This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, US President Donald Trump exulted over his remarkable achievement in securing the release of the last 20 living hostages held in Gaza, and, eventually, all 28 slain hostages, under the October 2025 deal he brokered between Israel and Hamas.

“Under the ceasefire I negotiated, every single hostage, both living and dead, has been returned home,” he self-marvelled. “Can you believe that? Nobody thought it was possible. Nobody thought that was possible.”

Similarly, on Iran, the president rejoiced that last June, “the United States military obliterated Iran’s nuclear weapons program with an attack on Iranian soil known as Operation Midnight Hammer.” Obliterated — a word he has continually used to describe the state of the ayatollahs’ nuclear program — is an overreach; most of Iran’s 60% enriched uranium likely survived the 12-day Israel-US-Iran war. Indeed, his key negotiator, Steve Witkoff, warned in a Fox News interview on Saturday, that “they are probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material, and that’s really dangerous.”

Nevertheless, Trump has legitimate reasons to claim credit for extraordinary successes in the battles against both the Islamic death cult terror group Hamas and its key sponsor, the ideologically and territorially rapacious Islamic Republic.

Trouble is, on both fronts, these enemies may be wounded, but not irreversibly so.

In Gaza, as my colleague Lazar Berman detailed in a deeply troubling report earlier this week, Hamas retains control of the half of the enclave where most of the population lives. And it is furtively ensuring that it will continue to hold sway even if and when the Palestinian Authority-affiliated National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, ultimately overseen by Trump, begins ostensibly taking administrative control of parts of the Strip.

Hamas is working assiduously to what I would call “deterrorize” its military commanders — inserting them, Berman reported, into key “civilian roles that are set to become part of the NCAG governing apparatus.” This confirms what the IDF warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in January: “Hamas is advancing steps on the ground meant to preserve its influence and grip in the Gaza Strip ‘from the bottom up’ by means of integrating its supporters in government offices, security apparatuses, and local authorities.”

Berman goes into considerable further detail on Hamas’s strategic planning to ensure it dominates and subverts the purportedly ruling technocratic committee, rather than being marginalized........

© The Times of Israel