What 2025 Revealed About Gaza’s Future

It’s hard to be optimistic about the future of Gaza. The cease-fire agreement brokered by the Trump administration is holding, but Israel continues to occupy more than half of the territory, and its forces have killed more than 350 Palestinians since the truce was reached on Oct. 10. Hamas, meanwhile, is resurging in Gaza—replacing key commanders killed in the two-year war with Israel; executing its Palestinian opponents; and hiding weapons and fighters in its tunnel system, more than half of which remains intact.

So, where does that leave Palestinians and Israelis? And what does it mean for the rest of the Middle East? Armed conflicts in the region have occasionally given way to diplomatic breakthroughs. The 1973 Yom Kippur War ultimately led to the 1979 peace accord between Israel and Egypt. The first Palestinian uprising precipitated the Oslo Accords in the 1990s. But more often, war in the Middle East is followed by periods of instability, chaos, and more violence—all of which convulsed Iraq years after the U.S. war wound down.

Here’s what a hopeful scenario might look like. Israelis come to realize their enemies are weaker than ever after two years of war and their friends, dwindling in number but beginning with the United States, are less inclined to support their excesses. If Israeli elections late next year produce a moderate government, this could result in a more pragmatic approach to the Palestinians. On the Palestinian side, Hamas would agree to disarm and disband, paving the way for a Gulf-funded reconstruction of Gaza and a full Israeli withdrawal.

But an astute watcher of the conflict sees the flaws in that storyline. Israel has been rejecting compromises with the Palestinians since well before the war. The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks shifted the country’s political consensus further to the right.

If the deal holds, it will bring a much-needed end to the violent conflict that begin on Oct. 7, 2023. But it will also force three reckonings for Israelis that will shape the country’s future in more lasting ways.

1) The first is a reckoning between Israelis and their leaders.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government had been in power for more than nine months when Hamas launched its assault. And despite the departure of key military and intelligence figures, that same government has remained in power, overseeing Israel’s actions in Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.

Netanyahu and his government are historically unpopular, and most Israelis at least partially blame them for failing to prevent Oct. 7. But Netanyahu has consistently argued that no accountability, assignment of blame, or even elections are appropriate while Israeli hostages remain in Gaza and the war continues. So far, his argument has worked. Despite feeling that their government has abandoned them, Israelis who turned out by the hundreds of thousands before Oct. 7 to protest Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul and those who turned out after Oct. 7 to show solidarity with the hostages and their families have still been reluctant to adopt an overtly political agenda.

That will now come to an end. Israelis will likely demand that this government resign, and Netanyahu will have a hard time keeping his far-right coalition members from bolting over a deal that they view as a capitulation to Hamas. The coming elections will be the most consequential in Israel’s history, ushering in a government that not only will have to manage the fallout from Gaza and help Israelis heal from their physical and emotional scars but will have to rebuild the basic compact between citizens and their government.

2. The second reckoning is over Israeli attitudes toward Palestinians. Some 1,200 Israelis were killed and more than 250 abducted on Oct. 7, but all Israelis personally felt the impact. The lesson that most took away was that there could be no lasting peace with Palestinians and there was no way to build a Palestinian state that could peacefully co-exist with Israel. As a result, Israeli attitudes toward Palestinians are at their nadir, driven by unprecedented hostility.

Yet U.S. President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan calls for Israel to engage with Palestinians in multiple ways, not only in working together on postwar Gaza but on developing a “credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.” It also commits the United States to convene talks between Israelis and Palestinians on a political horizon for peace—in other words, a renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace process. These are difficult things for Israelis to swallow.

Now, Israel will have to embark on a new phase in its relationship with the Palestinians under a cloud of mistrust, suspicion, and anger. There will be a new Palestinian administration in Gaza, there is the existing Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and there are millions of Palestinians who remain under some measure of Israeli control and want to resume their lives, requiring daily interaction with Israelis and their government. Israelis must figure out what their post-Oct. 7 relationship with all of these entities will be now that that period is set to begin.

3. The third reckoning is between Israel and the United States. The Gaza war has brought a seismic shift in Americans’ relationship to Israel. Polls show a majority of U.S. voters now oppose military support for Israel, while a plurality sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis and believe that Israel intentionally kills civilians. Among Democrats, it has become increasingly mainstream to advocate restrictions on security assistance to Israel. And the most influential voices in the MAGA-verse—from Tucker Carlson to Steve Bannon to Candace Owens—speak about Israel in dark terms as a drain on U.S. resources. There is little question that the U.S.-Israel relationship is going to change. The only question is how much.

While the Gaza war was going on, it was easy to dismiss Israel’s faltering status as a short-term dip driven by the daily news images and to argue that everything would go back to the status quo ante with the war’s end. Now that the war is over, Israelis are likely to discover that the opinions developed by many Americans over the past two years will not easily dissipate. Israelis will have to develop new ways to explain their country to Americans, new arguments for why Israel is an important and worthy ally, and new strategies for operating in a world where U.S. support is not necessarily as fulsome or automatic.

Israel may be able to win over some of the skeptics on the question of Israel’s strategic value. This will be particularly true if improved relationships between Israel and its neighbors allow the United States to reduce its presence in the Middle East and if Israel is seen, as with Russia during the Cold War, as a critical bulwark against China.

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