How Trump’s upside-down diplomacy delivered a major foreign policy victory

He turned upside-down the traditional playbook for solving international crises, in which diplomats work behind the scenes to iron out differences between warring parties, before world leaders swoop in and announce a deal.

As mediators pored over maps and prisoner lists in Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm El Sheikh late into Wednesday night, Trump signaled that he would be flying to the region to mark a deal that was still unfinished.

His gambit is that no one, including hard-liners on both sides of the war, will say no to him, and that the professionals will sort it out.

“We ended the war in Gaza," Trump said from the White House on Thursday, congratulating special envoy Steve Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, for their roles.

Yet even as Trump took a victory lap, technical teams were still trying to resolve the details of many of the substantive issues that had derailed previous rounds of talks, with Hamas officials warning negotiators in Sharm El Sheikh that they could still walk away if key demands weren’t met. This includes the exact withdrawal lines for Israeli troops and a list of Palestinian prisoners to be freed in exchange for Israeli hostages, according to people familiar with the talks.

U.S. negotiators in Egypt concluded that the deal was “close enough" for Trump to announce it on Wednesday evening, a senior U.S. official said.

A day later, they were still focused on finalizing the details and patching up gaps in the agreement, the official said. “There’s still… just a lot of ways that this can go wrong."

In Paris, European and Arab foreign ministers met to discuss the implementation of the plan and Gaza’s postwar future—without the participation of Rubio, who abruptly canceled his trip the day before.

Trump’s public pressure campaign created a sense of inevitability, said Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt. “Who wants to be the side that prevents him from announcing from the Knesset podium that he deserves a peace prize?" he said.

But while his gamble may have worked to secure the first phase of the deal, which calls for an initial cease-fire that will allow for the exchange of captives, diplomats say Trump will find it far more difficult to use the bully pulpit to push through the next phases. The longer-term plan calls for disarming Hamas and the introduction of a multinational peacekeeping force in Gaza.

Those issues proved so difficult that negotiators in Egypt chose not to touch them this week.

“It’s not first and goal anymore, it’s already a touchdown, even though the ball hasn’t crossed the line," said Khaled Elgindy, a former adviser to the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah on past rounds of negotiations with Israel. “The idea of getting out ahead of the negotiators and forcing their hand, I think, has worked thus far."

Key to the deal was Trump’s direct pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was reluctant to end the war, people involved in the negotiations say. U.S. officials on Thursday alluded to some tougher tactics behind the scenes. “The president had some extraordinary phone calls and meetings that required a high degree of intensity and commitment and made this happen," Rubio said.

“Trump is the only U.S. president, and I’ve worked for half a dozen administrations from Carter to Bush, who was able to force an Israeli prime minister to accept an American peace proposal," said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator. “Trump has gone where no American president has gone before."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with President Trump at the White House last month.

Israel’s strike on Hamas leaders in Qatar last month sparked widespread Arab anger and a consensus that Netanyahu had gone too far. The Qataris and Emiratis turned to intense diplomacy with the White House to pressure Israel, said people familiar with the negotiations.

This time, Trump told Netanyahu he had to take the deal, while the Qataris, Egyptians and Turks pressed Hamas to do the same. “Netanyahu was locked in, and Hamas was locked in," said Gershon Baskin, an Israeli hostage negotiator involved in past talks.

U.S. officials familiar with the negotiations credited the speed of the final push to Trump meeting with Arab officials on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly last month. Trump told them he was prepared to draw a line with Netanyahu, according to Arab officials, who said they walked out of the meeting feeling optimistic.

Days later, Trump said he wouldn’t allow Netanyahu to annex the West Bank. “It’s not going to happen," Trump told reporters, shocking the Israeli right, which was pushing for annexation.

Trump, who has always preferred people he sees as dealmakers over technocrats, relied on Witkoff, a real-estate developer, and Kushner to bypass traditional diplomatic channels. Their approach broke from the drawn-out, detail-driven pattern of traditional Middle East negotiations, which often devolved into zero-sum battles, analysts say.

Instead, their style resembled a high-stakes business deal—putting an offer on the table, signaling a willingness to walk away and waiting for the other side “to shake in their pants and say yes," Baskin said.

In late September, after negotiations between Israel and Hamas had stalled for months, Trump announced a broad 20-point plan that called for the release of hostages and a permanent end to the war in Gaza in a White House event alongside Netanyahu, who faces some resistance to any cease-fire from hard-line members of his own cabinet.

When Hamas responded to Trump’s plan with a “yes, but," earlier this month, Trump surprised Netanyahu by accepting the Palestinian group’s response, leaving the Israeli prime minister little room to maneuver and setting up this week’s negotiations in Egypt.

Trump isn’t the first president to try to speak a deal into existence. Last year, President Joe Biden read out the details of a proposed cease-fire agreement in a televised address in an effort to force Netanyahu to accept it. The negotiations continued to falter for the next several months as the Israeli leader resisted prodding from the White House.

This time, Trump took that tactic several steps further, using the announcement itself as leverage.

“Had he waited for all the details to be negotiated, it could have taken weeks, months, and ended in nothing," said Daniel Shek, a former Israeli ambassador to France and head of diplomacy at Hostages Families Forum, an advocacy group. Instead, Trump “announced the result and said ‘now it’s your turn to work out the details.’"

Write to Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com, Vera Bergengruen at vera.bergengruen@wsj.com and Anat Peled at anat.peled@wsj.com