Tears flowed in Israel on Monday as a two-year dam of pent-up anguish was released in a single day of collective joy and relief.
Typing these words may be a challenge through my own tears. How we have all longed for this day.
That day was Monday, October 13th, 2025, the day all 20 remaining living Israeli hostages were freed from Gaza to be reunited with their families: fathers returning to their children, sons to their mothers, brothers to their siblings.
For now, a ceasefire is in place. Israel’s relentless bombing of Gaza has stopped, aid is finally allowed to flow in and 2,000 Palestinians have been released by Israel.
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For so long, every single day brought the horrible news of tens more Palestinians being killed by Israel in Gaza. But this week has been different; this week the bleeding has stopped. A fragile ceasefire has brought fragile hope.
It is remarkable how above all of this looms large the peculiar figure of Donald Trump, who somehow succeeded in imposing on Israel and on Hamas – at least for now – a specific sort of Pax Trumpiana.
The US president’s ability to apply this tourniquet forcefully should not be underestimated, especially given the brutality of the past two years, and in light of the Biden administration’s failure in this regard.
But it is hard, impossible almost, to resolve the contradictions: the same person leading the dismantling of American democracy is the one promising to rebuild Gaza.
The same person who just months ago introduced a grotesque plot to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza is now the peacemaker, the one signed on to a plan stating that “[n]o one will be forced to leave Gaza ... We will encourage people to stay and offer them the opportunity to build a better Gaza”.
And so, through the thick fog of over-the-top Trumpian rhetoric and the endless clouds of flattery sprayed upon him, some solid facts offer a way of anchoring ourselves back in reality.
The facts: Israel is led by an ultranationalist government, headed by a prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who is wanted for war crimes. He would have clearly preferred to continue the daily carnage of Gazans.
On the Palestinian side, credible leadership, one that enjoys the legitimacy of its own people, is hard to find – and is certainly not the one currently in place.
Gaza itself is devastated – according to the United Nations (UN), 78 per cent of buildings are partly or fully destroyed, including hospitals, schools, universities and all forms of infrastructure from water to sewerage to electricity.
Gaza’s health service is “shattered” and “on the brink of total collapse”, the World Health Organisation says.
Uncleared rubble is everywhere and underneath it the remains of countless more families killed by Israel, their names yet to be added to the more than 67,000 dead already accounted for.
And there are more facts – facts surprisingly articulated by none other than Trump himself in his speech to the Knesset: “Ultimately the world wins. You can’t beat the world.”
Yes, it was Trumpian pressure that – finally, belatedly – forced Israel to stop; but it was more than that, as Trump spelt out.
The rising tide of global public opinion, slowly translating public outrage into foreign policy beginning to affect trade agreements, sports, culture and academia – this unbeatable pulse of a global conscience being awakened – is what ultimately made the difference. This is a lesson worth remembering.
With these facts in mind, we can try to look ahead. Trump is now all about pushing forward a great regional deal, something that at times echoes the pre-October 7th, 2023, plans for Israeli-Saudi normalisation.
It is worth recalling that plan was meant to make clear to Palestinians how invisible and insignificant they have become. It was meant to send a message that the Palestinian issue has become a non-issue.
Now the Palestinian issue is front and centre on the region’s – and the world’s – stage. Trying to, again, move forward without genuine Palestinian ownership and representation would be, again, doomed to fail. This, too, is a lesson worth remembering.
The first public message by 24-year-old pianist Alon Ohel, after he was released from two years of captivity in Gaza was one he scrawled on to a whiteboard and held up while he was in a helicopter on his way to a hospital in Israel.
It quoted a few lines from a cherished Israeli poem: “Because my song is a gust of the wind, my open window, spring of my power, laughter and tears, end of my suffering.”
And it was the end of so much suffering. The future must be built from this moment, it must be built on the end of everyone’s suffering. After so much grief, cruelty and carnage, this seems an almost insurmountable task.
But all we can do is hope that, on this, Trump is right: that ultimately the world wins, that ultimately humanity wins.
Hagai El-Ed is a writer based in Jerusalem. He tweets @HagaiElAd
