Examining Phase Two of the Peace Initiative
Featuring: Dalia Zaidi, Egyptian Affairs Expert
Date: October 16, 2025
Time: 12 o’clock, noon
Today, October 13, 2025, is a historic day. Our 20 remaining live hostages have finally been returned home. President Donald Trump spoke before the Knesset and was interrupted many times by standing ovations. Today we are triumphant that the hostages, finally, after two emotionally and physically brutal years will finally be returned to the loving arms of their families.
Stage I of the deal is over, (although not all of the deceased have been returned for proper burials.)
Stage II awaits us. There will, most likely, be many bumps in the road. Hamas is not likely to give up its power without a fight.
Egypt is one of the parties which had been tasked with mediating the dispute between the terrorist organization, Hamas, and Israel. The other two are Turkey and Qatar.
Turkey, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has made the most deplorable statements towards Israel, just within this week. Without reference to the barbaric attacks of Hamas of October 7, 2023, Erdogan has accused Israel of “genocidal attacks on the Palestinians which are worse than Hitler’s”. He immediately praised the terrorist group Hamas for accepting Trump’s plan, “clearly demonstrating its will for peace”, and placing the entire burden of acceptance of the plan on Israel, saying “peace is not a one-winged bird.”
Likewise, Qatar has been hosting Hamas officials in its capitol, Doha, since 2012, and has been paying Hamas’ salaries in Gaza. It has provided a base for various Hamas leaders including Khaled Mashal, member of Hamas’ five-person leadership council; Khalil Al-Haya, the de facto leader of Hamas since the death of Yahya Sinwar in October 2024; and Mohammad Ishmael Darwich, Chairman of the Hamas leadership council. Doha has been airing the highly antisemitic Al-Jazeera, particularly its Arabic version, that is aired throughout many regions of the world.
Egypt has its own set of problems. It has allowed the construction of tunnels and of smuggling routes from inside Gaza to the Sinai Peninsula within Egypt. Within Sinai we have seen vast military maneuvers, and between July 16th and August 25th, there were 384 drone incursions from Egypt into Israel.
Today, and this entire week is a time for celebration. However, , one cannot help but be concerned if the results of this peace initiative will endure for generations, to come.
Here to answer this is Dalia Ziada.
About Our Speaker: Dalia Ziada is an Egyptian award-winning writer and political analyst specializing in governance, geopolitics, and regional security in the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean. Dalia studied international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, majoring in international security studies.
In the past two decades, Dalia held senior positions at regional and international think tanks and civil society organizations, where she led projects, advised policymakers, and authored articles, papers, and books analyzing the geopolitical conflicts and power relations in the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean.
Since April 2024, Dalia has joined the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA) as a Senior Fellow for Research and Diplomacy on Arab-Israel-U.S. affairs. Meanwhile, Dalia is working on a research project with the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) on the threat of radical Islamism in the United States.
Since May 2024, Dalia has been roaming American university campuses, in partnership with Hillel International and other esteemed non-partisan organizations, to lecture on the changing geopolitics of the Middle East in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks.
Dalia has earned several awards for the impact of her writing and activism. She has been globally recognized for her leading role as a civil rights activist in the Arab Spring revolutions of 2010-2011 and for her uncommon stance as an Arab Muslim intellectual against Hamas and in support of Israel following the October 7 attacks that Israel endured in 2023. Dalia has been active in the people-to-people Muslim-Jewish Dialogue and Arab-Israeli Dialogue for 16 years. She has also engaged in several political and cultural battles against political Islamists and radical Islamist groups in her homeland, Egypt, in Arab countries, and in the United States.
Dalia authored the best-selling book “The Curious Case of the Three-Legged Wolf – Egypt: Military, Islamism, and Liberal Democracy” (2019) and other internationally acclaimed books dating back to 2006. Dalia’s next book project, “The Coalition of Odds,” explores the geopolitical and security structures of the new Middle East emerging from the regional reshuffle of power coalitions, the impact of the Great Power Competition, and the changing world order.
