Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet on Thursday approved the first phase of President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan that was rolled out nine days earlier. In exchange for Hamas releasing the rest of the Israeli hostages, 20 of whom are believed to still be alive, the Israel Defense Forces will institute a ceasefire and implement a partial withdrawal from its current positions. The hostages will reportedly be set free by Sunday or Monday, although it may take additional time for Hamas to locate the bodies of those who have died.
Either way, one can’t avoid feelings of relief. The celebrations are hard to miss; for the roughly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza who have been living through hell over the last two years, the ceasefire will provide much-needed respite from a war that has gutted the entire coastal territory, ruined its already dilapidated health care system and destroyed approximately 90% of its homes. In Israel, the families of the remaining hostages who are alive, who have been pressing Netanyahu to sign an agreement that ends the war, will soon have their loved ones back in their arms. Trump, predictably, is quite pleased: “This is a great day for the world,” he said hours after the deal concluded. “This is a wonderful day, a wonderful day for everybody.”
Yet, as understandable as it may be to bask in this success, we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves. It’s important to reiterate that Israel and Hamas have only come to terms on the first phase of Trump’s peace plan, not the entire thing. And Trump has a tendency to declare historic success and quickly move on to other things. But this approach won’t work on an issue as loaded and fraught as the Israeli-Palestinian file, which means his administration will need to keep up the pressure on all sides if it truly wants to prevent another round of fighting down the line. If Israel, Hamas or both come to the conclusion that they can wiggle out of their commitments, we should expect they most certainly will.
Ultimately, Trump’s peace plan was less a plan per se and more a rough guideline touching on all the major issues, from hostage releases and Israeli military withdrawals to Hamas’ disarmament and the establishment of a technocratic Palestinian administration in a post-Hamas Gaza. The first phase of the accord, in which Israel trades a partial military withdrawal and a ceasefire for the return of the hostages, was in many ways the easiest part of the document because none of those issues were existential for either party. Israel could live with a partial withdrawal further east — as the superior military power, Israel can always return to war if it so decides — and while the hostages were Hamas’ main bargaining chip during the war, the group made the determination that its interests were better served by handing them back to Israel in return for some quiet in Gaza.
The other issues left outstanding, however, will be much more complicated to rectify. Trump’s list of 20 points is highly ambitious. Gaza, for instance, is supposed to be administered by Palestinian officials under an international transitional body called the Board of Peace, which Trump will chair and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair will be heavily involved in. Hamas is supposed to disarm and demobilize, which has proven to be a red line for the organization in the past, and any subsequent Israeli military pullbacks will only occur when Hamas hands over its weapons and Gaza is considered secured by the international forces tasked with supervising the territory’s total demilitarization. A new economic system will need to be established in Gaza as well, and if all goes according to plan, Israel and the Palestinians will be expected to re-enter comprehensive talks on a final status peace agreement.
To state the obvious, none of this is going to be easy. In fact, if you were a gambler, the smart play would be on placing your money on the process stalling or falling apart. This isn’t meant to rain on everybody’s parade; indeed, one can make the argument that it is better to have a few days, weeks and months of quiet in Gaza than no quiet at all. And who in their right mind could argue against families becoming whole again after the hostages spent the last two years suffering in Gaza’s system of underground tunnels?
Even so, one gets the feeling that the mediators shepherding these on-again, off-again negotiations don’t have a clear idea about how to get past Phase 1. When asked what will happen after the hostages are free and the IDF is pulled back to new defensive lines, Trump was extremely vague, suggesting he either didn’t know what was going to happen or felt it was too early to comment on specifics. All Trump was willing to say was that he thinks Gaza will be rebuilt, which is less a definitive, factual statement than one littered with hope and expectations.
The blunt fact of the matter is that nobody, not even Trump, his Middle East peace envoy Steve Witkoff or his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was heavily involved in the negotiations, really knows what’s going to occur after the first 72 hours. This is in many ways uncharted territory; events could proceed fine, or they could fall back into the same old patterns, with Netanyahu’s government insisting that Hamas surrender all of its arms and Hamas coming right back and insisting that such a concession can only happen after all Israeli forces leave Gaza and the rest of Palestinian land in the West Bank.
Amid the tears of joy and champagne-popping, there are still more questions than answers at this stage. How will the international police force work? Which countries are contributing troops and what will their authorities be? Which Palestinian technocrats will serve in the interim authority, and what happens if the authority descends into infighting? Will Israel insist on a timetable for Hamas disarming? Will Hamas preface disarmament on Israeli troop departures, similar to what Hezbollah is currently doing in Lebanon? Is this entire thing merely a pause in the fighting until Israel and Hamas return to war after they run into the same roadblocks that bedeviled previous ceasefire negotiations over the last two years?
It’s trite to say that peace in the Middle East is a thankless task. But in this specific case, it couldn’t be more accurate.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
