‘Big question marks’: experts doubt Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal will lead to lasting peace

Gaza’s war-weary residents could soon receive a rare reprieve, with a multiphased truce agreement between Israel and Hamas, announced on Wednesday, expected to take effect on Sunday. However, their future remains as uncertain as ever because the deal, announced by the leaders of the United States, Qatar and Egypt, does not guarantee an end to the war that has been raging since October 7, 2023. The draft truce agreement provides for talks on a framework for the post-conflict governance and reconstruction of Gaza, but with no consensus on those issues in sight, the door has been left open for prolonged Israeli military occupation of the territory. Furthermore, the agreement does not address political negotiations to resolve the underlying conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Analysts say the temporary pause in hostilities may do little to end the threat posed to the Middle East’s stability by the long-running conflict between Israel and its Western backers, and Hamas, Lebanese Hezbollah and other militias aligned with Iran. “Hopefully, there will be a prolonged pause” in the war in Gaza while Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners are being exchanged and aid surges into the Strip, said Barbara Slavin, a distinguished Middle East fellow at the Stimson Centre think tank in Washington. “But this war will not end absent a political solution and I don’t see one,” Slavin told This Week in Asia. “Frankly, I worry that Israel will now move to annex the West Bank, and continue to pressure Washington to support military action against Iran’s nuclear programme,” she said. According to Giorgio Cafiero, CEO of Washington-based risk consultancy Gulf State Analytics, the ceasefire deal will merely “lead to the end of this round of fighting between Israel and the Palestinian resistance in Gaza”. But even if the ceasefire deal holds, “without the root causes of violence being addressed – chiefly the Israeli occupation and the daily dehumanisation of Palestinians – it is likely just a matter of time until another round of violence, if not another full-scale war, begins”, Cafiero said. Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington think tank, said both Israel and Hamas “have to decide to stick to the agenda” and go forward into phase 2, during which a “sustained calm” would be declared and the Israeli military would withdraw from populated areas of Gaza to its forward operating bases there. “Otherwise, the war will start again. It may even start again sooner, if hotheads on either side get their way,” Ibish said. “A certain degree of tolerance of provocations needs to be baked into all of this process” in order for the envisioned second phase to have “any chance of coming into fruition”, Ibish added. Andreas Krieg, an associate professor of defence studies at King’s College London, said that “a look” at the Netzarim Corridor, erected by the Israeli Defence Forces to divide northern Gaza from the south, and the various fortified defensive lines erected there, “show why this is not a comprehensive ceasefire deal”. Only under the third phase of the truce agreement would a full Israeli military withdrawal take place, which Krieg said in a social media post “is not even achievable in the mid-term”. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government “will leave the options open to permanently seizing territory in the Strip”, Krieg said. If the ceasefire holds, Cafiero said “that will do much to help” the Palestinians in Gaza in terms of “experiencing some relief and tackling the humanitarian crises plaguing the besieged and decimated coastal enclave”. Nonetheless, “extreme humanitarian suffering will continue” because of “all the destroyed healthcare infrastructure and endless list of other humanitarian disasters” that the past 15 months of war “have either created or made many times worse in Gaza”, Cafiero said. While there is “always the potential for a major epidemic or something else imponderable”, Ibish said the initial 42-day truce “ought to begin the rebuilding of a degree of food security and the reconstruction of basic medical care in Gaza”. Even if the war does start again, “given that it will be an insurgency” largely driven by sidearms and improvised explosive devices fashioned from all the unexploded Israeli ordinance littering Gaza, Ibish said “there won’t be much point in Israel destroying the rebuilt hospitals”. So the ceasefire deal “should be the end of the very worst” for Gaza’s 2.3 million people, 90 per cent of whom have been displaced by the war. If Israel and Hamas were to successfully complete the first two phases of the truce agreement, the third phase would address the future governance of Gaza. As things stand, there is no clear vision, analysts said. “Different actors want different arrangements and how these governance-related questions will be worked through is difficult to predict,” Cafiero said. “This remains one of the big question marks.” According to Ibish, “that’s why, if this [ceasefire] proposal goes through, it probably indicates that Israel has made a strategic decision to leave Gaza in the hands of Hamas for the foreseeable future”. “That might seem incompatible with Israel’s endless statements about refusing to allow that to happen, but it is very consistent” with Israel’s long-standing policies of keeping the Palestinian national movement divided between the secular nationalists of Fatah controlling the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the Islamists of Hamas ruling Gaza, Ibish added. He said the Israeli decision to refuse to discuss, let alone implement an alternative civil administration for Gaza meant the choice was simple. “It’s either the Israeli military or Hamas. It looks like the Israeli military has no interest in administering Gaza, so it’s going to be Hamas,” Ibish said. “And, let’s be clear, this is a conscious and deliberate Israeli strategic choice.”

‘Big question marks’: experts doubt Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal will lead to lasting peace

Israel and Hamas’ truce agreement is set to start on Sunday, but analysts warn unresolved core issues leave the future uncertain