On Monday morning, Israeli Jews rejoiced as Hamas released the last twenty Israeli hostages from tunnels in Gaza, allowing them to return to their families and girlfriends. A few hours later, almost 2,000 Palestinians who had been imprisoned in Israel were released. Most of them returned to Gaza and the West Bank, though several dozen are destined to live out their lives in exile abroad. Of the Arabs released, some 250 were serving life sentences for murdering Israelis over the past thirty years.

Alongside the live hostages, Hamas have also handed over seven or eight bodies of hostages who died either during Hamas’s invasion of Israel on 7 October 2023 or in their subsequent captivity. According to President Donald Trump’s twenty-point peace plan, published on 29 September, and the Israel–Hamas agreement that followed, Hamas was supposed to hand over the bodies of 28 dead hostages—and Israel and Washington are now demanding that Hamas fulfil its commitment. Hamas officials have said that they are having difficulties locating the twenty missing bodies, some of which are presumably buried under the rubble of houses destroyed by Israeli bombings of the Strip over the past two years. But Israeli officials suspect that Hamas is playing games and is either bent on psychologically torturing the families of the twenty, who wish to bury their dead in Israel, or wants to hold onto the “missing” bodies in order to trade them for a release of additional Palestinian prisoners at a later date. On Tuesday, Israel threatened to respond to what it regarded as Hamas’s violation of the agreement by imposing restrictions on humanitarian aid entering the Strip or even closing the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza—though it appears that neither penalty has actually been activated. On Wednesday, it appeared that Hamas intended to hand over four more bodies within hours. Egypt has announced that its agents are now working in the Strip, attempting to locate the missing bodies.

Monday’s hostage–prisoner exchange followed Saturday’s military withdrawal, as the  IDF pulled its troops back eastward out of some twenty percent of the Gaza Strip, especially the outlying areas of Gaza City, the Strip’s main urban hub. The IDF continues to occupy about fifty percent of the Strip, areas it conquered during the counter-offensive that followed Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which around 1,200 Israelis—350 of them soldiers—were murdered and 251 taken hostage. According to Hamas figures, some 67,000 Gazans were killed over the following two years of warfare in the Strip, about one-third or one-quarter of whom—according to Israel—were Hamas fighters. The rest were civilians who died collaterally. The IDF has lost at least 900 soldiers in the war that began that day, around 550 of them in Gaza since 8 October.

Saturday’s partial IDF pullback, Monday’s hostage–prisoner exchange, and the entry into the Strip of hundreds of trucks loaded with humanitarian aid (food, water, medical supplies, etc.), together constitute the implementation of the first stage of Trump’s peace plan, which ultimately provides for a gradual but full Israeli withdrawal from the Strip alongside the disarmament of Hamas and the administration and reconstruction of the devastated Strip by an international “Board of Peace,” chaired either by Trump himself or by former United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair. This Board would supervise a “transitional” government, composed mainly of non-Hamas Palestinian technocrats, and an International Stabilisation Force (ISF) of soldiers and police, which would disarm Hamas and carry out the “demilitarisation” of the Strip, meaning the destruction of Hamas’s vast tunnel network and the supervision of the gradual IDF withdrawal back to the Israel–Gaza border. The plan allows for Israel, after the withdrawal, to maintain a 500–1,500-metre security “perimeter” on the Gaza side of the Israel–Gaza border for an indefinite period. In the long term, Point 19 of the Trump plan provides for the eventual takeover of the administration of the Strip by the “reformed” Palestinian Authority (PA) as a first step on the “pathway … to Palestinian statehood.”

Over the past two years, the IDF has managed to destroy only some 30–50 percent of Hamas’s tunnel network. Meanwhile, Hamas has recruited thousands of new fighters from among the very willing million or so youths in the Gaza Strip bent on revenge against Israel and on obtaining salaries from Hamas, which is bankrolled by Qatar and Iran.

Both Israel and Hamas have accepted the Trump plan, under strong pressure from America and its Muslim allies—but Hamas continues to assert that it will never disarm and will not agree to a non-Arab administration of the Strip, while the Netanyahu government remains committed to preventing the emergence of a Palestinian state, which it believes would pose an existential threat to Israel. Hence Netanyahu also opposes any PA involvement in the governance of Gaza.

These are the main obstacles to be overcome in the unfolding of the Trump plan, which was backed on Monday by an impressive gathering in the Egyptian city of Sharm El-Sheikh of international leaders, including the heads of the German, British, French, Indonesian, and Jordanian governments. At that brief get-together, which was also attended by Mahmoud Abbas, the “president” of the Ramallah-based PA, the leaders of Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey signed a declaration pledging their commitment to implementing the Trump plan. Their assistance, and that of the other attending states, would involve dispatching military and police forces to take control of the areas vacated by Israel and Hamas during and after the disarmament of the latter and the allocation of tens of billions of dollars to finance humanitarian aid for Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants and fund the reconstruction of the Strip’s infrastructure, public institutions, and housing, which observers believe will take at least five to ten years, given the extent of the territory’s devastation. The Strip’s hospitals, administrative institutions, schools, and universities have all been destroyed or severely damaged, and its water, electricity, and sewage networks are non-existent.

Over the coming weeks, American diplomats will hammer out the details of the establishment of the “Board of Peace,” the “transitional” administration, and the ISF with representatives of Western and Muslim governments. Meanwhile, Israel continues to occupy the uninhabited half of the Gaza Strip, while over the past few days Hamas forces have emerged from their underground tunnel hideaways and taken up conspicuous positions along main thoroughfares, at crossroads, and in the most imposing buildings in Gaza’s towns. Here and there, to assert their rule, they have publicly executed political opponents or those accused of collaboration with Israel and have tried to suppress anti-Hamas clan militias, which Israel established and armed in various parts of the Strip in recent months. Hamas has also, apparently, sent armed squads to feel out or challenge the new Israeli positions along the “yellow line” to which the IDF has withdrawn. Several Hamas gunmen have been shot dead in these attempts. Hamas has complained that these shootings represent Israeli violations of the ceasefire accord.

Israel’s Perfect Failure

Israeli intelligence and the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023.

QuilletteUri Bar-Joseph

Israelis are wary of the key roles Trump has earmarked for Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey in the forthcoming implementation of the plan’s further stages. Qatar has been the Arab world’s main political and financial backer of Hamas—while, absurdly, also serving as a mediator in the Israeli–Hamas prisoner–hostage exchange and truce deals—and Islamist-governed Turkey, although it is a NATO member, has been a consistent supporter of Hamas and critic of the Jewish state. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, recently compared Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler and regularly charges Israel with committing “genocide” in Gaza—while denying the actual genocide that Turkey committed against its Christian minorities a century ago. Equally absurdly, Trump has repeatedly called the Islamist Erdoğan, who hates the West, a “friend.” Egypt has been at peace with Israel since signing a treaty with the Jewish state in 1979, but it is a Muslim-majority country where Hamas’s parent organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood, enjoys mass popular support—including, presumably, among the country’s soldiers and police. Trump expects Turkey and Egypt to provide much of the manpower for the ISF, while Qatar, alongside Saudi Arabia and the UAE, will supply the funds for the “transitional administration” and the reconstruction of Gaza. Most Israeli observers believe that Turkey and Qatar are interested in the revitalisation of Hamas and in its continued and ultimate control of the Gaza Strip.

Trump also looks to Indonesia, the Muslim world’s most populous country, to contribute manpower for the Strip’s administration and the ISF. Over the weekend, rumours abounded in Israel that Indonesia’s president Prabowo Subianto Djojohadikusumo would fly to Israel after the Sharm el-Sheikh meeting, and perhaps even establish diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. But nothing came of this. It is believed that Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, has maintained a close clandestine relationship with the Indonesian government over the past decade or two.