Trump to Visit Middle East ‘Monday or Tuesday’

The president’s 20-point peace plan to end the Gaza War, to which Hamas tentatively agreed to Oct. 3, calls for Israel to release 250 Palestinians with life sentences “plus 1,700 Gazans who were detained after October 7, 2023.”

“Once all hostages are returned, Hamas members who commit to peaceful co-existence and to decommission their weapons will be given amnesty,” Trump’s peace blueprint says. “Members of Hamas who wish to leave Gaza will be provided safe passage to receiving countries.”

Trump has framed the cessation of fighting as bringing peace to the region as a whole — after his first-term diplomatic push established between Israel and four Arab countries, a list which he has attempted to broaden to include Saudi Arabia and Syria in his second term.

The Trump plan specifies three rounds of Israeli troop pullbacks away from Gaza’s heavily populated coastal areas, with the first due to occur in conjunction with the initial hostage release.

Key sticking points in the roadmap — such as international troop contributions to a Gaza peacekeeping force and members of a proposed “technocratic, apolitical” interim government with no Hamas involvement — remain undetermined.

The transitional government would be overseen by a Board of Peace chaired by Trump, with former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair as a member.

The roadmap, which calls for no forced relocation of residents, has followed a year of dramatic threats and inducements, with Trump at one point floating clearing out the beachfront territory and turning it into a US-owned “Riviera of the Middle East.”

Trump’s breakthrough came roughly 36 hours before the Friday morning announcement of the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize — an award that prominent Republicans and many of his foreign allies have clamored for him to win.