The ceasefire agreement regarding the Gaza Strip can be welcomed as a modest reprieve from the immense suffering that the residents of that territory have endured for the past 15 months.
The Israeli military assault on the Strip has inflicted deaths that according to the official count has passed more than 46,600. This tally probably undercounts actual deaths by more than 40 percent, with the majority of fatalities being women, children and the elderly.
This is in addition to all the other suffering from continuing military operations. There have been more than 111,265 reported injuries, including life-changing disabilities in an environment in which Israel has largely destroyed the health care system.
The agreement also commits Israel to allowing an increased number of trucks bearing badly needed humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. Other benefits include the release of a number of Israeli hostages that Hamas took in its attack in October 2023. Also to be released are several hundred Palestinians whom Israel has imprisoned. The Palestinians can be considered hostages, too. Although some of those to be released have been given sentences of imprisonment, many of the Palestinians Israel incarcerates are held indefinitely without charge, incommunicado and without legal representation.
Beyond those positive measures, there is little in the agreement just reached on which to hang much hope for significant progress toward peace and stability in that part of the world. Although a cessation of military operations interrupts some of the immediate suffering, it does not reverse the enormous damage that has turned what was already an open-air prison into a largely uninhabitable wasteland. The agreement reportedly provides for an Israeli withdrawal from major population centers and the Netzarim Corridor, in principle allowing families from the northern portion of the Gaza Strip to return to their homes, but many will be returning only to rubble.
Many will be returning only to rubble.
The agreement has the earmarks of only a temporary pause. The ceasefire is for six weeks, with any extension dependent on the success of future negotiations. A second and third phase are envisioned that would see the release of more hostages by each side and further withdrawals by the Israeli military, along with a reconstruction plan, but so far those phases are just outlines of objectives and not a real coming to terms. In short, the negotiators reached a short-term bargain while punting more difficult issues.
There is little reason to be optimistic that follow-up negotiations will succeed and that the bombs will not resume falling. Hamas has been sufficiently battered that its leadership almost certainly sees an indefinite extension of the ceasefire as in its interests, but it will continue to resist giving up all its bargaining chips in the form of the remaining Israeli hostages without gaining more Israeli concessions in return. The biggest impediments to extending the ceasefire are on the side of Israel, where the political and policy trends are in the direction of indefinite warfare.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has had personal and political reasons to keep Israel at war. Continued warfare has delayed his having to face fully the consequences of corruption charges against him and the inevitable official inquiry into policy failures that may have contributed to the October 2023 attack by Hamas. His hold on power also depends on maintaining a coalition with extreme right-wingers whose only idea about policy on Gaza is complete elimination of the Palestinian community there.
The most prominent of the hard right, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, has threatened to quit the government because of his opposition to a ceasefire in Gaza. Netanyahu probably believes he can finesse the conflicting pressures he is under with a combination of the boost in support he will get from a return of some of the Israeli hostages and the reaching of private understandings with Ben-Gvir and his fellow right-wing extremist, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. Part of any such understanding would be the prospect that, after the temporary ceasefire that succeeds in repatriating some of the hostages, the Israeli military assault on Gaza will resume.
Resumption of the assault may come after the six-week ceasefire expires and negotiations over Phases 2 and 3 fail to reach an agreement. Or, Israel may find excuses to resume the assault sooner. Netanyahu has a long history of reneging on international agreements, dating back to the Wye River Memorandum reached during his first term as prime minister in 1998, which provided for partial withdrawals in the West Bank that Israel never implemented. More recently, Israel has repeatedly and extensively violated the Lebanon ceasefire agreement reached last November.
Although both protagonists in the drawn-out Gaza negotiations will continue to spin the story to their own advantage, the change in position that permitted an agreement to be reached now but not a few months ago has mainly been on the Israeli side. Netanyahu had repeatedly insisted that Hamas must be destroyed for the war in Gaza to end. Negotiating with somebody one has vowed to destroy has always been oxymoronic, but now Netanyahu’s government has reached a negotiated agreement with a Hamas that is very much not destroyed.
The negotiators reached a short-term bargain while punting more difficult issues.
U.S. politics, Israeli-U.S. relations, and the coming change of administrations in Washington explain the Israeli posture. The scenario that played out is the latest chapter in the political alliance between Netanyahu and Donald Trump, and between the Israeli Right and the Republican Party.
Netanyahu aided Trump — his favored candidate in the U.S. election — by keeping the Gaza war boiling and thereby hurting the chances of the Democratic ticket, and then, with Trump safely elected, taking the boiling pot off the stove shortly before Trump himself takes office. The past incident this scenario most brings to mind is William Casey’s striking a deal with Iran to keep holding American hostages until Ronald Reagan was inaugurated following his defeat of Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election.
Trump’s declaration a week ago that “all hell will break out” if Hamas did not release Israeli hostages was unlikely to change any negotiating positions, given that hell is a good description of what everyone in the Gaza Strip, including Hamas, was already living in. Notwithstanding this fact and the effort of the outgoing Biden administration to take credit for the ceasefire agreement, Trump will be able to claim that he is the one who made the deal happen.
There remains the possibility that a renewed war in Gaza will, beginning a few weeks from now, become a problem for Trump just as it was for Biden. But two main factors will incline President Trump not to exert any pressure on the Israeli government to turn away from renewing its devastation and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip. One is Trump’s relationship with his domestic evangelical political base, with its unconditional support for most anything Israel does. The other is that his ally Netanyahu has done him a big favor with his handling of the ceasefire negotiations, and now Trump owes Netanyahu favors in return.
Consistent with this, Trump’s incoming national security adviser is exclaiming an all-in-with-Israel, “Hamas has to be destroyed” position.
This prospect for the months ahead underscores how the new ceasefire agreement does nothing to curtail long-term strife in Gaza’s part of the world as long as the residents of the Strip and other Palestinians are denied self-determination.