The Ceasefire Deal

On 16 January, with the help of American, Qatari, and Egyptian mediators, Israel and the Gaza-based Palestinian terrorist organisation Hamas signed a six-week ceasefire and hostage–prisoner exchange deal that is to go into effect on 19–20 January. Barring a last-minute snag—and many Israelis fear that Hamas may violate the deal’s provisions at some point over the coming days or weeks—Hamas will release the first batch of thirty-three hostages by the end of March, while Israel frees around 1,000 Palestinian fighters, currently incarcerated in the Jewish State’s prisons. The US government believes that, if all goes well, Israel and Hamas will then launch a second hostage–prisoner exchange involving the remaining 65 Israelis still in Palestinian hands and thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Israel will then pull its forces out of the Gaza Strip and end the war triggered by Hamas’s assault on southern Israel on 7 October 2023. Until recently, Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed not to end the war until achieving the complete destruction of Hamas—but although the IDF have severely mauled that organisation, they have so far failed to destroy it.  

As part of the first six-week stage of the deal, Israel is committed to withdrawing its troops from the towns of the Gaza Strip, as well as from both the Philadelphi Corridor along the Gaza–Egypt border and the Netzarim Corridor, which bisects the Strip. This would allow the million or so Gazans who were driven out of the northern part of the Strip during the first few months of the war and have since been languishing in tent-cities in the south, to return to their ruined homes and towns north of the Netzarim Corridor.

The timing of the current deal owes everything to Donald Trump’s victory in the November 2024 US elections. The deal’s outlines were mapped out in May–July 2024 by Biden Administration mediators, led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken. But Netanyahu was unwilling to sign, as the continuation of the hostilities has enabled him and his coalition government to cling to power, even though they are responsible for Israel’s multiple military and intelligence failures on 7 October. Hamas, led by hardline terrorist Yahya Sinwar, also appears to have been unwilling to reach a deal over the past twelve months. Sinwar’s death at the hands of an Israeli patrol last October, coupled with the IDF’s bludgeoning of Iranian-backed Hezbollah, the Lebanese fundamentalist organisation that supported Hamas by rocketing northern Israel daily, together with the fall of the Iranian-backed Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus, paved the way for Hamas to moderate their rejectionist position. 

There has doubtless been a “Trump effect” on the war and its protagonists—especially on Netanyahu, who spent the first fourteen months of the war defying President Joe Biden’s strictures and threats—rightly believing that the president’s philo-Zionism would overcome his distaste for various Israeli actions, and for Netanyahu himself. Thus, Netanyahu sent the IDF into the town of Rafah in the south of the Gaza Strip, occupied the Philadelphi Axis in defiance of Biden’s warnings, and limited the number of humanitarian aid convoys entering Gaza.

But, unlike Biden, Trump is unpredictable. Since Trump is about to assume office and Israel will be reliant on US arms and ammunition shipments as well as on American political and economic support over the coming four years, Netanyahu had little choice but to accept the ceasefire deal. The Trump diktat was transmitted by the billionaire Steven Witkoff, the president’s personal emissary, who arrived in Netanyahu’s home on Saturday 11 January after ignoring the Israeli premier’s request that he wait until after the Jewish Sabbath. Witkoff reportedly responded to the request with expletives and simply showed up. During their five-hour meeting, Netanyahu caved. Philadelphi and Netzarim were no longer crucial to Israel’s existence—as Netanyahu had long argued—and the Gazans could have as many food trucks as they wanted. Netanyahu also apparently agreed in principle to extend the ceasefire beyond 42 days, pull the IDF out of the Strip, and declare an end to the war.

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The agreement is opposed by Netanyahu’s two extreme right-wing coalition partners:  National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who have both threatened to withdraw from the government coalition, which currently musters 68–69 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. The two dissenting parties they head, which together hold 13 seats, demand that the government continue the war until Hamas is definitively crushed. Ben-Gvir has announced that he will pull out of the coalition as soon as the deal begins to be implemented, while Smotrich has stated that he will pull out if Netanyahu doesn’t resume war-making as soon the 42 days of phase one have elapsed.  

But Netanyahu is likely to weather this internal political crisis. He has already obtained the backing of the Inner (security) Cabinet as well as  the full cabinet, and can rely on a  majority in the Knesset, since the centre-left opposition party leaders have assured him that they will provide him with a “safety net” in  support of the deal. Nevertheless, according to the latest opinion polls, most of Netanyahu’s Likud Party supporters regard the deal as catastrophic, consider Netanyahu to have betrayed both their trust and his own stated positions and principles, and may well turn to Ben-Gvir or Smotrich in the next elections, which are scheduled for October 2026, although a coalition crisis may bring that date forward. The right-wing extremists have been particularly irked by the fact that the deal has dashed their hopes of the re-establishment of Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. (Israel’s previous settlements in the Strip were dismantled by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon back in 2005.)

Netanyahu’s agreement to the deal also triggered opposition from another quarter—the families of the hostages, who are concerned about the fate of the 65 captives whom Hamas is holding in reserve for the second stage of the exchange—a second stage that the families fear might never be implemented, leaving their loved-ones to languish and die in the Hamas tunnels. They argue that Netanyahu should have pushed for a one-stage deal in which Hamas would free all the hostages, in exchange for the release of jailed Hamas prisoners, an end to the hostilities, and Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. 

In addition, most of the half-million Israeli settlers in the West Bank—Smotrich’s, and to a lesser degree Ben-Gvir’s, electoral constituencies—oppose the deal, as do many other Israelis, on the grounds that the thousands of released Hamas prisoners will return to terrorism and begin killing Israelis again both in the West Bank and in Israel proper. They point to Yahya Sinwar, who was himself released by Israel in a previous prisoner swap and went on to organise and lead the Hamas assault of 7 October.

A further Israeli worry—though it is generally left unsaid—is that during any prospective second stage Hamas might say that they cannot locate all the 65 remaining hostages and do not know whether they are alive or dead. Israel would then be left in an excruciating limbo. Many people fear a repeat of the Ron Arad saga, which haunted the country for decades. Ron Arad was a Phantom F-4 navigator who was downed over southern Lebanon in 1986. He was captured by Shi’ite gunmen and for several months Israel haggled over an exchange deal. No deal was reached—and Arad then vanished from the face of the Earth. Israel suspected that the Shi’ites had sold or handed Arad over to Hezbollah or to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and that he had subsequently either been murdered or died in an Iranian jail. Iran disclaimed any knowledge of Arad. Israeli intelligence pursued the matter for years, taking  Lebanese Shi’ite militia commanders hostage in daring commando raids and offering a $10 million USD reward for information as to Arad’s whereabouts. But nothing came of any of this.

One major supporter of the current hostage–prisoner exchange deal—and even of the partial stage-one segment of the deal—is the Israeli military security establishment. The generals and the Mossad and Shin Bet directors have stated that getting any of the hostages back—whatever it costs in terms of freed Hamas prisoners and IDF withdrawals—is morally necessary and will boost the morale of their soldiers by reassuring them that the state will always save them if they fall into enemy hands. The generals have further argued that the IDF could, in any case, retake Philadelphi and the Netzarim Corridor at any time, in a matter of hours.

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And there is one further, important consideration: the lives of IDF soldiers. Over the past three months, more than fifty  have died and hundreds more have been wounded in campaigns to retake the northern Gaza towns of Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun, and Beit Lahiya—towns “cleared” by the IDF over the previous months but later reinvested by infiltrating Hamas squads. The army told Netanyahu that these offensives were pointless, since Hamas was constantly recruiting new fighters from among Gaza’s young people, who were bent on avenging dead relatives and were driven by deep religious passions and Jew-hatred and incentivised by cash payments from Hamas—cash that the recruits badly needed to help their families, impoverished by the protracted war and the destruction of their homes and workplaces.

On Wednesday night, before the deal was signed but after Gaza’s inhabitants learned that it was in the offing, Hamas mustered crowds of thousands, who poured into their ravaged streets, cheering and raising their hands in V signs. Hamas has been representing the deal as a victory and in some ways it is: Israel has failed to crush the organisation—in fact, over the past few weeks, Hamas has even resumed sporadic rocketing of Israel’s southern border settlements—and Israel has suffered many thousands of casualties, and is about to release thousands of imprisoned Hamas fighters. And, under pressure from Trump, the IDF is likely to completely or almost completely withdraw from the Gaza Strip. (“Almost” because Israel has stated its intention of continuing to occupy a “perimeter” 500–1,000 metres deep into Gaza along its eastern and northern borders with Israel, a free-fire zone that will prevent Hamas gunmen from nearing the kibbutzim on the Israeli side.) Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has also made these points in a well-publicised speech in which he claimed that Hamas and the Palestinians have won. Islamists the world over, both Sunni and Shi’a, have been rejoicing at this “victory” over the Jewish state.

But Hamas’s future and the future of the Gaza Strip remain unclear. Militarily, Hamas has been severely degraded, having lost or expended almost all its rockets and lost most of its military and political leaders. But, given time, it is likely to reorganise and rearm to some degree. Will Iran prove willing and able to help refinance and rearm the organisation? Will Hamas continue to rule over the Strip’s 2.3 million inhabitants, whose infrastructure, homes, schools, and workplaces have been largely destroyed? Israel has been reluctant to set up any “day after” political structure that could replace Hamas or the IDF.  But reconstruction will be the order of the day and Gaza will require the kind of money that only Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—the enemies of Hamas and Iran—can provide. These countries will be loath to finance a Hamas-dominated polity.  

A possible alternative to Hamas might be the Ramallah-based Palestinian National Authority, dominated by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). But the Netanyahu government has opposed the introduction of PNA forces and officials into the Strip, fearing that this would constitute a first step towards the establishment of a Palestinian state. But over the longer term, Israel may be unable to hold out against the wishes of the Saudis and Emiratis, especially if they are backed by Washington. Trump’s position on Palestinian statehood is unclear. Of course, the PLO’s historic rival Hamas opposes PLO entry into the Strip. (Hamas bloodily ejected the PLO from the territory back in 2007.) But they may be forced to partner with the PLO in the end, in order to politically reconstruct and administer the Strip. Over the past weeks, Trump and his aides have clearly stated that, like Netanyahu, they too want Hamas to be completely crushed. But Trump is volatile and it is too early to tell how things will develop in the medium and long term.   

Meanwhile, it remains unclear whether the inhabitants of the border-hugging Israeli settlements will feel safe enough to return to their homes over the coming months,especially given that many of those homes are in need of  reconstruction and that they face the prospect of a resurrected or partially resurrected Hamas re-emerging on their doorstep. Rumour has it that there are vast stockpiles of Iranian weaponry hidden among the Sinai Peninsula’s Bedouin communities and that these weapons could quickly make their way into Gaza through new tunnels that Hamasniks could construct along the Sinai–Gaza border, once the IDF abandons the Philadelphi Axis.

Trump’s recent political pronouncements—albeit brief and vague—indicate that he seeks to calm the Middle East, partly to clear America’s decks so that the country can confront what he sees as its major challenge: the threat from China. Many commentators believe that Trump also has his eye on the Nobel Peace Prize, which he believes he already deserved for his part in helping engineer the Abraham Accords four years ago. A Peace Nobel for Trump would certainly be sticking it to his peacenik Democratic opponents in the US.

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Calm, at least for the moment, has been achieved along the Israel-Lebanon border by the Israel–Hezbollah ceasefire agreement—brokered by the Biden Administration and signed last November—and the situation in Gaza now appears to be heading towards some sort of resolution—and with it, perhaps, the Houthi problem. Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels closed the Bab al Mandab Straits to international shipping and sporadically rocketed Israel in solidarity with Hamas during the war in Gaza. No war; no Houthi attacks—at least that is what Israel and America and its allies hope. In addition, Trump, who has always been wary of military adventures abroad, appears to be eagerly seeking a political and economic deal with Iran to halt Iran’s progress toward the bomb.

Part of Trump’s vision for the Middle East, which was also Biden’s vision, includes consolidating a formal defence pact between Washington and Riyadh, which would include the normalisation of Israeli–Saudi relations. From Jerusalem’s perspective, such a normalisation would be the logical culmination of the 2020–21 Abraham Accords, which normalised Israel’s relations with the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco, and would be a significant turning-point in Israel’s increasing “acceptance” by the Arab world, which began with the Egypt–Israel peace treaty of 1979.  Saudi Arabia would be a clincher in this respect, as it is the birthplace of Islam and the Arab world’s richest country.

No doubt this was one of Netanyahu’s major considerations when he agreed to the deal with Hamas. Over the past fifteen months, the Saudis have made it clear that they are eager to see an end to the war in Gaza, which they view as a step on the road towards establishing a Palestinian state. Of course, Netanyahu has always opposed Palestinian statehood, which he sees as an existential threat to Israel. But the Israeli premier is nothing if not a pragmatist. He has been keenly aware throughout of the possible benefits of the deal, which include making Trump happy and achieving normalised relations with Riyadh. And for Netanyahu there is also a very personal angle to all this.  An Israeli–Saudi peace might overshadow the palpable Netanyahu government failures of 7 October and clear the way for a protracted extension of Netanyahu’s leadership of Israel. And Netanyahu, who is the son of historian Ben-Zion Netanyahu and an avid student of history, has always worried about his place in history: Achieving Israeli–Saudi reconciliation might secure it.

There is one last consideration which has probably affected Israeli decision-making in favour of the Gaza deal, at least marginally: Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, have been issued with arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court for suspected war crimes committed during the conflict in Gaza. A number of lower-ranking Israeli soldiers were recently threatened with arrest while touring Italy and some Latin American countries after serving in Gaza. A similar threat potentially hangs over hundreds of thousands of other Israeli servicemen. At the same time, over the past year the International Court of Justice has been looking into the idea that Israel may have committed “genocide” in connection with this war—an absurd charge, in my view. The cessation of the war in Gaza might help get Israelis and Israel itself, off the hook. With the war at an end, anti-Zionists and antisemites in the international community will have less of an incentive or excuse to target Israel and hound Israelis and their governments will be less receptive to pressure to do so.