There was no white smoke in Rome this week during the negotiations for a ceasefire in the Israeli war on Gaza that has been taking a devastating toll on Palestinian lives since 7 October last year.

The chiefs of the US, Egyptian, Qatari, and Israeli intelligence services met in the Italian capital to try to eliminate differences that have been halting the approval by Israel and Hamas of a “sustainable truce” that would allow the shattered people of Gaza to bury their dead and access humanitarian aid.

It would also allow them to begin the long task of removing some of the rubble of cities carpet-bombed by Israel during the war and for Israel itself to retrieve the remaining living hostages taken by Hamas during its attack on Israel on 7 October.

According to informed regional diplomatic sources, there were few expectations of the Rome meeting. In the words of one Egyptian source, who has moved from cautious optimism to unmasked pessimism on the chances of a deal during the past few months, “there were no signs” that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had decided to bring the war to an end.

Netanyahu “is stalling,” he said.

Several sources said that the Rome meeting was arranged at very short notice after US President Joe Biden, in his final months in the White House, pressured Netanyahu to renew the negotiations to end the war.

Netanyahu, the sources said, had told Biden that his security and diplomatic team had an amended draft for a ceasefire deal that had been negotiated for months. It was then that Biden asked CIA Chief William Burns to call for a meeting in Rome, where Burns was to be on an overseas assignment, along with other mediators from Egypt and Qatar.

The delegations met in Rome on Sunday to face a new set of Israeli demands not included in the draft that was last negotiated in Doha and Cairo. Two crucial points, the sources say, relate to the security arrangements that Israel wishes to put in place on the border between Gaza and Egypt and to the process of resettlement for Palestinians who have been forcibly displaced in Gaza.

According to the Egyptian source, the Rome meeting was supposed to finalise details of the handover of the Israeli hostages and the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, especially after Hamas agreed to replace its demand for a permanent ceasefire with one aiming at sustainable calm.

“There was a separate track between Egypt and Israel with regards to the security measures on the borders between Gaza and Egypt and to address the Israeli claims of smuggling through the tunnels there,” he said.

Netanyahu then decided to integrate both issues, “and this will certainly complicate things for a while.”

The Egyptian source declined to say how many of the new Israeli demands were likely be accommodated in Cairo. But he said there would be further negotiations, either in Cairo or Doha or in some other capital in the Mediterranean “before September.”

It is not unlikely that Netanyahu will come up with other demands, he said.

The source explained that Netanyahu’s calculations are influenced by Biden’s decision to exit the race in the US presidential elections in November. Another influencing factor is the chances of Donald Trump, the former US president and a frontrunner in the elections, to make a comeback to the White House.

Trump, who has heavy legal baggage including charges of fraud, is now competing with US Vice-President Kamala Harris who is perceived to be better positioned than Biden to make it to the Oval Office.

In the words of one regional diplomat, “Netanyahu now has until January when either Harris or Trump is sworn in. He will use this time to cause further havoc in Gaza and to try to kill more Palestinians, and he will be trying to eliminate any of the Hamas leaders who have escaped the Israeli war machine since the beginning of the war.”

“Harris made it clear that she will take a tougher position on Israel’s war on Gaza if she is elected president when she said that she would ‘not be silent’ on the war,” the source added.

According to the same source, irrespective of the statements Trump made when he received Netanyahu at his resort in Mar-a-Lago in Florida, he in fact “told Netanyahu to finish the war before January.”

He explained that Netanyahu might have hoped that Trump, who moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem during his first term in office and initiated the so-called “Abraham Accords” aiming at the normalisation of relations between Israel and some Arab states, would be more accommodating than Harris.

“But he does not know for sure because the choices made by Trump when hoping for a second term might be different from those made by a president in his second and last term,” the source said.

Regional sources say that Netanyahu does not look as if he wants a larger war with Hizbullah in Lebanon, and he might well continue his war on Gaza until a new US president is elected in November.

They argue that though Netanyahu returned to Israel from his visit to the US following an attack on the Israeli-Occupied Golan Heights, which Israel has blamed on Hizbullah, it does not seem likely that he intends to start a new war. Instead, he seems most likely to want to manage a diplomatic combat.

Netanyahu, the sources said, is under heavy pressure from several capitals, including Washington and Paris, to avoid attacking Beirut in order to avert another conflict in the region, especially since the Gaza war is still ongoing.

“It seems that Netanyahu gave his word that he would not attack Beirut,” the sources said.

The regional diplomat said that the fact that an Israeli attack has not taken place is an indication that Netanyahu is “playing another game” to put pressure on Hizbullah to move further north of the Blue Line dividing Lebanon from Israel and the Golan Heights.

This was established by the UN in June 2000 as a way of determining whether Israel had fully withdrawn from Lebanon. It has been described as “temporary” and “not a border, but a line of withdrawal.”

However, the diplomat said that it was highly unlikely that Hizbullah would agree to such a deal, meaning that “an Israeli strike on the south of Lebanon is still to be expected.”

None of the sources was willing to firmly exclude a scenario in which high-intensity conflict takes place between Israel and Hizbullah in Lebanon. They said it was not clear what Netanyahu is planning for the remainder of the year.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 1 August, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly