The Decibel - How Trump’s peace plan for Gaza could end the war

Episode Date: October 6, 2025

Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled a 20-point peace plan to end the war in Gaza. He did so alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called it a “critical step”. Hamas has since responded, and agreed to parts of the plan — notably, the release of all remaining hostages and the relinquishing of its control over Gaza. Negotiations will begin in Egypt on Monday.The Globe’s European Bureau Chief, Eric Reguly, joins the show. He’s been reporting from Cairo and Jerusalem, and will explain the details of Trump’s peace plan, how it’s being received across the region, and whether it could mark the beginning of the end of this war.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

So this is a big, big day, a beautiful day, potentially one of the great days ever in civilization. Last Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled a plan to end the war in Gaza. He did so alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called it a, quote, critical step. But if Hamas rejects your plan, Mr. President, or if they supposedly accept it and then then basically do everything to counter it. Then Israel will finish the job by itself. The 20-point plan demands that Hamas released the remaining hostages,

hand over administration of Gaza, and lay down arms. It calls on Israel to withdraw from Gaza and cease fighting. On Friday, Hamas agreed to release the hostages and give up control of the Gaza Strip. Key negotiators will meet in Egypt to discuss next steps on Monday. The Hamas plan, I tell you, it's amazing. You're going to have peace, if you think about it. Peace in the Middle East for the first time in, they say, really, 3,000 years.

So I'm very honored to be a big part of that. This week marks two years since the October 7th attack, when Hamas militants killed more than 1,200 people, and took roughly 250 hostages. The majority of Gaza's population has since been displaced in the war that's followed. And over 67,000 Palestinians have been killed. That's according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Famine has taken hold in Gaza City.

Warrants have been issued for top Israeli and Hamas officials by the International Criminal Court and a United Nations Commission has concluded that Israel has committed genocide. After a number of failed attempts at a ceasefire deal, many are hopeful that this new peace plan is different. Today, Eric Regulay is on the show. He's the Globe's European Bureau Chief, and he spent the last month in Cairo and Jerusalem. He'll explain the details of Trump's peace plan, how it's being received, and whether it could mark the beginning of the end of this war. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Eric. Thanks so much for making the time to be on the show.

My pleasure. And just want to make note that this is a fast moving file. We're talking at 3 p.m. Eastern and 9 p.m. in Rome. So, Eric, on a high level, what does Trump's peace plan propose happens? Well, this is 20 points, but the key is stop the war, disarm Hamas, allow, aid to come in and crucially not force any Palestinians in Gaza out of Gaza. That's a big one because the narrative for the last few months from Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a Gaza without Gazans. And in fact, Israel was talking to several countries,

including Egypt, primarily Egypt, Libya, Indonesia, Sudan, about taking as many Gazans as possible. And also this plan talks about the release of hostages, 48 hostages, 20 believed to be alive, within three days, and that's in exchange for 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. Within three days, yes. And about 250 of those prisoners are serving life sentences. I mean, they're considered terrorists by Israel. The rest, about 1,700, are detained in Israeli prisons. They have not been prosecuted.

What do we know about the news around the potential release of hostages? Because on Friday, it sounded like there was going to be a release. Do we know when that's going to happen? Do we have any sense? Well, Hamas has agreed to that, which is a big one. Yeah. That's a huge one. So, as you said, there's about 48 left, about 20 alive, 28 thought to be dead.

So these hostages will be released within 72 hours of an agreement. I suspect it's going to happen this week. Oh, okay. Sometime in the next week. Both sides want the photos. They want to see these hostages with their families. It's a really, really big deal. So this has got to happen, I think will happen pretty fast.

How did this peace plan materialize? Like, where did it come from? Do you remember, you may not, I had forgotten about it, but in 2020, during Trump One, there was a peace plan for Gaza. It didn't go anywhere. It's broadly similar in some areas. The main difference was that it envisions the reform of the Palestinian Authority, implying that the Palestinian Authority would be governing Gaza. But the new plan, this one, which came out last week, does not envisges that at all.

There is going to be no role for the Palestinian Authority, at least now, anyway, in Gaza. There'll be a technical committee of Gazans overseen by Donald Trump and former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Not loved in the Middle East. He, you know, with the United States, invaded Iraq in 2003. A lot of people in the Middle East consider him a war criminal. The other, it's two foreigners. It's a huge change in the sense that there's no Palestinians governing Gaza, the new Gaza. You know, the top body overseeing this whole plan is, it's called the Board of Peace.

Donald Trump is a chairman, and Tony Blair will be, in effect, his number two. So now there is going to be a committee underneath that, which is the Palestinian committee, which should be technocrats who are Palestinian, but not exclusively. I mean, the 20-point plan talks for international members, too. We have no idea who these are going to be yet. And it's a little bit premature, really. I mean, there are more pressing issues at the moment. Can we talk about the motivation?

What about the timing of this plan? Like, it coming out right now. Is there anything to that? Oh, yeah, a big one. I think that September 9th was a key date. That's when Israel bombed Doha. And why do they do that? Because they tried to target the Hamas peace negotiators.

They didn't succeed. I think they wounded one, but they didn't kill the main negotiators. That really annoyed Donald Trump. Qatar is probably the biggest ally of United States and the whole Middle East. The American military base there is huge. It seems to have been done. without Donald Trump's approval, the attack by Israel. He just, it was like the last straw.

And that's when he changed right there. And at that point, I think he decided this war has got to end that Israel has to be reigned into some degree. And he launched his peace plan in earnest. So I think September 9th, the Doha attack was very, very big on this. Okay. So you mentioned this as a 20-point peace plan. Can you just highlight what stands out to you?

I mean, other than the release of the hostages, a few things stand out. One is that Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza. It doesn't say anything about the West Bank in this piece, though, but Donald Trump already said that Israel is not going to annex any of the West Bank. Paragraph 12, no one will be forced to leave Gaza. We mentioned that. And that's a big win for the Palestinians. When I was in Cairo for two weeks, all the Palestinians,

all the Palestinians I talked to and the Egyptians, including former diplomats, former generals, they were very worried about Israel and the United States pushing 2 million Palestinians out of Gaza. Where would they go? Presumably Egypt. Egypt doesn't want them. And Egypt was especially worried that there would be members of Hamas in Egypt. So 2 million Palestinians come out of Gaza, presumably a lot of them would go into the Egyptian Sinai, and some of those two million obviously would be Hamas members. So Egypt was worried about having Hamas militants on their own soil, and they could attack Israel from the Sinai, even attack Egypt.

So that was a non-starter. That's a biggie. The economic plan is vague. It seems to be similar to the 2020 plan. The strip will be redeveloped. here's a key one, paragraph 17, in the event Hamas delays or rejects a proposal, the above points will proceed anyway. Break that down.

What does that mean? What it means is Hamas says no, they're going to be eradicated. Huh. Absolutely eradicated. And Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, keeps saying that, you know, accept the plan or you're completely finished. And they'll do that. I mean, Hamas has been more than decimated.

It's, you know, it's probably lost at least half the two-thirds of their fighting force. I mean, there's not much left. But if they don't accept the whole plan, then the United States would support Israel's continuation of the war. What does the plan, the 20-point plan say about statehood? It's vague. It says conditions may finally, may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood. Yeah, what does that mean? No one knows.

I mean, this has been true for how long? I mean, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. The two-state solution has always been on the table since the Oslo Accords. It's being raised here again, but there's nothing to fin. in it, nothing at all. And Netanyahu's has been saying for the last few weeks that he would never accept Palestinian statehood. I mean, one of the things that stood out for me in this peace plan is that there was no Palestinian involvement. Hamas was not at the negotiating table. The Palestinian Authority was not at the negotiating table. This plan was drawn up by Trump,

by his son-in-law, Jaron Kushner, by Israel. And this has the average Palestinian, including the ones I talked to in Egypt, wondering why they don't have a say in their own future. You know, peace plans typically have all sides involved. The two sides involved were this from the United States in Israel, not Palestine. So they're suspicious.

They're thinking that this is another colonial, project that we're going to end up losing. But, but we're willing to accept it because we want this war to end. We want our families who are still in Gaza to live. We'll be right back. We know both Netanyahu and Hamas have signaled support for aspects of this plan. But what do we know about the sticking points here for each side? Okay. The big sticking. point for Israel, for the Trump plan, is disarmament of Hamas and demobilization. Hamas has not agreed to that yet. It may, but it has not yet. Hamas is worried about the

withdrawal of Israeli forces. The 20-point plan talks about the, quote, stage withdrawal of Israeli forces. No one knows over how many days, weeks, months, or years that will happen. Will the stage withdrawal be complete? Will it be 100%? Will there be a buffer zone along the perimeter of Gaza and Israel and Egypt? How wide will that perimeter zone be? Would it be a few hundred meters or a few kilometers? I mean, I've been to Gaza. It's tiny. It's 41 kilometers long and at its maximum width, I think it's 20 or 25 kilometers. It's really, really small. If the perimeter, if the buffer zone is big, that's going to eat into farmland, for example.

We should also note, Eric, that, you know, Trump did order Israel to stop bombing Gaza on Friday after Hamas responded to the plan, but there are reports that bombing is still happening in Gaza City. Hospital officials reported that 22 people were killed on Saturday. So I just wanted to make note of that. Yeah, the Guardian just reported that the number was a lot bigger. Israel Trump ordered Israel to stop offensive bombing and only do defensive military tactics. But the fighting doesn't seem to have stopped. Eric, how long could it actually take until we see an end to the fighting?

Well, theoretically, the offensive fighting by the IDF, the Israeli defense forces was supposed to have ended on the weekend. It clearly didn't, though it looks to be at a lower level than it was. As soon as the hostages are released, which could be any day, I'm going to guess, you know, sometime in the next week or so, the fighting is going to stop. That's the agreement. The fighting stops. Let's talk about reaction from people in Israel and Palestinians in and outside of Gaza. What are you seeing and hearing there? Let's start with Israel. The polls. have changed in the last year. So obviously, after Hamas triggered this war on October 7th, two years ago, killed 1,200 people, mostly Israelis, not exclusively Israelis, it took 250 hostages.

The war was very popular in Israel. All the polls said that 70, 80 percent were in favor of the war, were they in favor of the elimination of Hamas. In recent months, that, has changed. Why is that changed? Because the war is going on too long. Israel is getting really bad publicity around the world. It's being labeled a pariah state. In Rome, yesterday, I live in Rome. There were an estimated one million protesters on the street right in front of my house. There's been protests throughout Italy for a week or so, and I thought, well, this will be a few thousand. I went out of my house, and it was a sea of humanity. And these marchers, they march for hours and hours going from the pyramid right by my house,

past the Circus Maximus to the Colosseum. It may not have been a million, but it was certainly hundreds and hundreds of things. thousands. So that's what you're getting in Europe. Spain the same. So it's been more in Southern Europe, partially the result of the flotilla, which got intercepted by Israel and international waters. And Splatilla was carrying aid to Gaza. Yeah, AIDS such as baby formula to Gaza. They were taken ashore. Some of them were thrown in jail. All of them will be deported. But no, there were Italians. Here were Greeks. There were Spaniards aboard, and this really, really annoyed the people of Southern Europe. To get back to the response from Israel

about this plan, what have politicians said? The two most vocal politicians against this plan are Smotrich, who's the finance minister, and Ben Gavir, who's the security minister. These two have been the prime hawks. They want the war continued until Hamas is 100% eradicated. They would like to see settlements in Gaza. And they don't want this plan at all. And if they withdrew their support and their parties withdrew their support from the coalition government, the government could fall. The Israeli government could fall. And if the government falls, There's going to be an election, which Netanyahu may not win. And don't forget, he's under investigation for criminal activities.

And, you know, if he's not prime minister, he may not be protected anymore. What have you heard in response to this plan, potentially moving forward from Palestinians? I spent two weeks in Cairo until about a week ago. And almost every day I talk to Palestinian families who had left God. Many of them had left because they had family members in Egypt and could get visas, but most of them were wounded. And they got into Egyptian hospitals. And then after they recovered, they found very inexpensive apartments in Cairo. All of them, to the man, to the woman, want this war to end.

Yes, they care about Palestinian statehood. Yes, they want to be masters of their own land, but they're really, really worried about their families. There is one woman I know very well. She's called Nada. I met her in Gaza in 2022, a year before the war started. We got to know each other very, very well. She escaped with her wounded father about a year and a half ago, but she has eight family members, including her mother, brothers, a younger sister.

their children in Gaza, and they've been ordered to leave Gaza by the Israelis. And on their march out of Gaza, just a few days ago, Yaman, who is the youngest brother, he's 18 years old, got hit by Israeli shrapnel. I don't know, it's from a bomb or a missile or a landmine. But he's in ICU now. It looks like he'll live, but he's got a piece of shrapnel lodged in his brain and they don't, he's not walking, he's not talking. He needs an operation desperately or else he could be an invalid the rest of his life. And that's what you're hearing is that almost every family I talked to in Egypt from Gaza had family members in Gaza. And they are terrified, absolutely terrified that they're going to get killed, maimed, or starve to death.

Eric, this is, of course, not the first time we're talking about a potential ceasefire deal to end this war. What is different about this deal compared to ones we've seen fall apart before this? And is there a greater sense that this plan could actually work? Well, the reason I'm optimistic about this plan is only because Trump is really, really involved. Yes, he was involved in the 2020 plan, but, you know, that wasn't his. his focus that year. I mean, he was worried about getting reelected. This one seems personal to him. When he was campaigning last year, he said, look, I'm going to fix the Ukraine war in, what, 24 hours? That didn't happen. Ukraine war is still going on. In fact, it seems to be intensifying.

So he focused on Gaza, and he needed a win on Gaza. And he may get that win. It may not be to Israel's 100% liking her. Mass is liking. But he's really focused on this. And that's the main difference, I think, between the 2020 plan and this plan is that this one has got Trump's personality, fingerprints, ideas, son-in-law, Jared Kushner. It's a Trump family deal. And I don't think he's going to tolerate failure on this. I just don't. Is the sense that because Trump is involved and seems to not want failure that he's going to put pressure on Israel, and that's potentially why this deal could go through? Oh, sure, and Hamas as well. I mean, the pressure on Hamas is if, you know, you accept the deal or Israel is going to finish a job for you, you know, and eliminate

you. Look, I don't think this plan is entirely to Israel's liking. Hamas still exists, right? Point A. Point B, no gassins are going to be forced out. And Israel was hoping that hundreds of thousands or a million or more would leave. So this is not entirely to Israel's liking either. Okay. So we know that both Netanyahu and Hamas are supportive of this plan moving forward. But of course, there are still many details to sort out. Negotiations will begin on Monday. What do we know about what will be talked about? Well, the initial negotiations will be the hostage release, the timing of it. It may not happen on all in a single day. I was reading one pretty gruesome report that Hamas may not know where all the dead hostages are. You know, they're probably in tunnels. Some of these tunnels have been destroyed.

So I think the hostages dead and alive are going to get released. it may not all be at once. It could be over several days. The second question then is the release of prisoners from Israel, the 250 life prisoners and then the 1,700 or so detainees. Are they all going to come out at once? Will it be released over, I don't know, several weeks or months, but also their identities? Are there any signs that this deal is being taken?

taken seriously? Oh, yeah. So my fixer in Cairo sent me an intriguing video earlier today, and it showed Egyptian heavy equipment. These were bulldozers, the machines with the huge buckets on them. They were moving from Egypt into Gaza. I checked it out. It looks real. And this made me happy because this is a sign that the peace effort seems to be serious. Now, why is this heavy equipment going in there? To clear roads, presumably to allow massive amounts of aid to get in there. I mean, there is hunger. The United Nations Special Committee said there's famine there and genocide. But these people have to be fed. These people have to be fed. So, so, to clear the roads to get trucks in, but also to find bodies because there are bodies

probably under many or most of the destroyed buildings. So they will be unearthing bodies. I mean, it's grim, but it's necessary. They would be going in from southern Gaza at Rafa. The Israelis are, it's called the Philadelphia Corridor. The Israelis are firmly in control of that corridor, on that corridor, which runs in the Mediterranean to the Israeli border along the southern side of Gaza, Israel's in control. There's no fighting right there. So it's safe to put that machinery in there. I still consider it a good sign because dozens of huge bulldozers would not be going in

unless they're going to be used for something. So it, to me, it's a signal that the clearing of the rubble is going to. to happen very soon. Eric, thank you so much for making the time to be on the show. Thank you. That was Eric Regulay, the Globe's European Bureau Chief. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland.

Our producers are Madeline White, Mikhail Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive. editor. Thanks so much for listening.