It is now more than a month since the latest ceasefire between Hamas and Israel went into effect. In it, Hamas agreed to release the remaining Israeli hostages in exchange for Israel’s gradual withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
Though it’s true that the ceasefire has not been without incident, Hamas still hasn’t returned the bodies of all of the hostages, and there have been skirmishes between the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) and militants that may or may not be part of Hamas, it was holding at the time of writing.
Crucially, unlike past ceasefires, this is meant to only be the first step in an extended peace plan, put forward by US President Donald Trump, which would see Hamas dismantled and Gaza placed in the hands of an interim government made up of key Arab allies until such time that a reformed Palestinian authority can take control of the newly rebuilt, demilitarised, and hopefully deradicalised strip.
But after an already rocky month, just how likely is it that the shaky truce will hold, let alone that the rest of the peace plan will ever go into effect? Like so much else to do with the region, it’s an incredibly tough call, and though there is some real cause for optimism, it is very much tempered by the realities on the ground.
Nothing encapsulates this better than the recent news that the children of Gaza have returned to schools run by the UN’s Palestinian relief agency, Unrwa. On the one hand, it is, of course, wonderful that some semblance of normality is returning for children who have spent the past two years caught in the middle of a truly horrible war. On the other hand, the fact that these are schools run, once again, by Unrwa, is nothing short of catastrophic, as the agency doesn’t just have numerous ties to Hamas, but has been key in indoctrinating Palestinian children into Islamist extremism, Jew-hate and zero-sum thinking about the situation that ends only in the destruction of Israel.
It’s as classic an example of “two steps forward, three steps back” as you can find. Worse, it is a sign of the untenable status quo of October 6 2023 trying to reassert itself, a status quo that proved to be utterly disastrous for Israelis and Palestinians. To better understand where we are right now though, we need to look at the three main parties involved in this peace process: Israel, Hamas and everyone else.
Despite protestations from the far-right, the Israeli government signed on enthusiastically to Trump’s peace plan, with the support of most Israelis. All the remaining live hostages have returned home, most of the dead hostages too, and after two years of intense fighting, Israeli soldiers and their families (to say nothing of the hostages and families of the victims of the Hamas’ massacre) can start picking up the pieces of their pre-October 7 lives.
However, this has come at the price of releasing hundreds of convicted terrorists and mass murderers back into the wild and leaving Hamas as a severely weakened but still plenty dangerous fighting force and, for now at least, still the de facto controllers of Gaza. Meanwhile, those on the Israeli fringe far-right have decried the deal as it expressly forbids the retaking of Gaza and the expulsion of the Palestinians, but obviously the less they get their way the better.
Case in point, one of the great black marks against Israel of late has been the numerous attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank/Judea and Samaria by a tiny but persistent group of extremist, far-right religious-Zionist settlers and a government — in particular, far-right national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir — that has failed to stop or even properly prosecute them.
Yet even here there is hope, because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now released a statement echoing the vociferous condemnations of Trump, Israeli President Isaac Herzog, and IDF chief of staff Eyal Zamir, and vowed to start prosecuting these extremists to the full extent of the law. This is significant both for obvious moral reasons, but also because it signals a loosening of the grip the far-right religious-Zionist parties have held on Netanyahu’s coalition for too long.
Israelis are clearly tired of war and tired of capitulating to an extremist fringe that seems intent on leading the country into ruin by betraying the Jewish and democratic values on which their country was founded. Which is why, for all of the combustibility and unpredictability of Israeli politics, Israeli leadership from all sides (bar the increasingly unpopular fringe) have embraced and will continue to embrace the basic outline of the peace plan.
The same, however, cannot be said for Hamas. As the main losers in this peace plan, Hamas is by far most likely to sabotage it in the long run. Indeed, while it has acquiesced to accepting a temporary ceasefire at the insistence of its backers in Turkey and Qatar, it has all been in the service of solidifying its power in Gaza.
Since the ceasefire took effect, Hamas has publicly executed dozens of “Israeli collaborators” (read: competing groups that threaten its rule) and its leaders have made it entirely clear that they have no intention whatsoever of disarming in the long run as long as Israel continues to exist. They have also made it clear that Hamas will be part of whatever new government forms in Gaza.
In short, Hamas remains a time bomb waiting to explode, and though most of its military leadership has been obliterated, it still has tens of thousands of fighters, having filled up its ranks with new recruits, enlisted during the war. By most measures, what has been true over the past two decades is more true than ever: if Gaza is to have any hope of a future, Hamas needs to be removed from the equation — whether by Israel or by the international security force that is a key part of Trump’s peace plan.
That said, as Israeli journalist and history professor Haviv Retig Gur suggested in a recent episode of his brilliant “Ask Haviv Anything” podcast, there is a way for the peace plan to potentially continue even without Hamas disarming. Should Israel and the US manage to set up a new government and security force with their Arab allies, they might be able to relegate Hamas to a role similar to Hezbollah in Lebanon: a rogue militant force, concentrated in a specific area, without the support of the people or the new government.
This is hardly ideal, but as Israel showed with the “pager attacks” last year, it would make Hamas ripe for targeted, surgical strikes with minimal civilian casualties that were simply impossible when Hamas was completely embedded in Gaza’s civilian infrastructure.
Sadly, right now this does look like the best and most likely scenario. But whether it can reach even this modest point will depend a lot on the support of the Palestinian Authority (PA), neighbouring Arab countries and the wider Western world in general.
What separates Trump’s peace deal from those that preceded it is that it actively involves Arab countries as key stakeholders in the deal, as made possible by the Abraham Accords. This is a huge deal for two reasons. First, it puts the governance of Palestinians in neither the hands of their “sworn enemy”, Israel, nor Western countries with whom they have little in common, but with Arab countries that share similar values, practise the same religion and talk the same language. Second, part of the reason why countries like the UAE joined the Abraham accords — or, in the cases of Egypt and Jordan, why they made peace decades ago — is because these countries have dealt with Islamist extremism for years and have enjoyed significant success at deradicalising their own populations.
As it stands, there are two major obstacles to actually getting these countries involved. First, Hamas itself. Simply, Arab leaders have made it clear that as long as Hamas is still a serious military threat, they and the countries they represent will not come anywhere near Gaza. And considering how much the international order has played right into the hands of Hamas over the past two years, the terror group has been and will continue to be emboldened to continue exactly as they have been.
The second obstacle to peace is the PA. The PA may be seen as “moderates” in all this – and in comparison to Hamas it pretty much is – but it is the leaders of the PA and, in its previous form, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation that have rejected deals that would have given the Palestinians a state of their own, and it is the PA that has been responsible for setting the curriculum of Palestinian education, with its wildly antisemitic textbooks. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is also in the 20th year of his four-year term, and will do anything to maintain power.
According to the peace plan — and at the insistence of the Arab countries involved — the PA will play a major part in the rebuilt Gaza. Both Trump and Israel, however, insist that this has to be a reformed PA — one rid of its own antisemitic leanings and its ANC-level corruption. Abbas, unsurprisingly, is less than willing to comply.
Which is why it is clearer now than ever that this peace plan has great potential even if it only accomplishes half of what it sets out to, but that it’s also never more than one dumb politician or radical extremist away from falling apart at the seams.
Which is why it is so important that the rest of the world puts pressure on the right places — and why, as long as the “pro-Palestinian” movement continues to either ignore or reject this actual opportunity for peace, the chance of it happening becomes less likely it is to happen.
• Preskovsky is a freelance writer.
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