Aaron David Miller

it will create a new environment which has never existed beyond several weeks or months.

And that is to say an environment which will allow not just the dribbling of humanitarian assistance into Gaza, but the flooding of the zone.

And once the zone is flooded...

prices on the black market decline, the advantages that accrue to criminal gangs, and even Hamas in terms of the diverting of humanitarian aid and the use of that aid for recruitment, all of these things begin to end.

And those three elements were the reasons

the international community, the United States, the region cared about Gaza.

In a way, David, it's a paradox, because it could be that in reducing the urgency, no hostages, no major military campaign resulting in the exponential deaths of thousands of Palestinians, and no humanitarian catastrophe, that people may actually begin to care less

about what happens in phases two, three, and beyond.

That's a core question.

There are basically three reasons why this agreement came to pass.

Number one, Hamas is much weaker.

particularly on the military side, and it's the military commanders, not the external leadership that are making the decisions.

Number two are key Arab states, two of Hamas's principal backers of the three, the third being Iran.

Qataris and the Turks basically leaned on Hamas in a way that they had rarely have ever done before.

But it's the third factor.

Let's be clear.

We would not be having this conversation

Had Donald Trump not done something that is quite unique, almost unprecedented in the annals of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, no president that I ever worked for, Jimmy Carter to Bush 43, and I'd add in Obama and Biden, no U.S.

president ever talked to an Israeli prime minister or pushed him and pressured him.

on an issue that that prime minister considered so vital, not only to his politics, but his definition of Israel's national security.