On the night of October 4, President Donald Trump picked up the phone in his Florida residence and called Binyamin Netanyahu with a blunt message: the war in Gaza was over.

After two years of relentless bloodshed, Trump’s envoys had secured a cease-fire through marathon negotiations with Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey. Now the president wanted Netanyahu to accept the deal — or face the political consequences.

“Bibi, you can’t fight the world,” Trump told him, according to his account in an interview with TIME. “You can fight individual battles, but the world’s against you.” Netanyahu pushed back, but Trump pressed harder. He launched into a profanity-laced tirade recounting everything he had done for Israel: moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, brokering the Abraham Accords, even joining Israel’s June airstrikes on Iran.

“I’ve done more for Israel than anyone,” Trump fumed. “But I can’t stand with you on this.”

According to Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, it was “a very blunt and straightforward statement … that he had no tolerance for anything other than this.” Netanyahu eventually relented. By the end of the call, Israel had agreed to a two-phase plan ending its longest war.

The accord, announced days later, secured the return of Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, opened Gaza to humanitarian aid, and began the phased withdrawal of Israeli troops from the enclave. It also launched negotiations toward a permanent settlement and international peacekeeping force.

If it holds, the deal could mark a defining victory in Trump’s second term: the end of a brutal war and the cementing of U.S. dominance in a region where, just two years ago, Washington’s influence seemed to be fading.

Over the past nine months, Trump has combined military might and transactional diplomacy to reshape the Middle East. U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June, which crippled Tehran’s infrastructure, accelerated the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria and shifted regional allegiances. In Yemen, Trump bombed Houthi sites and won a pledge to stop attacks on American vessels.

Now, he’s used the same real-estate instincts that guided his business career — leverage, flattery, and threat — to bring Netanyahu and Hamas to the table. “Trump is breaking all the long-held assumptions of Middle East diplomacy,” said historian and former Israeli ambassador Michael Oren. “He’s reasserting American hegemony — and, so far, it’s working.”

Trump credits his success to what he calls “credible power.” His decision to kill Iranian general Qasem Soleimani during his first term and his willingness to strike Iranian nuclear sites this year, he says, convinced both allies and adversaries that he would use force if necessary.

“It would have been impossible to make a deal like this before,” Trump told TIME. “No President was willing to do it. By doing it, we had a different Middle East.”

The cease-fire, however, remains fragile. Hamas has yet to return the bodies of all the deceased Israeli hostages, prompting Israel to briefly close the Rafah crossing. Fighting flared again in mid-October, and Israel accused Hamas of violating the truce after a deadly attack on IDF forces.

Within days, Trump dispatched Vice President J.D. Vance to Israel to hold the agreement together, underscoring the administration’s recognition that the fragile peace could still unravel.

Trump’s path to the deal was as unorthodox as the agreement itself.

In February, months before the cease-fire, Trump had summoned Netanyahu to the White House and proposed a radical idea: relocating Gaza’s population and turning the Strip into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

The proposal horrified Arab negotiators — but also jolted them into action. “He scared the hell out of them,” said Nimrod Novick, a veteran Israeli adviser. “That’s what got everyone moving.”

By summer, the battlefield had expanded. Israeli jets struck Iran’s nuclear sites in June, and Trump, initially furious, eventually joined the campaign. In September, Israel’s bombing of Hamas operatives in Doha nearly derailed mediation efforts but provided Trump an unexpected opportunity.

“It was terrible,” Trump said, calling the attack a “tactical mistake.” But it also gave him leverage. “It was so out of joint it got everyone to the table.”

At the U.N. General Assembly that same month, Trump, alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Witkoff, and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, convened Arab leaders on Rosh Hashana to finalize a 20-point peace framework. Saudi and Jordanian envoys signed on. Turkey offered Hamas protection if it complied. Qatar applied pressure.

Then came Trump’s ultimatum. “I said, ‘No more of that — you’re giving us the [expletive] hostages, all of them.’”

It worked. Hamas freed the remaining live captives.

The next stage will determine whether the cease-fire holds. It calls for Hamas’s disarmament, Israeli troop withdrawals, and the creation of a new civilian government for Gaza.

“These are very difficult things to do,” cautioned former U.S. ambassador Dan Shapiro. “Without clear governance, you risk a frozen conflict — Israel controlling half of Gaza, Hamas the other, and no reconstruction.”

Trump insists the outcome depends on one thing: him. “The most important thing,” he told TIME, “is they have to respect the President of the United States. The Middle East has to understand that. It’s almost the President more than the country.”

Netanyahu now faces rebellion from hard-right ministers demanding annexation of the West Bank — a move Trump says would cross a red line. “It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries,” Trump warned. “Israel would lose all its support from the United States if that happened.”

Trump’s team, meanwhile, is racing to consolidate gains. Vance and senior advisers Jared Kushner and Witkoff are managing reconstruction talks while Trump pursues an even bigger prize: a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia by year’s end.

The Saudis’ price is clear: an end to the war and a credible path toward Palestinian sovereignty. Trump says both are “within reach.”

“I think Saudi Arabia is going to lead the way,” he told TIME. “We don’t have the Iran threat anymore. We don’t have any threats anymore. We have peace in the Middle East.”

That may be an exaggeration. But after two years of war, Trump has managed to achieve something that eluded his predecessors: a cease-fire that returned hostages, quieted the guns — and placed America back at the center of Middle East diplomacy.

“While I’m there,” Trump said confidently, “it’s only going to get better and stronger. It’s going to be perfect.”

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)