Today, Explained will be off on Monday for Indigenous Peoples' Day; have a great long weekend and we'll see you back here on Tuesday. Hi readers, happy Friday! Cameron Peters here.
After more than two years, Israel and Hamas have finally reached a ceasefire deal to free all remaining Israeli hostages and allow aid to flow into Gaza again. I spoke with my colleague Zack Beauchamp about how the deal finally got done, the role President Donald Trump played, and what comes next. Read on for our conversation: |
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How an Israel-Hamas deal got done |
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Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images |
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| Cameron Peters Israel and Hamas have a deal. What’s been agreed upon? |
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| Zack Beauchamp
Both Israel and Hamas have agreed to a staged process, but only phase one is fully agreed upon. The top line here is that you have the release of Israeli hostages and the bodies of those hostages that have died or been killed, in exchange for a release of Palestinian prisoners and an end to the fighting. Israel will withdraw from large chunks of the Gaza Strip, but it will retain a presence on the ground, at least during phase one. The most important thing is that they will stop fighting. There will be no more attacks happening inside Gaza, and aid will be allowed to flow into Gaza.
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| Cameron Peters A month ago, Israel was bombing Hamas negotiators. How are we, a month later, at a deal? |
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| Zack Beauchamp
Right now, based on the limited information we have, the key factor seems to be political will, specifically political will from the Trump administration. They had not been making a priority out of Israel-Palestine peace, to put it mildly, after the first ceasefire they brokered foundered in March.
Israel imposed the aid cutoff on Gaza and the Trump administration basically said, Go ahead. We're not going to do anything about it. And that led to the worst humanitarian crisis of war, including the outbreak of what appeared to be famine in Gaza.
Recently, the Trump administration decided that it wants to get back involved in trying to make an end to the Gaza war. It's not clear exactly what the timeline was going to be, but that timeline changed when Israel attacked Doha, Qatar. The Trump administration has very strong ties to the Gulf Arab states, so they accelerated their timeline and started to put immense pressure on all of the different parties in lots of different ways to try to force a ceasefire. |
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| Cameron Peters How much credit do Trump and his administration deserve for getting this done? |
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| Zack Beauchamp
Honestly, a lot — at least, if the early evidence continues to be born out. Trump had a unique relationship with many of the key people involved. Trump has very strong ties not only to Netanyahu and his political fortunes — Trump is very popular on the Israeli right, and so he had a lot of leverage politically over Netanyahu — but relationships with the Gulf monarchies, as well as the leaders of Egypt and Turkey.
One of these dictatorships, Qatar, was a really important international partner of Hamas. So Trump worked with Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey to push Hamas from their end to accept the deal, and Trump uses his leverage over Netanyahu to try to force the Israelis into a deal. So you end up getting a situation where the stars have aligned for there to be at least a temporary ceasefire.
One of the dynamics here is that none of the leadership on either side really wanted an end to the war on terms the other would accept. They had to be forced into it. There were multiple points where it looked like each side wanted the talks to fail to be able to credibly blame the other one. And in each case, negotiators on either side, especially the US, said, No, we're just going to keep going forward.
One example is that when Hamas gave its answer to the deal, it was a partial yes. Netanyahu rushed to declare that Hamas had rejected the deal, and Trump said no, and then berated him in private. Trump wanted the fighting to stop in the immediate term, and so treating the Hamas answer as a yes turned it into, at least for now, a real yes, even though that’s not how Netanyahu saw it. |
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| Cameron Peters What are you keeping an eye on as we hopefully see this phase one agreement take effect? |
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| Zack Beauchamp
The first thing to look for is whether the terms of phase one are implemented as planned. I predict that they will be. But you have to watch carefully: are the hostages returned, does Israel withdraw to the agreed-upon points, what about the Palestinian prisoners? Keep an eye on all the details, because there's a lot of them.
The second question is very obvious, but it's worth repeating: What happens with the negotiations on phase two? Because right now, they're not agreed upon. And this is how the last ceasefire fell apart. Trump had set up a two-phase agreement. The first phase was a time-limited ceasefire, and then that led to an indefinite agreement, and then phase two was never agreed upon. The difference this time around is this is not a time-limited ceasefire, right? There's nothing that says this deal expires after a certain point.
Phase two also involves some more permanent issues. I don't know if phase one is going to hold, but phase two is really important, because it determines whether or not there will be durable change on the ground that could prevent this kind of thing from happening again. Because even if the ceasefire lasts for a year, two years, three years, four years — as long as Hamas is in charge of the Gaza Strip, this fighting is going to happen again.
There's going to be something, either on the Israeli side or the Palestinian side, that provokes the other and leads to violence that escalates and that leads to full-scale war. This has been by far the most devastating war in this pattern, but the pattern has been going on since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip 20 years ago. This is not a new thing. It's predictable. Israel even had a strategic term for it, “mowing the grass.” It was a horrible equilibrium that led to a disaster for the people inside Gaza and poor prospects for any kind of long-term peace agreement that could make everybody safer.
So are you going to do something about the hawkish Israeli posture that led to that fighting over and over again? Are you to do something about Hamas being in charge of Gaza? Are you going to link it to a broader political negotiating situation that can provide an actual peace agreement and create a Palestinian state? These are the big existential questions that will determine whether or not this is a ceasefire that's ultimately temporary, even for a longer time horizon than previous ones, or whether it's the beginnings of a durable base agreement. No pessimist has been wrong in betting on the Middle East recently, so I'm not sure that I would say we're likely in for one of the better scenarios, but it's possible. It's more possible than it was a few days ago. That's encouraging.
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Today’s edition was produced and edited by me, staff editor Cameron Peters. Thanks for reading! |
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