Less than 24 hours after the announcement of the breakthrough ceasefire in the 15 month war in Gaza, the first major hitch. Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he wasn’t calling a cabinet meeting to endorse the deal because Hamas was going back on key aspects of the deal.
We have been here before. A very similar deal for a ceasefire and the return of the remaining Israeli hostages was in place last May and ready to be signed. However, a dispute over Israel’s right to maintain patrols in the Philadelphi corridor, which runs along Gaza’s southern border, scuppered the truce.
The latest Netanyahu objection comes 72 hours before the ceasefire comes into effect early this coming Sunday. Meanwhile Israeli planes have continued to bomb northern Gaza.
It is too early to write the whole deal off. The difference this time round is that a concerted effort by the incoming and departing US presidents are behind the initiative. The efforts of President-elect Donald Trump appear to be decisive – and this will set a pattern for diplomacy, and the management of war and peace, across large parts of the world for the next four years.
Most critical has been the peculiar blunt force diplomacy of Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, who simply told Netanyahu to meet him in his office in Jerusalem last weekend, despite it being the Sabbath. The terms of the ceasefire were put to him — and in no uncertain terms. The Israeli premier had to agree.
A pattern of faltering progress, stop-start diplomacy, likely to bedevil attempts to end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
Within hours of the accord between Hamas and the Israeli delegation being announced in Qatar, ministers in Israel’s coalition government began the denunciation process. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the security minister, said the deal was dangerous. His ally Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, said that after the hostages are released hostilities needs be resumed “to smash Hamas.”
Palestinians watch TV as they await the imminent announcement of a ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel in Khan Younis, central Gaza (AP Photo)
This sets the pattern of faltering progress, stop-start diplomacy, likely to bedevil attempts to end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. Trump himself links the two. Announcing the ceasefire with Hamas – even before the incumbent, Biden, could – he said the same process of negotiation would bring other conflicts, meaning Ukraine, to swift conclusion.
Paradoxically, the story of this week’s Qatar agreement is that bringing peace, or even temporary truce, to Gaza and Ukraine will be a messy business likely to last for the rest of this year, at least.
In Israel hopes are still high. Five women soldiers, seized on October 7th 2023, are expected to be among the first hostages released on Sunday. Specialist medical teams are waiting on the borders of Gaza to take them to hospital. Convoys of UN trucks are lined up to take in aid of all kinds. However, such is the persistently toxic propaganda battle that the Israeli spokesman David Mencer told the BBC that it was the UN that was responsible for the failure to deliver aid to Gaza’s starving civilians. He also claimed that the schools were legitimate targets as UNRWA, the UN care and education agency, was responsible for recruiting for Hamas.
For Benjamin Netanyahu this is high noon in the latter stages of his political life. He is isolated abroad and increasingly beleaguered at home. The ceasefire deal would almost certainly get majority support in parliament, the Knesset, as the opposition leader Yair Lapid and moderates in his own coalition such as Gideon Sa’ar, the current foreign minister and leader of New Hope, would garner enough votes to get it through.
Hamas as a movement is unlikely to be eradicated
This should enable the ceasefire programme to start unfolding – in which several things have to happen in rapid order. The first 33 hostages have to be released. Aid by the thousands of tons has to go in – with medicines, food and shelter as priorities. There also has to be a police regime to maintain law and order – to curb the Palestinian mafias who have been colluding with Israeli racketeers, according to credible eyewitness reports.
A woman in Jerusalem walks by mock coffins lining a street and covered with Israeli flags that are meant to symbolise the price Israel will pay for agreeing to a ceasefire with Hamas (AP Photo)
The first period of implementation is due to last six weeks, in which a fundamental for the enduring governance of Gaza has to be addressed – the future role of Hamas, if there is to be any at all. Though its military wing has been checked, the movement is unlikely to be eradicated, as Netanyahu and his Jewish settler allies have proposed. It has sympathy and support across the networks of the Muslim Brotherhood and a firm foothold in Doha and throughout the Gulf.
Coupled to that is the question of a future Palestinian state – anathema to the Israeli government’s right wing. This is unlikely to be addressed until the concluding third phase of the Qatar-Gaza peace process. It is also likely to haunt Trump for most of his presidency. The alternative, full or partial occupation and Jewish resettlement of Gaza, espoused by Ben Gvir and his allies, seem the stuff of political fantasy, however.
Donald Trump has pursued two of his most powerful attributes in public life – his belief in forging the swift, tough deal, and his distaste for long and terrible conflicts. He has had success even before taking office. This time round he has shown himself much better prepared than when he began his first term. His team had the wit to collaborate with the Biden team in order to box in Netanyahu and the Hamas leadership in Qatar.
But – and it is a huge “but” – working the peace in Gaza and Ukraine is going to be a longer and more uncertain process than he would like to imagine. In Jerusalem and Moscow, he faces two protagonists whose vested interest – and political survival – is in continuing the conflict.
Robert Fox is defence editor of the Evening Standard
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