By Matt Duss, executive vice-president at the Center for International Policy
TEL AVIV – On Wednesday, Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani announced that a framework for an exchange of prisoners and hostages, leading to a ceasefire in the war in the Gaza Strip, has been agreed to by both Israel and Hamas. The announcement comes after months of intensive, on-again, off-again negotiations by multiple countries. The end of Israel’s devastating military onslaught, the release of prisoners and hostages, and the increase in humanitarian aid into Gaza which it will enable are most welcome. But the challenges ahead are tremendous. And it should have, and could have, come much sooner.
Last May, Biden outlined the contours of a three-stage deal. In the first, there would be a six-week ceasefire, Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners would be released, Israeli forces would withdraw from populated areas of Gaza, and humanitarian aid would be vastly increased into Gaza. Israel and Hamas would use this time to negotiate the terms of a permanent ceasefire.
Based on early reports, this deal looks very similar to that one. But as I wrote shortly after Biden’s announcement last year, it lacked the essential component of necessary pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept, which Biden has steadfastly refused to apply. Incoming Trump envoy Steve Witkoff’s apparent willingness to apply that pressure seemingly forced this breakthrough. “The pressure Trump is exerting right now is not the kind that Israel expected from him,” Israeli commentator Jacob Bardugo, a Netanyahu supporter, said Monday. “The pressure is the essence of the matter.”
Here in Israel and Palestine, where I arrived last weekend, there is great anticipation among people on both sides for this deal. Yet, there is also bafflement and anger that it took so long — much of it directed at Hamas and Netanyahu, but a lot of it also directed at the U.S.
“Why is Blinken so feckless?” asked an Israeli friend who lives in one of the kibbutzim attacked Oct. 7, referring to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s constant trips to the region that have ended with him leaving empty-handed and usually humiliated by Netanyahu. Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada, who is from Gaza, recently published a piece based on conversations with numerous Israeli, Palestinian and Arab officials involved in the talks. They expressed incredulity at how the Biden administration has continued to publicly blame Hamas as the obstacle to a ceasefire, when it was clear to all involved that Netanyahu was the problem. Worse still, the White House’s dissembling gave Netanyahu additional cover to continue his obstruction.
The costs of the administration’s approach have been devastating. The reconstruction alone is estimated to take decades. A United Nations assessment last May reported that the level of destruction of housing in Gaza was unprecedented in the post-World War II era, and that it would take at least until 2040 to restore the homes destroyed. The damage to critical infrastructure has been similarly severe, with damages estimated at more than $18.5 billion by the World Bank as of last April. It will be considerably more now.
The human costs are even more staggering. According to Palestinian health officials, the war has killed more than 46,000 people; many times that number have been maimed and wounded. A recent study in the Lancet medical journal estimated that the actual death count could be much higher, between 55,298 and 78,525 deaths from traumatic injuries in Gaza up to June 30 2024. More than 80% of the population has been displaced, often repeatedly, as the Israeli military has forcibly expelled populations into new “safe areas” which it then bombed. U.N. experts, along with many others, have repeatedly warned of famine in Gaza.
The toll will continue to climb long after any cease-fire. Another Lancet analysis, issued last summer, noted that “even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases.” The authors concluded that “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict.”
Biden has repeatedly — and correctly — declared that Israel, like any country, had a right and responsibility to respond to the horrific attacks of Oct. 7 and prevent such an attack from happening again. But public statements from Israeli officials, cited in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, are a series of confessions of intent that go far beyond any remotely plausible definition of a “just war.” Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi from the ruling Likud party wrote that Israel’s goal was “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” Israeli Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu, from the far-right Jewish Power party, suggested that Israel drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza and said there were “no uninvolved civilians” there. Former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon recently referred to Israel’s actions in northern Gaza as “ethnic cleansing.”
“This is in no way a lawful response, a targeted operation of ‘self-defence’ to dismantle armed groups, or warfare consistent with humanitarian law,” Norwegian Refugee Council Secretary General Jan Egeland said in November. “What Israel is doing here, with Western-supplied arms, is rendering a densely populated area uninhabitable for almost two million civilians.”
There are many ways this multiphase deal could still collapse. Netanyahu has reportedly assured his right-wing ministers that he will resume the war after phase I “until Hamas’ defeat.” Preventing that outcome will require the consistent application of the kind of pressure that Witkoff reportedly has applied. But in the longer term, if this ceasefire is to be anything more than yet another interregnum between rounds of catastrophic violence, the United States will have to get serious about supporting Palestinian liberation and self-determination. Its ability to serve as a credible broker between Palestinians and Israelis, already on life support after decades of failure, is another casualty of the U.S.-backed Gaza war. As one Palestinian activist put it to me, “You now have a whole generation of Palestinians who believe we’re not just fighting against Israel, we’re fighting the U.S.”
If, as another Israeli report claims, Trump has secretly offered support for more settlements in the West Bank in exchange for Netanyahu backing the Gaza ceasefire, a return to large-scale violence against West Bank Palestinians (as opposed to the smaller- scale violence that they endure every day) is simply a question of when, not if. So long as the Palestinian people live under occupation, and the Israeli government steadily consolidates that occupation as a single undemocratic state, neither Israelis nor Palestinians will ever know the security and peace that both peoples desire and deserve. The path toward both will require a level of vision and courage that is currently in very short supply.
