Today, as the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas enters its most fragile phase, no one knows who will control the future of Gaza.Patrick Kingsley, the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times, talks through this delicate moment — as the first part of the deal nears its end — and the questions that hover over it.Guest: Patrick Kingsley, the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times.Background reading: Gaza’s truce could end in days, with no extension agreed. What happens next?Alarmed by President Trump’s Gaza plan, Arab leaders brainstormed about one of their own.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Saher Alghorra for The New York Times Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What is the current status of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire?
From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams. This is The Daily. Today, as the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas enters its final phase, no one knows who will control the future of Gaza. Israel, Hamas, or possibly President Trump? My colleague, Jerusalem Bureau Chief Patrick Kingsley, walks us through this delicate moment and the questions hovering over the future of the war.
It's Wednesday, February 26th. Patrick, we're in the final days of the first phase of the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, which was outlined very clearly in terms of what each side had to give to the other.
And now we're entering into this next phase, which is not yet negotiated and could lead to more talks, but it could also end up leading just to more war, which we'll get to in a moment. But just to start, how, in your estimation, has this first part of the process actually gone?
Chapter 2: How has the hostage exchange affected the ceasefire?
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.
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
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.
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.
Chapter 3: What are the emotional impacts of the hostage release process?
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.
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.
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.
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,
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
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.
To imply that it's the prime minister's fault that these three people are dead.
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.
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.
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Chapter 4: Why are hostages being treated in a controversial manner?
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.
And was the body of Shiri Bibas actually returned?
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.
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.
I mean, all of this, as you said, sounds just so ghoulish, the parading of these emaciated people, this mix up with the body. Given the reaction to all of this within Israel and the fact that it has, as you mentioned, held up the return of these Palestinian prisoners, what is Hamas thinking here? What is the strategy? Why are the hostages being treated this way?
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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Chapter 5: Who currently holds power in Gaza amid the ceasefire?
From power in Gaza, they are very much still in charge.
And are they actually in charge, given how much damage Israel has done to Gaza, the infrastructure, killing their leaders, destroying the tunnels?
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
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.
And any discussion about the future of Gaza, any discussion about an end to the war has to take their presence into account.
Given that Israel did not achieve its intended goal of eliminating Hamas in the war, where does that leave the war and the ceasefire in this next phase?
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.
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.
So what are the possible outcomes here after Saturday night? Can you just walk us through them?
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Chapter 6: What are the possible outcomes if no agreement is reached?
So if both sides cannot come to a deal by the weekend or an extension, as you described, is it possible that the war is just going to start again? And if so, what is that going to look like?
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.
And we understand from our own reporting that there are very extensive plans in place to return to fighting.
So basically, the options here are go back to war or make some sort of short-term extension of the ceasefire. But are there any longer-term options on the table for a durable peace deal?
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.
You have to learn from history. History has, you know, just can't let it keep repeating itself. We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal. And I don't want to be cute. I don't want to be a wise guy. But the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so bad. This could be so magnificent.
We'll be right back.
So, Patrick, how has President Trump's, quote-unquote, Riviera vision of the Gaza Strip affected the negotiations over the ceasefire and what comes next for Gaza?
Well, let's just start with what the plan actually was.
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Chapter 7: What role does President Trump's proposal play in the negotiations?
And those people will now be able to live in peace. We'll make sure that it's done world class. It'll be wonderful for the people. Palestinians, Palestinians, mostly we're talking about.
Essentially forcing its two million residents to leave their homes and live for years in mainly Egypt and also Jordan.
And people can live in harmony and in peace. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.
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?
Right, so this is actually a more extreme proposal than any American president, I think, has proposed in modern times, if not ever. So what has the reaction to it been?
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.
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.
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.
Yes, and I can imagine to those Palestinians, it would feel a lot like a second expulsion.
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