Patrick Kingsley
Appearances
The Daily
Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
And this was such an outlandish proposal that no one really knew what to do with it. Did the president of the United States really think it would be possible to move two million people from one part of the world to another?
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
In Israel, there's been a mixture of enthusiasm and caution. Enthusiasm from the Israeli right for years The Israeli right wing has wanted Israel to return to Gaza, which it occupied wholly between 1967 and 2005, and reestablish Israeli settlements throughout the territory.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
Then there's the Israeli center that's more cautious, that sees this as a pie-in-the-sky kind of plan that could cause more disruption than it's worth.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
And then from the Palestinians, you have a feeling of abject horror that 75 years after hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to leave their homes or fled their homes during the wars surrounding Israel's creation, now another generation of Palestinians would in turn themselves be forced to leave their homes for the second time in two or three generations.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
Some of them were exchanged in a previous hostage for prisoner deal in late 2023. A handful have been rescued in Israeli military camps. operations but roughly 100 were still in captivity in january when this ceasefire was sealed and the deal allows for roughly a third of them most of them alive but some of them dead to be swapped for
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
Exactly. In 1948, in the wars surrounding Israel's creation, somewhere north of 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forced to flee their homes. In what has become the kind of foundational trauma of Palestinian history, referred to by Palestinians and indeed across the Arab world as the Nakba, or in English, catastrophe.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
And the sense that two million Palestinians in 2025 could be forced to leave their homes, however much this has been portrayed as a humanitarian gesture by the Trump administration, feels very much like a second Nakba.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
Well, at first, they displayed the same kind of horror and anger that we saw from Palestinians, partly out of solidarity for the Palestinian cause, but also the need to care for and provide for such a large number of people. was considered an immensely destabilizing idea that could have both created social and political chaos for the Egyptian and Jordanian governments.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
So they rejected this plan and then gradually, Out of that horror and rejection came a slightly different response, which was not acceptance, but it was the realization that the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Saudis, other leading Arab countries that are allied with the U.S. needed to come up with their own response, their own proposal for peace. the governance of post-war Gaza.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
And that's exactly what we see happening in the capitals of the Arab world today.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
That's one way of putting it. And it is also now what the Trump administration and its top envoys are saying was the intention of President Trump when he made this proposal in the first place. Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy, said...
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
last week that president trump didn't mean this literally he meant to get the arab world talking and proposing their own ideas to help try to break this deadlock about gaza's future that has been hanging over the region for the last 16 months if not the last 75 years what kind of plan are they talking about exactly and more importantly how would it actually work It's not yet clear.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
The leaders of the Arab world, or most of them, met last week in Riyadh to try and thrash out a proposal. They're meant to meet again next week in Cairo to talk more. From what we understand about what's being discussed at these meetings, the main proposals are for the leaders of the
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
Arab world to have some kind of oversight over a local Palestinian governing authority that does not include Hamas in exchange for Israel promising that at some point in the future Gaza and the West Bank, the other main territory where Palestinians live under Israeli occupation, will be able to become their own sovereign Palestinian state.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
The problem with this proposal is that it requires both Hamas to give up power and Israel to promise Palestinian sovereignty. Neither of those two things seem very likely at the moment.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
Exactly. That was the case before President Trump made his proposal and it remains the case now. And the whole thing is reminiscent of trying to solve a Rubik's Cube. You turn the cube in one direction and you bring two squares slightly closer to where you want them to be. But at the same time, you dislodge another square bringing yourself back to where you were a moment ago.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
In the negotiations to try and solve the Rubik's cube of the Gaza war, all sides, including some of the people trying to mediate, have got their own preconditions and own desired end goals that are completely incompatible with those of the others. And to be specific, Israel wants a post-war Gaza that does not involve Hamas governing it or exerting any kind of military power.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
Hamas wants a post-war Gaza in which it still plays a significant political role and it still gets to keep its military wing intact, posing a threat conceivably to Israel. Meanwhile, you also have the Arab leaders from Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere now trying to produce their own halfway house that would involve Hamas stepping down.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
Palestinian prisoners who variously had been jailed 20 years ago for their role in terrorist attacks on Israelis, but also hundreds of Palestinians who had been arrested without charge inside Gaza by the Israeli military and held in difficult conditions inside the Israeli prison archipelago. And as I say, the broad picture is that those have mostly... gone as they were expected to.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
But also, in exchange for their involvement, Israel would need to promise to give the Palestinians a state. Israel would be happy with the first bit, getting rid of Hamas. They would not be happy with the second bit, giving the Palestinians a state.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
Exactly. And the riddle of Gaza has not been solved in the last 16 months of war, but also not really over the last 75 years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ever since Israel was established in 1948, the future of Gaza has been a conundrum that no one has been able to really solve, least of all now.
The Daily
Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
Well, one of the implicit consequences of President Trump proposing such a dramatic plan is it really underscored the idea that Trump is acting in lockstep with Israeli interests even more than President Biden was perceived to be.
The Daily
Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
The supporters of that approach say that it is likely to place more pressure on Hamas to compromise because it believes that there is no daylight between Israel and its biggest benefactor, the United States.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
The critics of that approach say that rather than making Hamas more likely to compromise, it'll in fact make Israel less likely to compromise because it believes that it can return to war, return to the kinds of deadly and bloody fighting that we saw until January with the United States' full support.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
And that raises the specter of the ceasefire breaking down, if not in days, then at least in weeks, and a return to the devastating destruction that we've seen over the last 16 months.
The Daily
Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
But there have been some immensely traumatic scenes for both Israelis and Palestinians that have led to constant fears that this initial ceasefire was about to collapse. Tell us about those. Well, every Saturday, the choreography would go like this. The hostages would be released from Gaza and then, once they were free, the prisoners would be released from Israel.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
But the spectacles of both releases drew immense pain and anger on both sides. When the three or four hostages that were supposed to be released that day were freed, they were put up on stage in front of cheering crowds to bombastic music, often set against banners that attacked Israel and sought to humiliate the Israeli military.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
The hostages themselves often looked extremely gaunt, malnourished, starved, which sent shockwaves through Israeli society. And sometimes they would be interviewed on stage, seemingly against their will, asked humiliating questions about their time in captivity or asked to send messages to the Israeli political leadership.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
On the Palestinian side, there were also some uncomfortable scenes of prisoners emerging from Israeli prisons in very bad shape. Some of them were forced to wear clothes that said words to the effect of, we will never forgive, we will never forget, a reference to the crimes that they were jailed for 20 years ago.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
And so there was anger among both societies about the way that these releases were being conducted. And that culminated in perhaps the most unsettling and disturbing hostage release ceremony of the lot last week, when the bodies of three Israeli civilians from the same family, two very young boys,
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
Ariel Bibas and his brother, Kafir Bibas, four years old and eight months old respectively at the time of their capture in October 2023, and their mother, Shiri Bibas, a 32-year-old accountant. Those bodies were supposed to be released back to Israel last Thursday, and they were handed over to members of the Red Cross
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
in front of big crowds of Palestinians and against the visual backdrop of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, looking like a vampire dripping with blood.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
Exactly. The Hamas claim was that these two very young children and their mother were killed in Israeli airstrikes and that Netanyahu and the Israeli military was to blame for their deaths along with the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
The Daily
Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
And those images of a vampiric Netanyahu seem to be stuck to not only the banner on the stage that was at the center of this handing over ceremony, but also on the coffins themselves. And this was seen in Israel as enormously disrespectful, ghoulish, essentially. And that impression was taken to the nth degree once the bodies were examined back in Israel.
The Daily
Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
The Israeli military said that the two boys were not killed in Israeli airstrikes and that an autopsy had revealed that they were killed by militants inside Gaza after their capture. And then they revealed something even more shocking. that the body of their mother, Shiri Bibas, was not actually her body at all.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
It was the body of someone else completely, perhaps a Palestinian woman, who had been sent back either by mistake or by design to Israel. And this was a shocking piece of news for the Israeli public. This family had been one of the main emblems of Israeli trauma on October the 7th.
The Daily
Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
And so to see the spectacle of these two young children and their mother being returned in this way, and then on top of that to learn that the mother, Shiri, was in fact still in Gaza, was an immensely triggering and re-traumatizing event.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
It was, ultimately. Hamas said it searched again in the place where the Bibas family was buried alongside Palestinians killed during Israeli airstrikes at some point in the course of the war. And they quickly found the right body and returned it back to Israel. And that family was finally able to have some degree of closure.
The Daily
Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
But the fury of the Israeli government did not die down once Shiri Bebas's body was returned. The whole incident contributed to the Israeli decision to delay the release of the prisoners who were meant to be exchanged for the Bebas's bodies.
The Daily
Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
I think there's a few different reasons. In part, it's seen as a counterpoint to the way that Palestinian detainees and prisoners are being released in what Palestinians see as a very humiliating manner. But it's also a means of projecting power and authority. They want to remind both the Palestinians of Gaza and the people of Israel that despite 16 months of war that was meant to force them
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
It's hard to know exactly what level of authority or capacity they have in Gaza because we're not allowed in. The Israeli government is still not letting journalists into Gaza. However, it does seem from these videos and what reporting we are able to do that they are still the dominant force in Gaza. And if they want to organize a dramatic rally to send off the bodies of journalists
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
Israeli children on their way back to Israel, they can very much do that. And the message is very clear. Whatever the Israeli government has said about killing thousands and thousands of Hamas militants, they still have some men left. They still have lots of vehicles. They still have lots of guns.
The Daily
Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
And any discussion about the future of Gaza, any discussion about an end to the war has to take their presence into account.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
It leaves us in a very uncertain place. All throughout this last six weeks, as the hostages were being exchanged for prisoners, Israel and Hamas were supposed to have been negotiating through mediators about a more wholesale agreement to end the war and about the future governance of Gaza.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
Because they have such completely different visions for how that should look, the two sides have not been able to even start negotiations. And that means we're approaching the end of these 42 days that constitute the first phase of the ceasefire and that end at midnight on Saturday night without a clear sense of what's going to happen next.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
The first and most likely outcome is that the truce continues in a very informal, unstructured way, at least for a few days. The wording of the current deal allows for the truce to continue until even if there is no agreement about how the truce should continue, as long as there are negotiations still taking place.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
Several mini crises aside, it has gone roughly to plan. And that plan was to exchange 33 hostages held in Gaza by Hamas and its allies for roughly 1,500 Palestinian prisoners and detainees held in Israeli jails. Just to recap... At the start of the war, Hamas and its allies raided Israel, captured roughly 250 hostages, both dead and alive, brought them back to Gaza.
The Daily
Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
Another option, and this is something that has been proposed in recent days by Steve Witkoff, President Trump's Middle East envoy, is that there could be a brief formal extension of the ceasefire, more or less on the same terms, that the ceasefire has been observed thus far. And that would involve an exchange of a few more hostages for several hundred more prisoners.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
And it wouldn't solve the fundamental disagreement about whether the war should end entirely or who should govern Gaza after the war. But it would keep the arrangement going for another week, two weeks, maybe even three weeks. The third option, and it's extremely unlikely that they'll reach this point, is that there might be a deal about who should govern Gaza next, should the war end entirely.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
But that's something that is almost impossible to reach right now, just because the two sides are so far apart about what that would look like.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
It's very possible. Whether that happens on Sunday morning, I'm not sure. It's probably more likely that the ceasefire would stutter on for a little bit longer. But it is possible that the war could resume. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said as much earlier this week. He said that Israel is ready to go back to war.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
And we understand from our own reporting that there are very extensive plans in place to return to fighting.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
There are plenty of longer-term options that have been suggested by governments, analysts, politicians, diplomats, Arabs, Israelis, Westerners. None of them are particularly viable because they all require a degree of compromise from the two main actors. Perhaps the most dramatic and consequential has been the one proposed in recent weeks by President Trump himself.
The Daily
Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
This was a proposal put forth by President Trump in the White House in a seemingly impromptu way as he stood at a lectern beside... the Israeli prime minister a few weeks ago.
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Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
And in this proposal, President Trump suggested depopulating Gaza... Because they're living in hell.
The Daily
Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?
Essentially forcing its two million residents to leave their homes and live for years in mainly Egypt and also Jordan.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
Yes and no. In reputational terms, Israel has dealt itself damage by the way it has been perceived to conduct this war. It is accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice. Prime Minister Netanyahu, as well as his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, are wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
there has been criticism of Israel almost like never before as a result of the way it's conducted its war in Gaza. And in that sense, you could argue it has lost or it has at least lost ground in a diplomatic war, a war for legitimacy and a war for reputation.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
So Israel depends on international support for at least some of its actions. It depends on American funds and American military resources, ammunition, fighter jets, in order to wage its wars. And within the Middle East, it depends on good relations with the Arab world in order to cement its long-term status within the region.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
Before the war, Israel was close to forging a landmark diplomatic deal between itself and Saudi Arabia, the most influential country in the Arab world. The war put those negotiations on ice and, in fact, made it much harder for Saudi Arabia to be seen to be doing a deal with a country that many people in the Arab world believe is committing a genocide against Palestinians.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
And if the war ends, Israelis will hope that they can get those negotiations back on track. But militarily, yes, as you say, Israel has weakened Hamas, they've weakened Hezbollah. They have weakened Iran. And all of those battles contributed, at least in some part, to the collapse of Iran's ally, the Syrian government.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
And so Israel, despite all its internal divisions, has proved itself as the region's strongest military power. It means, or at least Israelis will hope it means, whatever reputational loss Israel has suffered because of the conduct of its war in Gaza, both in the Middle East and across the world. It is simply too powerful militarily to be wished away.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
And that whatever the anger many people within the Middle East feel towards Israel, their leaders will feel that Israel is a country that they have to work with. precisely because it is such a military force.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
In essence, it's a three-stage ceasefire that could, if all goes well, end up being a permanent truce. The first phase is the only part of the deal that is really nailed down. That's a six-week phase during which 33 hostages, mostly alive but some of them dead, are set to be released by Hamas and its allies, who captured those hostages right at the start of the war on October 7, 2023.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
And in exchange, Israel is supposed to release several hundred Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. And during that six weeks, we also expect Israeli troops to gradually withdraw, allowing
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
several hundred thousand Palestinians who were displaced from their homes in northern Gaza to tents and makeshift camps in the south of the Strip to return to their homes, to move back northward to a decimated Gaza city. During all of that movement and exchanges of captives,
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
there will be more negotiations to see if they can extend this initial six-week phase into another six-week phase during which the deal is supposed to become permanent and more hostages are supposed to be released for more prisoners. The problem is there is still much to be negotiated about that second phase.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
There seems to be still some disagreement about where exactly Israel will withdraw from. And there's enough ambiguity in there that the deal could collapse after six weeks, if not before. And that ambiguity is intentional. Israel and first and foremost, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not want to agree to a deal that would definitively end the war. Hamas had the opposite perspective.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
They wanted a deal that would end the war for certain. And so the mediators between the two sides came up with ambiguous wording that would allow each side to feel like they were getting more or less what they want. The wording allows Israel to say that they can break the arrangement after six weeks, and it provides the...
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
possibility for Hamas that the ceasefire will extend beyond 42 days into something permanent and that they will be able to survive the war intact as a group and in power as the governing force over Gaza.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
The third phase would not be significantly different from the second phase, but there would be final exchanges of dead bodies and other human remains, as well as the start of a massive reconstruction project to rebuild the Gaza Strip over several years.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
I think there's several factors here. One, Israel is stronger. Two, Hamas is weaker. And three, the Trump administration is about to come into power and has put pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli leader.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
Since last summer, Israel has had a series of military successes. It has most obviously weakened Hamas, taken over more of the Gaza Strip, destroyed more of Hamas's infrastructure, killed more Hamas leaders, including Yahya Sinwa, the man who did more than anyone to mastermind the October 7th attack on Israel at the start of the war.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
Further afield, Israel has substantially weakened Hezbollah, a key ally of Hamas in Lebanon. It has weakened Hamas's main benefactor, Iran, destroying much of its air defenses. And another member of the Iran-led alliance, the Syrian government, has collapsed. So Prime Minister Netanyahu can...
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
present more or less the same deal to the Israeli public and in particular to his far-right allies as being less of a capitulation as it was once seen by parts of his coalition government. Because He and Israel are coming from a position of greater military strength. And the flip side is that Hamas is therefore weaker. Gaza is decimated.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
Hamas's goal of setting off a kind of broader regional conflict that would substantially weaken Israel or perhaps even destroy it has come to nothing. And the going analysis is that this has made Hamas vulnerable. more willing to come to the table and agree to a deal that was on that table already for several months. And the third factor is the Trump factor.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
It's the Biden administration in tandem with the Qatari government and the Egyptian government that has done most of the running in the negotiations, helping to draft the details of this agreement that has just been signed and cajoling the Israeli government for more than a year towards this agreement.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
But it seems to be the incoming Trump administration, President-elect Trump himself and his incoming Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, that have applied the pressure that has been the straw that broke the camel's back. Steve Witkoff came to Israel last week, met with Netanyahu.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
Since that meeting, the negotiations have gone from advancing fairly slowly to suddenly getting to the point of a deal being reached. And it seems to be that Trump, who has said for months that he wants to see a deal by the time of his inauguration early next week, may have been the decisive factor in getting this deal over the line.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
We went inside the room, so we can't say for sure, but it's possible that it was some combination of carrot and stick. The stick being that Trump, who's an unpredictable actor, would be very angry if a deal wasn't reached. The carrot may be that the Trump administration will back Netanyahu if he decides to resume the war after six weeks.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
That was less likely under President Biden, but it's seen as being potentially more likely under a Trump administration who might grant greater leeway to Israel in Gaza than President Biden. The reverse could also be true. Having helped to author this deal, the Trump administration may see its reputation as being tied to its success and may place more pressure on Netanyahu in several weeks.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
And we await to see which of those two outcomes will be the case.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
That's been one of the more remarkable aspects of the recent days of negotiations. You've had representatives of two administrations that really don't see eye to eye and have very different visions of American democracy joining forces to get this deal over the line.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
The Biden administration that has led the way in drafting and wrangling over many of the details over so many months in these negotiations, it's Trump's Middle East envoy who appears to have played a major role in getting this deal suddenly over the line in recent days. So those are the mechanics of the deal. And we are left with questions about how exactly those mechanics will play out.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
And we're also left with questions about what all this means in the long term for Israelis, for Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank, and also for the region, the Middle East as a whole.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
For Gazans, it is, at least for a few weeks... Respite from one of the most intense aerial campaigns and ground invasions, certainly in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also in 21st century warfare. And even if this deal collapses after six weeks, it gives them the opportunity to have a night's sleep without bombardment.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
It gives people a chance to find their loved ones whose corpses have been trapped on the rubble for months, in some cases over a year. It gives hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in southern Gaza the ability to finally, after more than a year of displacement, return home to northern Gaza.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
Scores of universities, hospitals, medical centers have been destroyed during this war, and it could even take decades to repair some of that damage.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
So Hamas is a movement and the Hamas-controlled Ghazan authorities don't really have the ability to do much of this on their own. They're going to rely on massive overseas help from the rest of the Arab world, from the United Nations, and exactly how that is going to work has not yet been decided.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
The deal gives them the chance of survival. As the war went on, they were losing more troops, more operatives, more leaders. Their top leader Yahya Sinwa was killed, if you recall, in October. Sinwa's predecessor Ismail Haniyeh was killed also in the summer.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
Now that the war has stopped, at least for now, and there's a possibility that the initial six-week ceasefire will extend into something longer, they may be able to survive the war both intact as a movement and in power as a governing force in the Gaza Strip.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
They said words to that effect. After the October 7th raid by Hamas and its allies, Israel basically said its two goals of the war would be to return the hostages captured by Hamas and its allies on October 7th and to destroy Hamas's military capabilities and its governing capabilities. If they are still able to govern Hamas,
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
Gaza Strip after the war ends, or if the ceasefire becomes a permanent one, then that would represent something of a victory for the group, even if their actions have resulted in the decimation of the territory that they controlled before the war began.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
In the short term, it brings also some respite, also some joy to an Israeli society that has been traumatized both by the October 7th attacks, which were the deadliest attacks on Israel in its history, but also by the 466 days since Israel in which Israelis have been torn by guilt and sadness over the continued incarceration of their friends, relatives in Gaza.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
And if at least some of those hostages can be released, it counts as a kind of redemption, not only for the hostages themselves, but for Israelis across the political spectrum. Longer term, if the deal holds and Netanyahu decides to continue it and to nudge it towards something permanent, then it could severely destabilize his own coalition government. He is in power in part through the support of
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
several far-right ministers and lawmakers who deeply oppose ending the war with Hamas still in power, even if that means leaving some hostages inside Gaza. So if he does agree to take this from a six-week deal into a longer arrangement, they could leave his coalition potentially
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
destabilizing it or maybe even collapsing it, which could lead to early elections and perhaps, depending on the results of those elections, a transition of power within Israeli society. So short term, this brings relief and joy for Israelis as well as people in Gaza.
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A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza
In the long term, it could deepen some of the divides that we've seen split Israeli society for many different reasons in recent years.