WASHINGTON — A U.S.-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took hold Thursday morning under the terms of President Trump’s much-touted twenty-point peace framework, of which seventeen points reportedly concern the personal greatness of President Trump, two concern hostages, and one is a hand-drawn arrow pointing at the Nobel Committee’s mailing address.
The framework, distributed to negotiators on White House letterhead bordered with what aides described as “victory laurels,” opens with the binding clause “Whereas no one has ever done this before, and many people are saying that,” before getting around to the cessation of hostilities on page eleven. Point 14 is simply the word “TREMENDOUS” in 48-point font. Point 19 instructs signatories to “call him and tell him.”
“It’s structurally unusual but diplomatically functional,” said Renske Halloran, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Heartland Project who has reviewed the document. “The actual ceasefire mechanism is buried in a footnote on point seven, and the footnote is also about Trump. But technically the guns stopped, so by the only metric the President accepts, it’s working.”
Hostage families, who learned of the breakthrough via a Truth Social post that misspelled three of their relatives’ names, expressed cautious relief. The post was reportedly point 8.
State Department officials, speaking on background because they would prefer to keep working there, confirmed that the President spent the morning of the ceasefire’s implementation not on follow-through but on a phone call to the Norwegian ambassador in which he asked, three times, whether the Nobel medal could be made bigger. He is said to have inquired about “a sash, like a beauty pageant” as a backup.
Israeli and Hamas negotiators, who have spent two years unable to agree on the shape of a table, reportedly signed the framework after being told they did not have to read points 1 through 6, 9 through 13, 15, 16, 17, or 20, all of which are about Trump. Negotiators were permitted to focus exclusively on the twelve sentences that constitute actual policy.
The President addressed the nation Thursday afternoon from the Rose Garden, where he spoke for forty-one minutes about the ceasefire and approximately ninety seconds about the region. He referred to Gaza as “that place” four times and to himself as “the only one who could have done this” eleven times, a ratio aides described as “on-message.”
Asked by a reporter whether the framework included any enforcement mechanism, the President said the enforcement mechanism was him, personally, and that anyone who broke the ceasefire would have to deal with him, personally, and that he would be very disappointed, personally. He then introduced his son-in-law, who introduced a slideshow.
Critics noted that point 20, the only operative clause concerning long-term governance of Gaza, reads in its entirety: “To be determined by President Trump at a later date, possibly during a rally.” Supporters called the provision flexible.
By Thursday evening the ceasefire was holding, the hostages were being processed, and the President was on the phone with a medal engraver, asking whether “45 and 47, Peace” could fit on the front, or whether they’d have to put some of it on the back.