Israel’s attempted killing of Hamas’s senior global leadership on Tuesday was the clearest indication in months that the war in Gaza is unlikely to end in a hostage deal between Israel and Hamas.

The airstrike by the Israeli Air Force on a residential building in Doha, the capital of Qatar, a US ally, reportedly took place as Hamas leaders, some of whom had traveled from out of the country, were meeting to discuss the Trump administration’s latest ceasefire proposal. According to Hamas, five people were killed in the attack, but the Hamas leaders, including Khalil al-Hayya, the group’s exiled Gaza leader, and Khaled Mashaal, head of Hamas abroad, had survived. Qatar’s interior ministry says a member of their internal security forces was killed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly gave the green light for the strike following an attack by a Palestinian gunman that killed six people at a Jerusalem bus stop on Monday. White House officials say the US was informed of the strike after the missiles had been launched, though Netanyahu described it as a “wholly independent Israeli operation.” The White House has distanced itself from the strikes; press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that while eliminating Hamas is a worthy goal, “Unilaterally bombing inside Qatar, a sovereign nation and close ally of the United States … does not advance Israel or America’s goals.” Leavitt also said that President Donald Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, had informed the Qatari government of the impending attack and that Trump had assured the country’s leaders that “such a thing will not happen again on their soil.”

The attack comes at a pivotal moment in the now nearly two-year-old war in Gaza, as the Trump administration is making a renewed push for a ceasefire deal and Israel is preparing for a new ground offensive.

Earlier on Tuesday, Israel ordered the total evacuation of Gaza City in anticipation of the operation, which has been codenamed “Gideon’s Chariots II” as a follow-up to the last major ground offensive into the enclave over the summer. Israel has also been blowing up residential high-rise buildings in the city that it says are used as Hamas military positions. Even amid these preparations, some have questioned whether Israel’s exhausted military is really about to go through with another major ground operation.

“There’s been this debate about whether the announcement of Gideon’s Chariots II and the pending ground offensive in Gaza City was meant to be a way of putting more pressure on Hamas to agree to a deal,” Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at the US-based Israel Policy Forum, told Vox following the Doha strike. “I think we now have our answer.”

That answer being that Israel’s government remains committed, as Netanyahu stated at the outset of the war nearly three years ago, to defeating Hamas militarily rather than agreeing to a ceasefire as it has in the past. (That’s to say nothing of possible plans for relocating Gaza’s civilian population.) The strike has already received praise from politicians across the political spectrum in Israel, though the support has not been universal.

Einav Zangauker, the mother of one of the surviving Israeli hostages held by Hamas, said in a X post that, “It could be that at this very moment, the Prime Minister has actually assassinated my Matan, sealed his fate.”

What’s left of diplomacy in the Middle East?

The fact that Hamas leaders were able to live and operate more or less openly in Qatar, which, like Israel, is considered one of the United States’ “major non-NATO allies,” was always something of an anomaly.

Though the Qataris have come under heavy US and Israeli criticism for hosting Hamas, both countries have also found it useful for the group to have a fixed address and a ready interlocutor — the Qatari government — when they did need to negotiate it. In fact, prior to the October 7 attacks, Israel supported Qatar’s decision to send millions of dollars every year to the Hamas-led government in Gaza. Part of the message of the strikes could be that Israel is no longer interested in having an interlocutor — or in talking.

Qatar’s foreign policy has long been a delicate balancing act: It hosts Hamas as well as the largest US military facility in the Middle East, Al Udeid Air Base. It’s a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council, along with countries like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, but also maintains friendly relations with its archrival, Iran. The connection with Iran, among other factors, made it a target of Trump during his first administration, but Qatar has spent billions of dollars on lobbying to get back in Washington’s good graces, including employing some current members of Trump’s administration. That effort appeared to have paid off when Trump visited the emirate in May, inked a massive trade and defense deal, and accepted a Boeing 747 as a gift, ostensibly as a temporary replacement for Air Force One.

Qatar may fancy itself a sort of Switzerland of the Middle East — it has also played host to negotiations over the wars in Afghanistan and Ukraine — but in doing so, it has seemingly made itself a target. Israel’s strike comes less than three months after Iran launched missiles at US forces in Qatar in retaliation for the American bombing of its nuclear facilities. In this case, it was the negotiators themselves who were targeted.

The Qataris “placed too much trust in the presence of the al-Udeid base to make sure things like this won’t happen,” Hussein Ibish, a senior scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, told Vox.

This is also the second time this year, after Iran in June, that leaders involved in ongoing, public negotiations with the United States have come under attack by Israel. Last week, Trump described the US as being “in deep negotiations with Hamas.”

Trump also warned Hamas last week that, “If you immediately release the hostages, good things are going to happen, but if you don’t, it is going to be tough and nasty for you.” So it’s notable that the White House, at least so far, is distancing itself from Israel’s action rather than taking credit for making good on Trump’s threat, as it did when Israel struck Iran.

But given that the US hasn’t done much to restrain Israel in either case, many in the region are likely to question whether these were genuine negotiations at all, and whether it’s worth it to pick up the phone when Witkoff is on the line.

It’s also a reminder that the Israeli government believes Hamas can be wiped out through military force and that its other enemies in the region can be dealt with through periodic “mowing the grass” strikes in multiple countries.

If that proves not to be the case, it may soon find it has no one willing to negotiate and nowhere to hold the negotiations.

“We are imposing a complete siege on [Gaza]. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel — everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we must act accordingly.”

That was Yoav Gallant, then the Israeli defense minister, two days after Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, killed some 1,200 Israelis and took 250 more hostage. The following week, Israel’s national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir echoed a similar sentiment: “So long as Hamas does not release the hostages,” he posted on X, “the only thing that should enter Gaza is hundreds of tons of air force explosives — not an ounce of humanitarian aid.”

Israel, in other words, did not engineer a famine in Gaza overnight. From the war’s outset, Israel has been blocking humanitarian aid from entering the Gaza Strip, to varying degrees, resulting in the spread of preventable diseases, including malnutrition, across the territory. In fact, since late 2023, international organizations have been warning that Gaza has been on the brink of famine. And in April of last year, Save the Children confirmed that children had been dying from starvation.

So why is it that it took this long for the world to turn its attention to this humanitarian disaster?

Part of the answer is that in recent weeks, the situation really has gotten much more dire, after Israel ended its 42-day ceasefire with Hamas in March and stopped allowing any aid into Gaza for two months, as my colleague Joshua Keating recently wrote.

But there’s another factor: The images coming out of Gaza have been absolutely heart-wrenching. Photos and videos have gone viral — on news sites and on social media — clearly showing malnourished babies starving to death, as well as those showing children and adults with their skin clinging to their bones with barely anything in between. “It is tragic that it takes those types of really graphic, really horrible images to break through,” said Alex de Waal, an expert on famine who serves as the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University. “And that is such a terrible commentary on just a gargantuan failure.”

This, of course, is nowhere near the first time horrific images from Gaza have surfaced and sparked outrage around the world. But there’s something about the visibility of a human-made famine that, for many people — including some of Israel’s most ardent supporters — crosses a moral threshold.

Starving an entire population cannot be spun as collateral damage or merely the cost of war — a messaging tactic that Israel has turned to to justify its killing of innocent people despite plenty of evidence that it has routinely targeted civilians. “You can’t starve anyone by accident. It has to be deliberate and sustained,” de Waal said. “It is beyond dispute that you have to starve people systematically because it takes so long.”

Indeed, Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war has been well-documented by human rights organizations since 2023, and both Gallant and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, including the use of starvation as a method of warfare.

Israel’s mass starvation of Gaza is, by definition, a form of collective punishment — imposing potentially fatal consequences on every Palestinian living in the enclave, whether they are a combatant or an innocent civilian. That’s why using starvation as a weapon of war is illegal under international law.

But that wasn’t always the case. What Israel is doing is part of a long history of weaponizing food and basic resources. Still, while there are many examples of countries intentionally creating or exacerbating famine conditions on populations, there are also aspects of Israel’s current policies in Gaza that are unique.

How countries have used starvation as a weapon of war

Using starvation as a weapon of war wasn’t always explicitly illegal under international law. The siege of Leningrad by the Nazis and their allies, which lasted from 1941 to 1944, was one of the deadliest sieges in history, killing more than one million people.

Many of these deaths were attributed to starvation. An American-run tribunal, however, determined that the forced starvation was compatible with international law. After all, it was a tactic that the Allies themselves had used as well, notably in their blockades of German-occupied territories and in Japan.

There are many examples throughout history of famines that were either entirely engineered or deliberately made worse through reckless colonial and war policies. In 1943, as the British empire’s colonial rule of the Indian subcontinent was nearing its end, the Bengal famine killed up to 3 million people.

Since then, studies have uncovered scientific evidence that the famine was not a result of climate conditions like serious drought. Instead, British policies, under Prime Minister Winston Churchill — which included confiscating rice and boats from the coastal parts of Bengal and exporting rice from India to other parts of the empire — seriously exacerbated famine conditions. Churchill denied this, saying that the reason there was a famine was because Indians were “breeding like rabbits” and suggesting that if the situation was indeed as dire as people claimed, then Mahatma Gandhi would be dead.

Another example is the Holodomor, the famine that killed millions of Ukrainians under the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. Joseph Stalin pursued a range of policies that engineered famine conditions — including restricting the movement of people, seizing grain even when there wasn’t enough to feed the local population, and exporting grain even as Ukrainians starved — in part, historians argue, to tamp down Ukrainian nationalist movements. Several countries and scholars have since recognized the famine as an act of genocide.

The US also used blockades as a means to advance its war interests. One of its military campaigns against Japan during World War II was named “Operation Starvation” — which aimed to destroy Japan’s economy by limiting the distribution of food and other imports. The military assault deprived Japan of essential raw materials and led to food shortages. That, along with naval blockades and America’s destruction of agricultural infrastructure contributed to widespread malnutrition and starvation.

It was only after World War II that the Geneva Conventions of 1949 established some rules about the responsibility to allow food and other essentials into enemy territory for vulnerable populations. But even then, by and large, starvation tactics were still permissible.

“The reason it was permitted was because the Americans and the British rather liked using it,” de Waal said. “It really wasn’t until the British and the Americans had abandoned their colonial wars — the American one being Vietnam in the ’70s — that they thought, ‘Okay, now we’re not going to fight these kinds of wars, and we can get around to banning it.’”

The Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions, which were agreed to in 1977, finally prohibited the “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare [or combat].” And just over 20 years later, in 1998, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court officially codified weaponizing starvation as a war crime.

How Israel’s starvation of Gaza is different

Any food shortages in Gaza have been directly triggered by the Israeli siege, not by any market failures or climate disasters, since Israel has the capacity to allow more food in at a moment’s notice.

“Here, what we see is all the ingredients coming together in a deliberate way. We see the [Israeli leaders’] statements; we see the total bombing of all the food production,” said Neve Gordon, a professor of human rights law at Queen Mary University of London. “I don’t think there’s [another] case in history, because other cases had to do with other stuff going on that were not human-made. Here, the whole starvation — from beginning to end — is human-made.”

Israel has also significantly limited traditional aid groups’ operations and, for months, entirely blocked aid from entering Gaza. Generally, UN-coordinated aid providers, which include UN agencies and established NGOs, have been able to enter and operate in war zones.

But since the ceasefire ended in March, Israel has placed unprecedented constraints on those organizations. Instead, since May, Israel has been coordinating with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a newly formed US- and Israel-backed private entity that operates militarized distribution sites in central and southern Gaza.

GHF has denied that its system is unsafe. But it operates far fewer distribution sites than experts recommend — dramatically decreasing the number of aid sites that were in place before Israel instituted its total blockade in March, making it more and more difficult for Palestinians to access food.

Israeli troops have also shot at aid-seekers at GHF’s distribution sites, and, according to the UN, some 1,000 Palestinians have been killed trying to get aid from GHF. Gordon calls GHF “a famine profiteering company,” adding that it “does not actually provide the necessary food, while producing these hunger games that everyone was watching, [showing] starving people are going to get food and getting shot at.”

Israeli government officials have defended GHF and instead blamed Hamas for the food shortages, accusing the group of looting humanitarian supplies despite Israeli military officials saying that there’s no proof that Hamas has systematically stolen aid. But the UN and many NGOs have called for GHF to be shut down, calling it dangerous and ineffective — a departure from established international humanitarian relief systems and a rejection of basic humanitarian principles.

While Egypt has been complicit in enforcing the blockade through its border with Gaza, the reality is that even aid going into Gaza through the Egyptian border has to go through Israeli inspection. The result is that Israel has effectively vacuum-sealed Gaza, with full control of what aid gets in.

Israel could have chosen to prevent a famine at any point. Instead, it has repeatedly hampered or entirely rejected efforts to deliver life-saving aid to Palestinians — all in contravention of international law. “Israel is not unique at all in using hunger as a weapon of war,” de Waal said. “What is unique about the Israeli one is just how rigorous and how sustained it is, and how it is in defiance of an international humanitarian capacity that can respond just like that. So if Netanyahu wanted every [child in Gaza] to have breakfast tomorrow, it can be organized.”

One example of Israel’s (and the world’s) capacity to stop the worst from happening is the polio vaccination campaign that happened last year. When polio — which had been eradicated from Gaza for 25 years — resurfaced as a result of the humanitarian and sanitation crisis imposed by Israel’s war, governments around the world pressured Israel to agree to a humanitarian pause in combat, in order to vaccinate children across the Gaza Strip. In the middle of the war, the vaccination campaigns were successful, reaching 95 percent of the target population. An effort to stop malnutrition can be similarly efficient.

The faster Israel relents and allows unimpeded aid delivery, the more lives can be saved. But unfortunately, it’s already too late for far too many Palestinians in Gaza. “Even if there was divine intervention — and we had a ceasefire and the best doctors and the right kind of food — I think we’d still have hundreds [or] thousands of deaths,” Gordon said. “But we’re not going to have that divine intervention.”

Gaza is on the brink of a mass starvation crisis, and once it starts, it will be difficult if not impossible to stop.

The Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip has faced various levels of food insecurity throughout the war that Israel has waged on the territory since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, fluctuating with the amount of aid Israel has allowed to enter the enclave via checkpoints it controls.

In March 2024, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) — the primary organization tracking food insecurity worldwide — issued a warning that every resident of Gaza was at risk of crisis levels of food insecurity, and half were at risk of famine. (Crisis levels are reached when a population has “food consumption gaps alongside acute malnutrition” or is “only just able to meet their food needs, resorting to crisis coping strategies like selling off essential livelihood assets.” Famine is the most serious form of hunger, involving a complete lack of access to food and resulting starvation and death.) A famine was never officially declared, and food access peaked during the negotiated ceasefire reached in January.

In March, Israel cut off all shipments into the Gaza Strip, including food aid, when the ceasefire expired. Israel justified it as a tactical strategy to get Hamas to release more Israeli hostages as part of continuing negotiations.

The flow of humanitarian aid has since slowed to a trickle under the purview of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private group backed by the US and Israeli governments. It began operating in May, and is the sole entity that has been allowed to deliver food. Almost one-third of the 2.1 million people remaining in Gaza are not eating for multiple days in a row, according to the United Nations World Food Programme.

Israel has also made it treacherous for hungry Gazans to even access food from the GHF. The UN estimates that the Israeli military has killed more than 1,000 Palestinians trying to get aid in Gaza since May. There are four GHF distribution centers throughout Gaza, three of which are in areas where the Israeli military has issued evacuation orders, and they are often only open for short periods of time, sometimes spurring crowds to rush to get provisions.

After enduring more than 21 months in a war zone with inadequate nutrition, the population of Gaza is worn down, and humanitarian groups say that imminent famine will likely cause many to die — not just from hunger, but also from preventable disease that their bodies can no longer fight off.

To understand how Gaza got to this point and what happens next, I spoke with Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, an organization that advocates for humanitarian assistance and protection for displaced people. Our conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

How has access to food in Gaza changed throughout the course of the war?

What happened from really almost the start of the war through all of last year was a population that was hovering right at the edge of a starvation emergency, but never quite dipping fully into it.

The Israeli government had been hugely restricting aid through January and February of 2024. The warning of potential famine came out in early March [2024], and then they subsequently allowed a great deal more aid in in April, and the situation improved. Some of the concessions that the Israelis then made in late March into April, and somewhat beyond that, really did make a meaningful difference. And then the Rafah offensive started in May, and things worsened again after that.

The period of the ceasefire [beginning in January 2025] was the best period for aid access since the war began. For six weeks, hundreds of aid trucks were coming in every day. There was relative freedom of movement and freedom of operation for aid organizations who previously had been heavily, heavily constricted by [Israel Defense Forces] operations and permission structures.

There was always just enough that would be allowed in to prevent the kind of full-blown famine outcomes that I think we’re now beginning to see.

Why is the population of Gaza now on the brink of starvation?

If you fully cut someone off [from food] when they are otherwise in good health, it’s going to take longer for them to deteriorate. If they have spent a year-plus being one step removed from starvation, then they’re much more vulnerable. Another shock to their system has the risk to be much, much more damaging.

I think that’s what we’re now seeing, when Israel withdrew from the ceasefire in March and imposed a total, complete, hermetic blockade on Gaza.

There was, for a while, enough residual aid that had been brought in during the ceasefire.The population could stretch that out and and make do for a while before the deprivation really started to bite again.

I would argue what we’re seeing is still effectively an extension of that blockade, because the primary aid that Israel has been allowing in is through this Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is not a meaningful factor in terms of the hunger situation in Gaza. The amounts they’ve been letting in are vanishingly small.

This Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is distributing modest amounts of very poor quality aid to, as far as we can tell, a pretty limited number of people: the ones who happen to be able to get to their sites, which is not most of the population. The cost of a bag of flour has gone up from 50 shekels during the ceasefire earlier this year to over 1,700 now.

What happens if famine sets in now?

When you have a population that is that stressed, whose health has deteriorated that much, or is [already] in such an advanced state of population-level food deprivation and malnutrition, then things can turn bad very rapidly, because there is nothing to stand in the way of starvation.

We have seen this kind of a trajectory in other settings before. Once people’s coping mechanisms are exhausted, once their food and financial reserves are exhausted, once their bodies are in a very weakened state due to sustained malnutrition over a long period of time, then it doesn’t take much to kill someone.

It is very hard for your body to fight off disease or survive an injury, or even just survive. In most famines, we see mortality coming from a mix of both outright starvation and opportunistic infections. So people’s bodies are greatly weakened, and they can’t fight off diseases that would otherwise be very survivable.

There is nothing coming on the horizon to improve that situation unless the Israeli government allows the mainstream professional humanitarian community to actually do their fucking jobs, and that is the one thing they will not allow.

Famines have a momentum, and the longer that they are allowed to deepen, the harder they are to reverse. You need your standard food aid package distributed at scale. But you also need specialized, fortified food products, because people are in such an advanced state of malnutrition. You need advanced therapeutic malnutrition treatment, because a lot more people are now going to be coming into an advanced state of malnutrition that requires inpatient malnutrition treatment.

You need clean water because the food that’s being distributed has to be prepared with water. You need fuel so that people can cook the foods. You need medical treatment because many people who die in a famine die of disease, rather than outright starvation. And you need to improve sanitation, because if people do not have good sanitation, that’s what allows the spread of waterborne diseases.

None of that’s possible right now.

Why in your view has the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation been so ineffective?

A core principle of humanitarian aid delivery is you want to get the aid as close to where the population is as possible.

Gaza Humanitarian Foundation inverts that: They make the people come to the aid, rather than bringing the aid to the people. And they make people come to the aid through a deeply insecure territory, past IDF forces, who have been consistently trigger-happy anytime they see a crowd of Palestinians nearby.

I and others warned very early on that this was likely to produce massacres, that this model was a recipe for disaster.

Another core principle of humanitarian aid is that you must not provide aid in a way that increases the risk to the population. There’s a very strongly ingrained ethos of “do no harm.” This is a “do harm” ethos, if anything. You’re creating a situation where, in order to access aid, you compel people to cross a military perimeter where they are routinely shot at. That is not humanitarianism.

Some advocates have suggested that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war. Do you agree with that?

That’s indisputable. It’s explicit. They want Hamas to relent, and they see the starvation of the population as a pressure point there.

Do you think the US is complicit in that?

I think the US is certainly complicit in that. I think even the Biden administration bears a degree of complicity in that, because they put somewhat more pressure on the Israeli government than the Trump administration has. But fundamentally, they tolerated the situation that brought Gaza to this point.

They tolerated a year-plus of starvation tactics being used, deprivation and illegal blockade tactics being used, and obstruction of aid, including aid provided by the US government. Rather than taking that on with the Netanyahu government, they did gimmick after gimmick. They did air drops. They did that ridiculous pier operation.

It wasn’t until nearly the very end of the administration that they sent the formal letter to the Israeli government demanding concrete progress. And then, of course, there was no meaningful progress.

I don’t think that solely falls on the Trump administration. Obviously, it is currently the Trump administration’s complicity.

President Donald Trump sounded confident on Sunday when he told a reporter that a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas could be reached by the end of the week.

Israel has reportedly proposed a 60-day ceasefire and the return of 10 living and 18 deceased hostages, out of approximately 50 remaining Israeli hostages, of whom 20 are believed to be alive. Hamas continues to push for a permanent end to the conflict.

Negotiations between the two sides are being conducted indirectly, with Qatar and Egypt leading the talks. The calculus on the part of the US and Israel appears to be that, with Iran and its proxy forces in the region significantly weakened, Hamas will be ready to make more concessions.

These talks are taking place against the backdrop of a worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza, with daily reports of Israeli troops displacing Palestinians and firing on hungry, desperate people trying to get food as Palestinian children struggle with starvation, malnutrition, and disease. Israeli soldiers have also been killed in recent fighting.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is making the rounds in Washington, DC, this week. It’s his third visit since Trump returned to office, more than any other foreign leader.

At a dinner at the White House on Monday evening, Netanyahu presented Trump with a copy of a letter nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump has repeatedly expressed his interest in getting the peace prize — an accolade that President Barack Obama received early in his presidency — and has cited his “peacekeeping” efforts in the Middle East, including attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, as justification.

Ending the war in Gaza, Trump believes, would cement his legacy. But he has to convince Netanyahu to agree to that. To get the latest on where things stand between Trump and Netanyahu, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke to Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at Israel Policy Forum.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have run hot and cold on each other since Trump took office in January. Where do things stand between them right now?

Right now, it seems that their relationship is at a high point. But even in the past six months, we’ve seen significant ups and significant downs.

On the one hand, this is now Prime Minister Netanyahu’s third visit to the White House in President Trump’s second term, and that would indicate that these two men have a closer relationship than any other two leaders on the face of the planet. But these visits have not always been so harmonious, and they’ve not always been so great for Prime Minister Netanyahu, particularly the second visit.

On that second visit, Prime Minister Netanyahu seemed to be blindsided in the Oval Office in front of cameras by a number of things that President Trump said. He was blindsided on tariffs when he had come to Washington ostensibly to try to remove any tariffs that President Trump was going to put on Israel. And not only was he not successful in doing so, President Trump sat in front of the cameras and talked about how the United States gives Israel $4 billion a year, and that’s a lot of money and it should get something in return.

He was also blindsided in that meeting on the issue of Iran. President Trump announced in that meeting that the United States was going to enter into direct talks with Iran, something that Prime Minister Netanyahu was certainly opposed to. Now we know how that turned out two months later, but at the time, it was seen as a pretty significant signal that President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu were not on the same page.

In addition to the awkwardness of that second visit — during President Trump’s last visit to the Middle East, he went to Saudi Arabia, he went to Qatar, he went to the UAE. He made a huge production out of those visits, talking about how much he loved the region, but he didn’t go to Israel and many people interpreted that as a snub. Was it?

I don’t think it was a snub. I think that he went to the region because he wanted to come home with high-profile, visible demonstrations of US strength and demonstrate that he could bring deals back home. Ultimately, he thinks of himself as a dealmaker, and there were all sorts of trade deals and promises for investment to be found in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. Those were not going to be found in Israel.

He took that trip to the Middle East back in May. What’s changed since then?

The biggest thing that has changed is the campaign against Iran, where you had 12 days of Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear and military facilities and personnel, and then you had the very high-profile US strike on the three Iranian nuclear sites at Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan.

In Israel and certainly within the administration — and I share this assessment — that campaign is viewed as being incredibly successful. And unlike when President Trump traveled to the region, this is a case where Israel presents him with a big and visible win and he’s touting it as much as he can.

So Israel gives him a win on Iran, and now, as President Trump is wont, he’s looking for another win. On Sunday, he tells reporters that a deal on Gaza is close. What do you think he’s trying to telegraph and what happens if he’s wrong? Does he take it out on Netanyahu?

There are two things that President Trump has consistently talked about in terms of his vision for the Middle East and what he wants to accomplish. One was preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. And whether that has now been done definitively or not, President Trump is certainly treating it as if this is mission accomplished, and Iran is now not going to get a nuclear weapon.

The second thing that he’s consistently talked about is bringing the fighting in Gaza to an end and expanding the Abraham Accords and bringing other countries into the circle of normalization, all of which I think in his mind is supposed to lead to the Nobel Peace Prize, which really I think is the goal that he seems to put above almost anything else in the realm of foreign policy.

To accomplish that second one, he needs Prime Minister Netanyahu to go along with what he wants because there is no world in which the fighting in Gaza will end unless Prime Minister Netanyahu agrees to do it. If Prime Minister Netanyahu does not go along with it, there may be consequences, and it may be that President Trump eventually moves on.

I think that what we’re seeing right now from Prime Minister Netanyahu is an effort to really extend the clock. The first part of this is a potential 60-day ceasefire in Gaza that will not bring a permanent end to the war, but will give President Trump the opening that he seeks at the moment. And if this negotiation is successful, then it also buys Prime Minister Netanyahu two months to figure out whether he wants to keep it going or whether, at the end of 60 days, the fighting in Gaza will resume.

[Netanyahu] likes extending his options as much as he can, and so buying this time will be important and it will allow him to give the president something that the president is really demanding from him, and that should keep the heat off at least for a little bit.

These two men have different motivations when it comes to the Palestinian people. Netanyahu doesn’t seem to care about Palestinians. He cares about Israel’s security. Trump wants a deal in Gaza because he likes doing deals. Do you think that Donald Trump cares what happens to the Palestinian people?

When President Trump speaks about Palestinians, certainly during this term in office, he tends to do it with a degree of empathy that we don’t always see from him on other issues. It’s pretty consistent when he talks about Gaza for him to talk about the fact that Palestinians are suffering and that they deserve better. We don’t often hear that sort of language from Prime Minister Netanyahu and from many Israeli leaders.

The problem is that for any real resolution to Gaza, you need some sort of political vision. President Trump often talks about how Palestinians deserve better lives and should have better lives. But it’s rare to hear him talk about how he thinks they will get there politically as opposed to this just being a quality of life issue.

We saw it when he announced his “Gaza Riviera” plan during that first Netanyahu trip to Washington, and we saw it again even last night when President Trump got a question about two states, and he didn’t answer it. He punted it to Netanyahu. Netanyahu made it very clear that Israel does not see a Palestinian state as part of the Israeli-Palestinian political future.

Both Trump and Netanyahu need this relationship. Trump needs Netanyahu. Netanyahu needs Trump. Who needs whom more, do you think?

Netanyahu absolutely needs Trump more than Trump needs Netanyahu.

The things that Trump wants right now from Netanyahu are things that would be nice to have. He wants to expand the Abraham Accords. He wants to have better coordination throughout the region. He wants his Nobel Prize. But ultimately, the United States has lots of other issues on its plate. The United States is a global superpower, whereas Israel is not. And the United States can work on all sorts of other things even if the Trump-Netanyahu relationship turns out to be poor and the coordination turns out to not be what President Trump wants.

From Prime Minister Netanyahu’s side, the United States is indispensable, and there are all sorts of things that he wants that he has to have President Trump for. We saw this in practice with Iran, where Israel embarked on airstrikes on its own, but it was clear from the beginning that it needed the United States not only to buy into what Israel was doing but to actually step in and act.

Ultimately, Prime Minister Netanyahu cannot afford to be on President Trump’s bad side, and I think that that’s going to cause him some difficult choices ahead when it comes to Gaza, where there’s no question that President Trump wants that war to end. Prime Minister Netanyahu also may want it to end, but he wants it to end on very specific and narrow terms. And if the two men end up crosswise on that question, Prime Minister Netanyahu really cannot afford to get into a rift with President Trump.