The precarity of the Gaza ceasefire deal

Even if the next phase of the agreement commences, Israel will face tough choices.

Friends,

At the end of last week, the New Statesman asked me to write an essay on the fate of the rickety January 15 Gaza ceasefire agreement (the deal actually provides for far more than a pause in the war.) I append the text of that piece below.

But over the weekend, the agreement faced its gravest crisis yet, one that could blow it up. So NS asked for an updated version, which they will run as a new essay. I’m posting the original essay—which appeared on March 1—below but am prefacing it with an update (in bold ), fyi, which will appear in the new version.

Rajan

The January 15 Israel-Hamas ceasefire has lasted 42 days. But it may not survive long beyond that. Israel showed no inclination to participate in the negotiations to prepare for Phase 2, whose terms have been agreed to in principle, with the details to be worked out through negotiations. When when the clock ran out on Phase 1 at the end of March 1 those talks hadn’t even begun. They were supposed to have kicked off three weeks ago, but Israel showed no indication that it was preparing to participate.

To break the logjam, Donald Trump’s envoy, the real estate tycoon Steve Witkoff, suggested an extension of the timeline. Hamas objected. Its rationale: It was not as if the talks had progressed and then reached an impasse, requiring more time to reach a conclusion. Israel didn’t even agreed to their initiation.

But this complication doesn’t fully account for the degree to which the deal faces a mortal threat.

Beyond seeking more time for the talks related to opening Phase 2, Prime Minister Netanyahu has called for a continued pause of the war through Ramadan (February 28-March 30) and Passover (April 12-April 20)—effectively seven weeks.

He also wants Hamas, which still holds 59 hostages, to release half of those who are alive and the bodies of half of those who have died, and at the start of the proposed extension—but with no commitment from Israel to implement the provisions of Phase 2, which include a complete Israeli military withdrawal from Gaza and a permanent end to the war, not just, as now exists, a pause.

Netanyahu’s new demands would, of course, require recasting the terms of the deal that Hamas and Israel accepted when they signed the January 15 deal.

To coerce Hamas to accept these new demands, as of the morning of Sunday, March 2, Netanyahu blocked the entry of further humanitarian aid to Gaza, thereby holding its entire population, already living on the margins of life, hostage.

The prime minister has blamed Hamas for rejecting the extension Witkoff has proposed. That is accurate, but what Netanyahu left out was that an extension aligns with Israel’s weeks-long bid to delay, if not derail, Phase 2. (You’ll see why it wants to do that when you read the NS essay pasted below.) Hamas has responded by demanding that Israel abide by the terms of the January ceasefire agreement. Importantly, however, Netanyahu has won American support for his demand to recalibrate the ceasefire accord.

The upshot: A game of Chicken has begun. Each side is racing toward the other with the outer wheels of its cars on the center line. There are three possibilities in this test of wills: Both sides swerve to avert a deadly collision, one of them does, or neither does, causing a calamity. Meanwhile, 59 hostages (many of them dead) remain trapped in Gaza, and the territory’s population, living precariously amidst tons of rubble, faces a cutoff of the most basic supplies, and therefore the return of hunger, disease, and even death. Worse, the war could resume.

This is where things stood as of March 3. I hope this update helps those of you who choose to read the NS essay. Here’s the link if you wish to go to NS’s site:

The Uncertain Fate of the Gaza Ceasefire Agreement

Rajan

Hamas and Israel have reached a precarious moment with the ceasefire accord they agreed on 15 January. The agreement, which paused the war, contains three phases, each lasting 42 days. Phase one provided for a staggered Israeli-hostages-for-Palestinian-prisoners exchange, the redeployment of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) from Gaza’s heavily populated parts to a narrow buffer zone inside its borders, the unimpeded return of the approximately 700,000 people who were displaced from the territory’s north and a substantial increase in the inflow of humanitarian aid trucks, which Israel’s severe wartime restrictions had prevented.

For Gazans, phase one amounted, literally, to a difference between life and death. It stopped the war Israel launched after Hamas’s 7 October surprise attack, during which 1,200 Israelis were killed and another 250 taken hostage. Israel’s retaliation turned Gaza into a hellscape. It left more than 48,000Palestinians dead – more than half of them women, children, and the elderly – and destroyed or damaged 60 per cent of Gaza’s buildings, creating 42 million tonnes of debris. Nine out of ten Gazans fled to other parts of the Strip at least once, and many were forced to move multiple times. The draconian restrictions Israel imposed on essential inbound supplies created severe shortages of food, water, and medicine, made worse by the IDF destruction of critical infrastructure. Consequently, hunger, malnourishment and disease were widespread.

For Israelis, phase one initiated the freeing of hostages whose unknown fate caused anguish for their families and friends – each passing day increased the probability that their loved ones would perish. As the routine street demonstrations in Israel urging prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to secure the hostages’ release showed, the nation was distraught. As of 1 March, Hamas had released 33 hostages, including the remains of eight who died in captivity. This was in exchange for some 2,000 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel, though that will still leave 58 hostages (including soldiers) in Hamas’s hands, half or more of whom Israel believes are dead. (Previous agreements – and rescue operations – yielded the release of 141, including four bodies, with most of the deals cut during the week-long November 2023 ceasefire.)

If the war resumes, even more Gazans will be killed or once again face bombardment, displacement, hunger and disease. Arab and American mediators may be unable to nudge Hamas and Israel towards another ceasefire accord, especially given the depth of their mutual mistrust, exemplified by the barrage of accusations from each side about the other’s violations. In February, Hamas listed 269 Israeli breaches, charging that Israel had killed civilians in Gaza, prevented displaced people from returning freely to the north of the Strip, restricted aid deliveries in the amounts stipulated by the agreement, and beaten and abused Palestinians prior to releasing them from prisons.

Israel has registered its own complaints: some released hostages were emaciated, others had been held in harsh conditions, and that Hamas stage-managed the hostage release in a humiliating manner. After the returned body of Shiri Bibas, who died in captivity along with her two young children, proved to be that of a Palestinian woman, Israel charged that the Bibas children had been killed by their captors’ “bare hands” – not, as Hamas had said, by an Israeli airstrike.

The most recent threat to the entire agreement was Israel’s announcement, following Hamas’s release of six additional hostages as scheduled on 22 February, that it would delay the handover of the next batch of 620 Palestinian prisoners to protest the demeaning hostage-release events. That prompted Hamas to declare that it wouldn’t participate in negotiations related to phase two until Israel kept its side of the bargain. The future of those talks was already uncertain: three weeks after they were to start, Israel had shown no sign that it was ready to join them.

Even if the next phase of the ceasefire commences, the two sides, especially Israel, will confront tough choices.

Hamas has delighted in demonstrating that it remained unvanquished despite the ferocity of the IDF’s siege and the deaths of some of the movement’s senior leaders, such as Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif. Hamas has also already secured the release of more than 33 times as many Palestinians as the hostages it freed. Yet Hamas will have to decide how far it can push Israel without blowing up the ceasefire altogether. It may bet that Netanyahu won’t defenestrate it as long as dozens of Israeli hostages remain trapped in Gaza, but it can’t be certain that he won’t restart the war to achieve his oft-stated goal of annihilating Hamas, even if that requires sacrificing some hostages still in Gaza.

Hamas may survive another bout of war, but it won’t end up in a stronger military or political position. It will lose even more fighters, making a postwar resurgence much harder. Gazans will be exposed to the devastation of war again, and that can’t possibly improve Hamas’s popularity. If the ceasefire implodes, the reconstruction of Gaza – details of which are meant to be worked out in phase three – will be also delayed indefinitely.

Netanyahu will be forced to make even tougher choices decisions in phase two. The hard-line members of his governing coalition opposed the ceasefire from the outset. One, the national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, resigned from the cabinet in January in protest. Another, the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, remained only after Netanyahu assured him that the ceasefire agreement wouldn’t preclude a resumption of the war and indeed that there would be a “gradual takeover of the entire Gaza Strip”. If the prime minister decides to abide by the agreed requirements of the next phase – the IDF’s total withdrawal from Gaza and a permanent end to the war – his precarious coalition government could collapse. Yet sacrificing the remaining hostages will spark new street demonstrations in Israel, and the protesters may not buy his blaming of Hamas for killing the deal. If Netanyahu nevertheless restarts the war, Israeli casualties, currently 846 killed and 15,000 wounded, will increase – and Hamas may again survive.

Another potential snag is that the IDF’s redeployment under phase one included the evacuation of the Philadelphi Corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border by 1 March – something both Hamas and Egypt insist on. But on 27 February, an official Israeli statement clarified what Netanyahu had previously intimated: the IDF, it said, “will not withdraw from the Philadelphia route”. Complicating matters, Netanyahu reportedly seeks an undefined prolongation of phase one – a sort of phase one-plus – which includes the release of all hostages, living and dead, during the extra time but without, as the next phase envisages, the IDF’s complete pull-out from Gaza or a permanent ceasefire.

The next phase also proposes an agreement on the politics of postwar Gaza. Israel insists that Hamas cannot rule the territory again. Though Hamas has apparently agreed to step aside from governing the Gaza Strip, it will baulk at the accompanying Israeli demand that it must fully disarm. Moreover, Netanyahu opposes the governance of Gaza by the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority (PA), so it’s unclear what arrangement he will accept and whether he can be persuaded that any local government can be independent as long as Hamas remains on the scene. Worse, Netanyahu may believe that President Donald Trump’s 4 February proposal of expelling all Palestinians from Gaza, annexing it to the US and building a second “riviera”, may ultimately prove feasible, no matter that Arab governments have rejected Trump’s outrageous idea and Hamas and the PA will never accept it. Nevertheless, Trump promoted his proposal on 26 February with a weird AI-generated video posted on his social media site; the video, among other peculiar images, includes a shot of Trump and Netanyahu, who has extolled the president’s outlandish Gaza plan, sipping drinks and reclining in poolside chairs on the Strip.

It’s unclear what will happen next. On 26 February, Israel finally agreed to release the 620 Palestinians prisoners once Hamas handed over the bodies of four more hostages, completing the exchanges required during the first phase. Extending this first installment of the three-stage agreement may allow time for talks to begin phase two, but given what the deal’s second stage requires of Israel, the entire ceasefire deal could still disintegrate – for many reasons, and at any time. Phase three – the reconstruction plan plus lifting the blockade Israel has used to all but lockdown Gaza since 2007 – may remain an abstract concept.