Isaac Chotiner
The New Yorker / October 9, 2025
And why it might not matter much for Gaza’s future, or for Palestinian statehood.
On Thursday, the Israeli Cabinet was on the verge of approving the initial stages of a ceasefire agreement that will at least temporarily end the war in Gaza. That war, which began two years ago with the Hamas attacks of October 7th, and the killing of twelve hundred people, was followed by Israel’s bombardment and occupation of the Gaza Strip, and the killing of nearly seventy thousand Palestinians. (A United Nations commission recently labelled Israel’s war a genocide.) The initial phases of the agreement, which President Trump announced on Wednesday, will likely include a release of the remaining Israeli hostages early next week, a release of Palestinians held by Israel, a pullback of Israeli troops from Gaza, and a much-needed surge of food and medicine into the territory.
Late on Wednesday night, I spoke by phone with Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, and an expert on the Middle East, about the contours of the deal and what will come next. (Elgindy is also the author of the book Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians, from Balfour to Trump) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what Hamas really hoped to accomplish on October 7th, the common pitfalls when peace deals extend beyond their initial phases, and whether increasing global disapproval of Israel really makes progress for Palestinians more likely.
What were the main factors that led to this deal ?
I think Donald Trump was the factor. We all knew that it would take the President of the United States to tell Benjamin Netanyahu, “That’s it. It’s time. It’s enough.” We thought we were at that moment in January when we had a ceasefire, but somehow Netanyahu managed to convince Trump to let him collapse it. I think where it got to be too much was after the Doha strike, which really sort of backfired on Netanyahu. [On September 9th, Israel bombed a neighbourhood in Qatar’s capital in an attempt to kill Hamas negotiators there. Netanyahu, at Trump’s urging, eventually apologized to the Qatari Prime Minister.] I think Trump had to recalculate, and think, O.K., maybe I don’t always have to take Bibi at his word. Maybe these things aren’t actually good for me. And I think that’s where the tide turned.
How do you understand Hamas’s willingness to make a deal now ? How have their calculations changed, if you think they have ?
Their basic line has not changed. They have been willing to make a deal since the very early weeks of the war, back in the fall of 2023. We saw that with the very first hostage release. Many people have since forgotten, but there were something like a hundred Israeli hostages released in the span of a week. I think Hamas has been willing to make deals. But that truce was short-lived because the Israelis were not interested in ending the war at that point, hostages or no hostages. I think Hamas has been willing to make a deal to release the hostages, to release all of them, but in return for some kind of assurance that the war would actually end. And I don’t think that’s an outrageous demand—that if they’re going to give up their one piece of leverage, they should have some reasonable assurance that the war is going to end. They thought they had that in January of 2025, and then they didn’t. Netanyahu’s word, and President Trump’s word, did not amount to much at that point.
But I do think Hamas’s calculations have changed because the group is much weaker now. I think the other stakeholders in the region, the Arab states especially, are fed up and want this to end. And so when Trump put forward his plan, as lopsided as it was, the Arab states and others embraced it, not because they loved the terms but because they just wanted to be done with this. That put Hamas in a very difficult position. If they were to accept the plan as it was laid out, it was basically the terms of their surrender. They’re supposed to hand over their weapons. Gaza is going to be controlled indefinitely by the Israeli Army and there will be an international force, and politically it will be overseen by some international trusteeship headed by Trump. This is not something that any Palestinian would welcome. So that really puts them in a bind. But they managed to find a way to say “yes, but” and that was really the only possible response they could have had. They couldn’t say no. They couldn’t say no to the President of the United States, especially when the Arab states were saying yes. And, also, they couldn’t say no to the people in Gaza who were so desperate for this to end and who were basically demanding that Hamas just accept the terms as they were.
You said Hamas was always open to some sort of deal, but also that Hamas’s calculations changed. So was the change that they were willing to accept a lopsided deal with no plan for a Palestinian state ?
Their calculations changed, in that they were willing to accept a deal that didn’t include an explicit assurance that the war would immediately end, that Israel would withdraw, and that there would be a timetable for Israel’s withdrawal. Those demands they had to let go of, and so they were willing to accept something much more vague and even lopsided. Once the Arab states, especially, embraced the Trump plan, Hamas had no choice. The optics meant that they just weren’t in a position to say no.
There’s been a lot of speculation about what Hamas wanted from this war. Sometimes you hear people say that what Hamas wanted was for Hezbollah and Iran to join the fight against Israel. Sometimes you hear people say it was to sabotage efforts that Israel was making for normalization agreements with its Arab neighbours. Sometimes you hear that Hamas wanted a brutal war, so Israel’s reputation internationally would be hurt, and brought down to the level that, indeed, it is at today. But if you think that Hamas would’ve come to an agreement early on, which I assume would have included a hostage-for-prisoner release, then you are making it seem like these grander ambitions were not necessarily what they wanted, because that would’ve brought the war to an end in 2023. So then why did Hamas launch the October 7th attack other than that they wanted to kill Israelis ?
It is a hard question to answer because obviously we can’t get into the minds of the people who planned and executed what happened on October 7th. Many of those people are dead, including Yahya Sinwar. But I think it’s fair to say that what did end up happening on October 7th was much bigger than what its planners had envisioned. I don’t think they set out to kill twelve hundred people, eight hundred of them civilians, and bring two hundred and fifty hostages, including elderly people and children, back to Gaza. I don’t think that was the plan. I think they had a much more modest plan of maybe a few dozen hostages, probably mostly military and police, because those are high value to use as bargaining chips with the Israelis. And I think things got horribly out of control on that day. And once the fence was breached, and once hundreds of people started pouring across the fence, you had all kinds of elements, not just Hamas and Islamic Jihad and additional armed factions, but criminal elements: people without a military or political motive who wanted to rob or loot or kill or get revenge. Still, I don’t want to minimize Hamas’s responsibility. They planned and executed it.
The other thing that they didn’t anticipate was that Israeli defenses would collapse as quickly as they did on that day. They really had the run of the place in these different communities, and the killing spree expanded. But, again, it’s impossible to get into the minds of the people who planned and executed this.
I think, in general, we can say that this operation was intended first and foremost to shatter the Israeli sense of complacency and contentment with the status quo. I think, at a minimum, that was clearly their plan, and they succeeded in that. They definitely shattered that sense of complacency. It was also partly about what many of these attacks by Palestinian armed groups in the past have always been about: getting international attention, and putting the Palestinian issue back on the international agenda after it’s been forgotten. And I think it was also a message about the normalization push.
You mean with Israel and the Arab states ?
Yeah, that this march toward inevitable normalization between Arab states and Israel will not proceed and leave Palestinians by the wayside. I think that was also part of the message.
I’ve read a lot of pieces about the two-year anniversary of October 7th. The common line is that Israel is incredibly strong in the region: it has defeated its enemies in Lebanon and Syria, and it has bombed Iran, and it’s shown incredible military strength. And yet, at the same time, Israel’s international reputation is terrible. Public opinion in the U.S. and in European countries is tilting against it. The Palestinian issue is on the front page of the newspaper. I could see that, if this had happened to Israel’s reputation in 1995, or in 2005, it really would’ve been catastrophic. But in 2025, I’m just not sure how much this matters. I don’t think Israel is going to run out of weapons from the West anytime soon. The world itself is getting much more autocratic, in the same way that Israel is becoming more autocratic. Even if there’s been some success—at a horrific cost to Palestinians—in turning the world against Israel, I’m not sure how much that matters anymore.
I think it does matter, because what’s changed is something that is so fundamental. This has completely shifted the narrative. That’s a clichéd term, I know, but you now have an entire generation—never mind in the Arab world but in the West, in the United States, in North America, in Europe, in Australia, and in Canada, all over the world—that has been politicized, if not actually radicalized, by Gaza. They cannot unsee the things that they have seen over the last two years. And, yes, that’s not really affecting the policies of any of these countries. Or maybe it is a little bit; even if I can’t say that it’s affecting American policy, it is having an impact in Europe. There’s the whole statehood recognition that has come from France and the U.K. and Canada and Australia. Where does that come from? Well, that’s largely a result of mobilization domestically. People are angry. People are disgusted with Israel’s response.
This spring, things really hit home for a lot of people. It’s very hard to justify the deliberate starvation of a population as some kind of self-defense, right? People can always argue about, well, they bombed a hospital and a building and a school, and Israel will claim that these are being used by Hamas. Whether it’s true or not, it doesn’t matter. It’s plausible. There’s no plausible basis for starving people.
Yes, the arguments went from, as you said, “Well, actually, the school or hospital had to be bombed for military reasons, and it was a legitimate military target” to, on the starvation issue, just outright denial. There was a little of “We don’t want to give Hamas food,” but really the argument was “People just aren’t starving.” It was just denial of reality.
Yes, it was about Hamas propaganda. It got to the point where even Donald Trump said, Sorry, you can’t fake this. This is real starvation. You can’t fake this sort of thing. So I think that really moved people, and once you realize that Israel maybe isn’t this light unto the world that you had been raised to believe it was, I think that changes something—and it’s irreversible. So you don’t see the effects now, but over time we’re definitely going to see the effects in terms of the politics, and eventually the policy. Now, that’s only if our democracies mean anything,
So we won’t see it.
If we go the authoritarian path, then, yeah.
In the past week, it felt to me that, when it became clear that Hamas was going to give up the hostages, the momentum shifted in favor of this deal getting done, and even Netanyahu could not back away. I’m curious why Hamas did not just give up the hostages a while ago. Let’s put aside the moral case. I don’t think Hamas was too concerned about that. But, in a practical sense, I don’t totally understand why they didn’t try this strategy. It felt as if the hostages weren’t gaining them that much. And so much of the case for the war continuing was about the hostages, even when it was clear to people paying attention that the Israeli government and Netanyahu did not care about the hostages. It was the only justification the Israelis had left.
I also wondered about that. It became clear in my mind, too, that if the hostages are their sole piece of leverage, well, it’s really not much leverage anymore, because Netanyahu has made it clear he’d much rather have his forever war than the hostages. So why don’t they just call his bluff and say, “O.K., here are all the hostages”? They could have done that. I don’t know why they didn’t. Maybe they just never came to that conclusion—they probably still clung to the idea that this was their last piece of leverage, and if they gave it up, then they’d literally have nothing, and maybe they thought that would look like surrender. I don’t know. But I think you’re right. I don’t think it really was leverage anymore. It was just this talking point for the Israelis. The whole discourse was so cynical.
Do you have any optimistic take on what this deal will mean for Gaza in the medium term? I hope that the short-term truce will mean food and aid entering in much more sufficient quantities, but beyond that do you have any hope ?
I think it’s going to be a very difficult road ahead. I haven’t been on the ground in Gaza in the past two years, but, from everything that I’ve seen and read, it’s going to be hard. I don’t know that Gaza is even a place where humans can continue to live in any meaningful way. Almost everything has been destroyed. There’s almost nothing left, even of Gaza City. All the hospitals are basically not functioning. There are no universities. There are no schools. There are no roads. There’s no sewage-treatment plants, and there’s no infrastructure. Everything has been destroyed. What will it take to rebuild? Obviously, it will take massive resources, and I just don’t know if they’re going to be there. There might be some kind of donor conference and all kinds of pledges, but will those materialize? If history is any indication, probably only a fraction will actually be put up.
I worry that, in the medium to long term, people will just leave. If people are able to leave, those who can will leave, and who could blame them? People just want to have normal lives. They will be saying, “I have no business and my home is gone. My workplace is gone. There’s no place to send my kids to school.” So it would not surprise me at all if we saw a kind of exodus over the next several years, just because people have to live. They will go wherever they are allowed to go. I’m sure a lot of European countries and the United States will close their doors to people fleeing Gaza, but they’ll go wherever they can.
So I just don’t know that Gaza can recover. It makes me incredibly sad to say that, because we’re talking about a society of two million people. Gaza City is the largest city in Palestine. It’s one of the oldest places on earth. There’s just so much that has been lost. Beyond just the basic immediate subsistence, can Gaza survive? I don’t know.
And what about the possibility of Hamas disarming, and Israel really pulling back its troops ?
Those two are linked. They’re very much connected. It’ll be very hard to disarm Hamas under any circumstances, because that is its raison d’être. It is a resistance movement, and to give up its weapons before there’s an end to Israel’s occupation, before the Palestinians have achieved a state, looks like surrender. So that, on its face, is going to be very difficult, but it will be especially hard when we know that there’s going to be an indefinite Israeli military presence on the ground in most of Gaza—or at least very significant parts of it, right up to the edges of the population centers, assuming that people are allowed to go back to the north.
As long as there is an active military presence, you’re going to have people with weapons who want to confront that presence. And I could see, in the future, a low-level indefinite insurgency that then becomes self-justifying, with Israeli leaders saying, “Well, there are all these attacks and the people still have weapons, and that’s why we have to stay.” And then the armed Palestinians saying, “The Israeli soldiers are on our land. Of course, we have to keep fighting them.”
I’m still struck by what you said earlier, about how a generation of people have been changed by what they’ve seen of this conflict, and what that will mean.
I don’t know if you followed what was happening in Italy, but you had a mass mobilization unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. Millions of people brought the country to a standstill with strikes. [More than two million people protested the war in Italy last week, and launched a general strike for a day.] That’s not necessarily going to be replicated across the Western world, but it’s a sign of just how much things have changed. The Washington Post poll a few days ago showed that forty per cent of American Jews believe that Israel is committing genocide. That’s stunning. The majority believe that Israel is committing war crimes. That is a sea change that will have far-reaching implications. There is no question our political system is broken. Yes, our politics are out of whack, but I think the images from Gaza are so visceral. I think people have been deeply affected. This may not last once there’s a ceasefire. But I still believe that people can’t unsee what they have seen.
Isaac Chotiner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the principal contributor to Q. & A., a series of interviews with public figures in politics, media, books, business, technology, and more
