CAIRO: Hamas calls Donald Trump a racist, a “recipe for chaos” and a man with an absurd vision for Gaza.

But one extraordinary phone call last month helped persuade Hamas that the US president might be able to hold Israel to a peace deal even if the group gave up all the Israeli prisoners that lend it leverage, two Palestinian officials said on Friday.

In the call, widely publicised at the time, Trump put Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the phone after a meeting at the White House last month, to apologise to Qatar’s prime minister for an Israeli strike on a residential complex that housed Hamas’s political leaders in the emirate’s capital Doha.

Trump’s handling of the Qatar bombing, which failed to kill the Hamas officials it targeted, including lead negotiator Khalil al-Hayya, gave the group more faith that he was able to stand up to Netanyahu and that he was serious about ending the conflict in Gaza.

Now, after signing up to a Trump-brokered ceasefire on Wednesday, the group has put further faith in the word of a man who only this year proposed expelling Palestinians from Gaza and rebuilding it as a US-controlled beach resort.

Under the deal, which took effect on Friday, Hamas agreed to give up its prisoners without an agreement on full Israeli withdrawal. Two other Palestinian officials, from Hamas, acknowledged that was a risky gamble which relies on the US president being so invested in the deal he will not let it fail.

Hamas leaders are well aware their gamble could backfire, one of the Hamas officials said. They fear that once the Israelis are released, Israel could resume its military campaign, as happened after a January ceasefire that Trump’s team had also been closely involved in.

However, gathered for indirect talks with Israel in a conference centre in the Sharm el Sheikh Red Sea resort, Hamas was reassured enough by the presence of Trump’s closest confidants and regional heavyweights to sign up to the ceasefire even though it leaves many of the group’s core demands unresolved, including moves towards a Palestinian state.

Eagerness

Trump’s eagerness was felt “heavily” in the conference centre. He personally called three times during the marathon session, a senior US official said, with his son-in-law Jared Kushner and envoy Steve Witkoff shuttling between Israeli and Qatari negotiators

While it may pave the way to ending the conflict, which began with Hamas’ October 7, 2023, raid, there is no certainty that later phases envisaged in Trump’s 20-point Gaza plan will materialise.

But Trump’s handling of both the Qatar strikes and the ceasefire that ended Israel’s 12-day war with Iran in June gave the Hamas negotiators confidence that the U.S. president would not just let Israel resume fighting as soon as the prisoners are released, the two Palestinian officials and another source briefed on talks said.

Trumps aides saw an opportunity to turn his anger at Netanyahu over the Qatar strike into pressure on the Israeli leader to accept a framework for ending the Gaza conflict, according to a source in Washington familiar with the matter.

Trump, who has cultivated ties with Gulf states important to a range of his wider diplomatic and economic policies, considers the Qatari emir a friend and did not like to see images of the strikes on television, a senior White House official said, calling the a significant turning point that coalesced the Arab world.

Trump’s public promise that no such Israeli attacks against Qatar would happen again lent him credibility in the eyes of Hamas and other regional actors, said a Palestinian official in Gaza briefed on the talks and mediation efforts.

“The fact that he gave Qatar a security guarantee that Israel would not attack them again, has increased Hamas’s confidence that a ceasefire will remain in place,” said Jonathan Reinhold of the Political Studies Department at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.

Hamas also took note of Trump’s public order for Iran and Israel to halt hostilities, said the Palestinian official in Gaza, singling-out Trump’s demand on his Truth Social platform that Israeli planes “turn around and head home” from a planned bombing raid on Iran hours after he had announced a ceasefire in their 12-day war in June.

Published in Dawn, October 11th, 2025