More than six months after outgoing US president Joe Biden unveiled his three-stage approach to a ceasefire agreement in Gaza on 31 May 2024, the three mediators of Egypt, Qatar, and the US succeeded in finally sealing a ceasefire and hostage deal that was announced in Qatar on 15 January.
The news was enthusiastically received in Gaza as well as in Israel, particularly by the families of the hostages.
Under the deal, the ceasefire went into effect before noon on 19 January. It was delayed from 08:30 until 10:00 because of the need to wait for Hamas to release the names of the three female hostages that would be freed on the first day of the ceasefire.
Hamas said that the delay in providing the names was due to “technical reasons.” Earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had warned that Israeli forces would not stop fighting until the list was made public.
Two hundred trucks carrying much-needed humanitarian assistance then entered the Gaza Strip from three crossings. The Rafah Crossing would open shortly.
Phase One of the deal, which will last 42 days, stipulates that 33 hostages will be freed in this timeframe, and, according to Egyptian sources on 18 January, Israel will free 1,890 Palestinian prisoners of war and detainees.
On the 16th day of the ceasefire, the negotiations will commence for the second phase of the deal to agree on the terms of a permanent ceasefire and the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. During this phase, the remaining hostages will be freed. Once the Israeli withdrawal is complete, the third phase of the deal that deals with the reconstruction of Gaza will witness the release of the remaining Israeli hostages, including the bodies of those who died in Gaza.
The most important question now is whether the deal will hold and bring the war to an end.
As far as the families of the hostages are concerned, they have called on the Israeli Prime Minister to demand the return of all the hostages now, fearing that after the first phase is over in six weeks, the Israeli Army will resume fighting in Gaza.
No one can blame them for such apprehensions. In a televised speech on 18 January, Netanyahu claimed that both “President Trump and president Biden have given their full backing to Israel’s right to resume fighting if we conclude that negotiations for phase II are futile.”
Note the words “if we conclude” – which means that Israel will be the sole arbiter to decide if the negotiations are futile or not.
Netanyahu also said that Israel would retain full control over the Philadelphi Corridor, whereas the annex to the ceasefire deal, as published in the Israeli newspapers, says that if all goes according to plan and the 33 hostages are back in Israel, Israeli troops will begin pulling out from the corridor and complete their withdrawal no later than day 50 of the first phase of the deal.
While the ceasefire went into effect on 19 January, Cairo was hosting a meeting of US, Qatari, Palestinian, and Israeli officials with their Egyptian counterparts to discuss the setting up of a mechanism to monitor the implementation of the ceasefire deal.
The European Union was expected to send a mission to Egypt to discuss the future operation of the Rafah Crossing. Prior to Hamas usurping control of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority in June 2007, there were European observers stationed at this crossing, where they had been from 2005 after the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. They were withdrawn in 2007.
Many observers believe that the terms of the ceasefire deal were already in place a couple of months ago, but that Netanyahu procrastinated in approving them. Some believe, probably rightly, that he was betting on Donald Trump winning the US presidential elections last November. His relations with Biden were strained, and he insinuated from time to time that he would not bend to pressures from the White House to stop the war on Gaza before Israel had achieved what he set out to do – that is achieving “complete victory.”
Although Netanyahu never defined exactly what such “complete victory” would mean, the interpretation was that he meant the complete annihilation of Hamas, an objective that many experts in Israel doubted that he would be able to accomplish. Others believed that Netanyahu wanted to involve Israel in a perpetual state of war in order to ensure his political survival in the face of the three legal cases against him and to keep his governing coalition in power.
After the resignation of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir the same day the ceasefire deal went into effect, the ruling coalition in Israel now enjoys only a razor thin majority of two seats in the Knesset. However, if pressures lead Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the extreme-right Religious Zionism Party, to resign, Netanyahu can still depend on opposition leader Yair Lapid and National Party leader Benny Gantz to provide him with a political safety net.
In announcing the ceasefire and hostages deal on 15 January, Biden said it “will halt the fighting in Gaza, surge much-needed humanitarian assistance to Palestinian civilians, and reunite the hostages with their families.” He added that his plan of 31 May 2024 had been the result “not only of the extreme pressure that Hamas has been under and the changed regional equation after a ceasefire in Lebanon and weakening of Iran, but also of dogged and painstaking American diplomacy.”
This “painstaking American diplomacy” would not have succeeded in the absence of the decisive roles played by Egypt and Qatar, however. They undoubtedly share Biden’s view that “it is long past time for the fighting to end and the work of building peace and security to begin.”
In the meantime, Egypt concurs with what Biden told journalist Lawrence O’Donnell of the US network MSNBC last weekend that “the idea that Israel is going to be able to sustain itself for the long term without accommodating the Palestinian question is not possible.”
I wonder why Biden did not articulate such a position earlier and before he was preparing to leave the White House. His administration could have saved the lives of untold thousands of innocent Palestinians in Gaza had he done so. And why did his administration keep providing Israel with military and financial assistance over the last 15 months of mayhem in Gaza?
As an Israeli political commentator wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on 17 January, Netanyahu may have waited for President-elect Trump before agreeing to a ceasefire in Gaza, but he may soon learn that his place in Trump’s world has also been marginalised.
The writer is former assistant foreign minister.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 23 January, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Short link: