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21 January 2025

Will the ceasefire last?

Trump has changed the calculus for Israel and the Middle East.

By Bruno Maçães

As the first phase of a long-awaited ceasefire and prisoner exchange between Hamas and Israel began on 19 January, almost 500 days after the 7 October attacks, one question loomed over all others: will it last? 

The terms of the current ceasefire are not new. In almost every detail, they replicate a similar proposal put forward by the Biden administration and Qatari mediators last May. Many of the obstacles preventing an agreement back then are still present. Other conditions have changed – the most obvious being Donald Trump’s return to the White House – but it remains unclear if these go far enough in sustaining an obviously fragile agreement.

The release of the first three hostages held by Hamas on the eve of Trump’s inauguration is not only a welcome development, it’s also intended to portray the new president as a peace negotiator, perhaps even as a responsible statesman. Images of a smouldering Gaza, where few buildings remain standing, are no longer popular with the American public. They are certainly less popular than the images of the freed Israeli hostages that will start to fill our screens. So Trump may well have done what any politician – one not moved by ideology or messianic beliefs – would do in these circumstances. Credible reports from Israel confirm that his envoy has exerted the kind of pressure over Benjamin Netanyahu that Biden was never able to apply.

Last May the Israeli prime minister adamantly refused to sign an agreement that implied the ceasefire would be anything but temporary. He had promised the Israeli public total victory over Hamas. Many inside Netanyahu’s cabinet – with support from the Israeli public – wanted to ensure that Gaza could never be rebuilt and that a large percentage of the Strip would be returned to Israeli settlers. Netanyahu, on the few occasions when he talked about the future, insisted Israel had to keep complete security control over Gaza. Accepting a permanent ceasefire and withdrawal from key strategic points would go against all of these goals.

At the time, it was plausibly suggested by Aviv Kohavi, the former chief of general staff of the Israel Defence Forces, that Israel should accept a permanent ceasefire in order to get the hostages back and then find a “pretext” to resume the war. Well aware of this possibility, Hamas demanded public assurances from the mediators, Washington first of all, that the ceasefire would lead, after six or eight weeks, to a permanent cessation of hostilities. Netanyahu clearly thought that the pressure not to resume the war would be greater than the pressure to stop it and refused the agreement proposed by Joe Biden. Yet he has accepted a very similar agreement now. What changed?

One obvious possibility is that the Israeli prime minister believes Trump will be accommodating when the moment to – as Kohavi put it – find the pretext arrives.

In fact, Netanyahu announced after the ceasefire agreement had been signed that Israel would keep control over the Philadelphi corridor on the border with Egypt, stating: “Not only will we not reduce our forces there, we will even increase them slightly.” This move would violate the agreement, which requires Israel to fully withdraw from the corridor during the second phase of implementation. He added in the same pre-recorded statement that Israel fully reserves the right to return to fighting if the talks for a permanent ceasefire collapse during that second phase. The problem is that the agreement clearly includes a framework for the ceasefire to be made permanent and has been accepted by the two sides. 

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Netanyahu even said during a meeting of his security cabinet on 17 January that he has received guarantees from the incoming Trump administration that, unless and until its security demands are met, Israel would be able to resume the war in Gaza. And to do so with full American diplomatic, political and military support. The current agreement may thus turn out to be a prisoner exchange deal, not a permanent ceasefire. 

Reports in the Israeli press suggest that Netanyahu may have promised his coalition partners a return to fighting after the hostages have been released, or most of the hostages in any case. One far-right cabinet member, the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, was convinced to stay. Another, Itamar Ben-Gvir, however, resigned as national security minister, but with promises to return if the fighting is indeed resumed.

Trump is less predictable. One member of his incoming national security team told me the reason he has pushed for a ceasefire has a lot to do with his interest in moving forward to “bigger prizes” in the Middle East: a normalisation agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and then some kind of normalisation between Iran and the US. The economic possibilities behind these projects are practically limitless, but they depend on an end to the war in Gaza. And then, who knows, a Nobel Peace Prize – a long-term Trump goal – might be in the offing.

The outcome of the next six weeks, the first phase of the ceasefire agreement, will hinge on how these contradictory goals are resolved. Some distance has opened between what Netanyahu sees as Israeli interests and the American national interest as Trump understands it. Under Biden no such difference could be detected. Netanyahu will try to bridge that distance again, primarily by trying to present Trump with a collapse of the deal, forcing a return to war. The US president will have to turn up the pressure on the Israeli authorities if he wants to keep his sights on those bigger prizes and avoid returning to a war that continues to undermine American authority in the Middle East and beyond. There would be no ceasefire without Donald Trump. But can the ceasefire be made to last with him?

[See also: The return of Donald Trump]


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