles with no terms or mechanism for implementation — no one has wholeheartedly bought into the scheme.

So far, Israel has endorsed only the first phase of the proposal, involving a fragile ceasefire, an exchange of the Hamas-held alive and dead captives for Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli prisons and Palestinian corpses in Israeli custody, plus a partial withdrawal of Israeli forces in Gaza.

US Vice President JD Vance and negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are in Israel to prevent the already disrupted ceasefire from breaking down and to nudge Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to engage in a second phase that would involve post-war security and governance arrangements in Gaza.

For its part, Hamas has released the remaining 20 living hostages, returned 13 bodies of dead captives it has been able to find under the rubble in Gaza, and is searching for the outstanding 15 corpses.

The group has also agreed that it will not be part of a post-war Gaza administration.

Even so, Hamas has rejected key elements of the proposal, such as the disarmament of the group and international policing for the Gaza Strip. Hamas also rejected the idea of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, saying it would only agree to a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish-majority state.

Speaking at the inauguration of a US military coordination center in Israel, Vance insisted that Hamas would have to disarm, but refrained from setting a deadline. He also stopped short of reiterating Israel’s oft-stated goal of destroying Hamas. “Hamas has to disarm. … Hamas actually has to behave itself, and that Hamas, while all the fighters can be given some sort of clemency, they’re not going to be able to kill each other, and they’re not going to be able to kill the Palestinians,” Vance said. 

At the same time, Kushner said there would be no funding for reconstruction in areas controlled by Hamas. Moreover, wealthy Gulf states are unlikely to fund the reconstruction of the territory that Israel’s military has turned into a devastated moonscape without credible assurances that the post-war process will not devolve into renewed hostilities.

For their part, Arab and Muslim states want to see a reformed Palestine Authority — the West Bank-based, internationally recognized Palestinian representative of the Palestinians that is widely seen as corrupt and ineffective — involved in post-war Gaza to lend the process legitimacy.

Complicating matters is the fact that Trump and Israel’s proposal to end the war and resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once and for all, which was authored by Kushner during the president’s first term in office, is at loggerheads with what the rest of the international community — including the Palestinians, the Arabs, the Muslim world, China, Russia, and Europe — envisions.

Despite what the initial terms of the Gaza Peace Plan outlined, Trump last week said, “We’ll have to see” about a two-state solution. 

In doing so, Trump reversed three decades of US backing for a two-state solution, involving the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. 

In contrast with the international community, which sees the creation of an independent Palestinian state as the solution, the Trump administration, backed by Israel, believes that economic development will be the panacea — the politics then presumably taking care of itself.

“The biggest message that we’ve tried to convey to the Israeli leadership now is that, now that the war is over, if you want to integrate Israel with the broader Middle East, you have to find a way to help the Palestinian people thrive and do better,” Kushner said in a recent CBS 60 Minutes interview.

Compounding obstacles to the implementation of the Trump proposal, Hamas, unlike the United States and Israel, and despite suffering enormous body blows during the war, was prepared for the day the guns would fall silent.

Body blows are nothing new for Hamas, even if the group suffered the most in the latest war. Israel has targeted, detained, and assassinated its leaders for more than two decades and has fought five wars with Hamas since 2008.

Rather than committing all its resources to a war it could not win, Hamas kept thousands of activists in reserve for the day it would reestablish control in those parts of Gaza from which Israel would withdraw.

Moreover, Hamas benefited from the fact that Gazan clans and criminal gangs that Israel armed failed to confront Hamas and take control of areas from which Israel withdrew as part of the ceasefire. As a result, Hamas was able to brutally reassert its authority in those areas.

The clans and gangs either disbanded when the ceasefire took effect last week or were confronted and suppressed by Hamas, which demonstrated a degree of control and command Israel thought it had destroyed during the war.

Israeli officials fear the possible inclusion of Turkey in an international stabilization force, if and when it is established in those parts of post-war Gaza from which Israel withdraws. The Israelis worry that Turkish troops might back Hamas in its effort to retain control.

Vance said Israel would have to agree to the composition of the international force: “We’re not going to force anything on our Israeli friends when it comes to foreign troops on their soil. But we do think there is a constructive role for the Turks to play.”

Turkey, which played a role as a mediator in the ceasefire negotiations, has endorsed the Trump proposal, which includes a call for the disarmament of Hamas, although it tacitly allows the group’s exiled members to travel in and out of Turkey and spend months at a time in Istanbul.

Early in the war, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan asserted that “Hamas is not a terrorist organization, it is a liberation group, ‘mujahideen’ waging a battle to protect its lands and people.”

That didn’t stop Israel from acceding to a Turkish request earlier this month to allow 66 Palestinians, some of whom have Turkish citizenship or family ties to Turkey, to leave Gaza. They included 16 relatives of former Hamas chief negotiator Ismail Haniyeh.

Israel saw the gesture as a way to improve relations with Turkey in advance of that country’s possible on-the-ground role in post-war Gaza.

In July of last year, Israel assassinated Haniyeh in Tehran. The Israeli military killed 60 members of Haniyeh’s extended family between October 2023 and July 2024.

Significantly, Turkey is one of four non-Arab Muslim countries — the others being Pakistan, Azerbaijan, and Qatar — that have expressed a willingness to contribute to the stabilization force that Egypt could lead.

Even so, contributors would need the fig leaf of an invitation by the Palestine Authority. With Netanyahu opposing the Authority’s involvement in post-war Gaza, and the US and Israel focusing on economics and reconstruction of Gaza rather than Palestinian national aspirations, that could prove another hard nut to crack.

In the ultimate analysis, ending the Gaza war, let alone resolving the larger Israeli-Palestinian conflict, hinges on the Trump administration remaining engaged in the process and willing to pressure Israel to make essentially a 180-degree political U-turn.

Given the administration’s track record of inconsistency on the Gazan issue and its backing away from support of an independent Palestinian state to help resolve the conflict, and adding in the opposition of a majority of Israelis to a Palestinian state, the odds are that the Trump proposal, at best, will lead to a lull in fighting rather than a sustainable end to hostilities.

James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.