President Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office at the White House, in Washington, DC, on Oct. 21, 2025. Credit - Photograph by Stephen Voss for TIME

On the evening of Saturday, Oct. 4, Donald Trump called Benjamin Netanyahu to deliver a message: the war in Gaza was over.

Trump’s envoys had brokered a deal with mediators from Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey to end two years of bombardment and bloodshed. The following Monday, the President told Netanyahu, they were going to announce the agreement—and the Israeli Premier had to accept it. “Bibi, you can’t fight the world,” Trump told him, recounting their conversation in an interview with TIME. “You can fight individual battles, but the world’s against you.”

Netanyahu pushed back, but Trump wasn’t having it. He launched into a profanity-laced monologue cataloguing all he’d done for Israel as President: moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing its sovereignty over the Golan Heights, brokering the Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states, even joining Israel’s strikes on Iran in June. Trump could no longer stand with Netanyahu, he suggested, if the Prime Minister didn’t sign onto the pact. “It was a very blunt and straightforward statement to Bibi,” says Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, “that he had no tolerance for anything other than this.” (Netanyahu’s office declined to comment.)

By the end of the call, Netanyahu had agreed to a two-phase deal that included a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, secured the return of Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners and detainees, allowed aid shipments into the ravaged enclave, withdrew Israeli forces from parts of the Gaza Strip, and opened negotiations for a final settlement. If it holds, the accord would end the longest war in Israel’s history, one that killed some 2,000 Israelis and nearly 70,000 Palestinians.

The deal marks a milestone in Trump’s ongoing bid to reshape the modern Middle East. During the past nine months, the President has attacked Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and helped degrade its standing in the region. Isolating Tehran hastened the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, and new governments in Damascus and Beirut have signaled a desire to restore ties with Washington. He has bombed Houthi targets in Yemen, leading to an agreement that the rebel group would no longer target U.S. vessels in the Red Sea. Now he has used a real estate dealmaker’s sensibility—an instinct for leverage, for cajoling counterparts through flattery and the threat of force—to push a peace deal on Hamas and Netanyahu, two seemingly intractable enemies. The U.S. President is “breaking all the long-held assumptions of Middle East diplomacy,” says Michael Oren, the historian and former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. “Trump is coming back and saying: We’re going to re-establish America’s hegemony here. And he’s done it—so far.”

Trump traces his achievements so far to his willingness to use America’s military might. Through the ­assassination of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in his first term and his decision to strike three Iranian nuclear facilities last spring, Trump earned enough goodwill among the Israeli public and stirred enough fear among the nation’s adversaries to bring both parties to the bargaining table. “It would have been impossible to make a deal like this before,” Trump says of his attacks on Iran. “No President was willing to do it, and I was willing to do it. And by doing it, we had a different Middle East.”

Of course, the cease-fire remains fragile, and the deal could still unravel. Hamas has yet to return the remains of all the deceased Israeli hostages, prompting Israel to close the Rafah crossing and restrict aid. Videos on social media show Hamas gunmen executing rivals in the streets. On Oct. 19, Israel accused the militant group of violating the cease-fire after attacks on Israeli soldiers. In the span of a week, the situation grew precarious enough that Trump dispatched Vice President J.D. Vance to the region in a bid to hold the agreement together.

The next phase is even thornier. It includes defining the scope of Israel’s military withdrawal and the structure of a peacekeeping force; disarming Hamas; and determining who will govern postwar Gaza. “Those are very difficult things to do,” says Dan Shapiro, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel under Barack Obama. Among the risks, Shapiro says, is that Trump could “end up with kind of a frozen conflict in the current situation, with Israel controlling half of Gaza, Hamas controlling the other half, suppressing its own people, and no real reconstruction.”

For those reasons, experts fear the peace may prove fleeting. But Trump’s foreign policy has also defied the predictions of his critics. His “America First” creed—once synonymous with isolationism and retreat—has evolved into an unconventional form of personalized diplomacy unburdened by doctrine. While he has shown himself content to let Russia have greater dominance over Europe and China exert its will in the Indo-Pacific region, he has asserted U.S. power in the Middle East in surprising ways. Trump has deepened Washington’s ties with Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Doha. He expects Saudi Arabia to normalize ties with Israel and join the Abraham Accords by year’s end. He tells TIME he intends to visit Gaza soon, as U.S. partners hammer out a plan to reconstruct the Strip. Soon he envisions greater economic integration between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The bullish vision of what all this could mean would be transformative: rail lines from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf; free-trade agreements between Israel and its neighbors; the ­establishment of a new regional energy grid; Saudis vacationing in Tel Aviv.