On Tuesday, a high-level security delegation arrived in Cairo to discuss updated plans for a truce in Gaza. According to a government source, the Israeli delegation received a list of names of Israeli hostages held captive in Gaza since 7 October 2023 who could be handed over as soon as Israeli strikes on Gaza are suspended.

The source said that the visit of the Israeli delegation also allowed for follow-up discussion of the security measures that Egypt, along with the two other mediators, the US and Qatar, are working on to help start an end to the 14-month long Israeli war on Gaza.

“We are making progress, helped by the flexibility that Hamas has been showing since Hizbullah agreed a deal to end the Israeli war on the South of Lebanon, but a full and comprehensive ceasefire deal is still a tough thing to achieve,” the government source said. He suggested that while a truce is possible, a full ceasefire is not.

Any truce, he added, should allow for a beginning to the end of the war. Though it will not evolve into a ceasefire anytime soon, it will get there eventually, “now that Israel is confident that it had firmly degraded the powers of Hamas.”

The government source said the deal currently in the works could be indirectly facilitated by the ouster of Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad in the early hours of 8 December.

“Hamas is now without regional backers. Despite tense relations with Damascus over Bashar’s reaction to the democracy protests in 2011, it still perceived Syria as part of the ‘resistance axis’,” said the source. “And now the axis is entirely dismantled.”

The resistance axis is a loose term referring to countries and groups that are either not at peace with Israel or in a state of active conflict, and Syria, which acted as a conduit for ammunition, weapons, and militants sent from Iran to Hizbullah in Lebanon, was central to the axis.

According to informed diplomatic sources, including one in Damascus, following the degradation of the capacities of Hamas and Hizbullah and the elimination of their two charismatic leaders Yahya Al-Sinwar and Hassan Nasrallah, Israel, in agreement with the US, sent an offer to Al-Assad to close the supply line between Iran and Hizbullah in return for a deal that would see his regime return from the cold after almost 14 years of isolation that followed from his brutal quelling of democracy that began in 2011.

The trouble, according to an informed UN source, is that Al-Assad tried to play smart by opening the door for a UAE-sponsored secret channel for negotiations with Israel on the one hand, and on the other keeping supply channels from Iran to Hizbullah open, though at a slower pace than Tehran wanted.

“This worked against him. He did not win over the Israelis, and he lost the Iranians who were racing against time to rebuild the capacities of its most influential regional ally, Hizbullah,” said the UN source said.

Diplomatic sources agree Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a lot to celebrate. Hamas, they say, is severely weakened, and Hizbullah has seen significant erosion of its capacities. Al-Assad is gone, and pro-Iranian militias in Iraq are under pressure from the Iraqi government and some Shia leaders to avoid becoming involved in the fallout. In short, say the sources, Israel can claim to have outmanouevred its regional nemesis Iran.

According to another diplomat, Israel has also eliminated a significant part of Syria’s military arsenal.

Israeli warplanes have carried out hundreds of air strikes across Syria since the fall of the Al-Assad regime, including on the capital, Damascus. Over 250 strategic sites in Syria have been targeted, including six Syrian naval vessels which were destroyed in an attack on the Syrian port of Latakia.

In a statement, Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz said the Israeli forces was aiming to “destroy the strategic capabilities that threaten the state of Israel” by attacking Syrian army facilities, including weapon warehouses, ammunition depots, airports, naval bases, and research centres.

Israel has also confirmed it has troops operating in Syrian territory beyond the demilitarised buffer zone between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Given the fluidity of the situation and the speed at which events have unfolded, argued the diplomat, Jordan is too “on edge” to enter into a confrontation over any possible Israeli scheme to reoccupy large parts of the West Bank, despite it being a seriously alarming scenario for Jordan where “50 per cent of the population is of Palestinian origin and there is an influential Islamist trend.”

Diplomatic sources agree that HTS leaders are in indirect contact with the West, largely via Ankara, and are making promises not to antagonise regional players. They are also promising to refrain from introducing radical regulations, and to pursue an inclusive government. Yet, there are no guarantees that this position will remain uncontested by other militant factions.

“It is possible that the Islamic State [IS], which has had a fractious relationship with HTS, could act to destabilise the situation,” said one diplomat who served in Syria. IS, he explained, is not fully eliminated, and “while the Israelis cooperated with the Turks to help remove Al-Assad they might have regrets if his successor is not as contained as Al-Assad was throughout his rule of close to a quarter century.”

According to a diplomat who has served in Tehran, it is also hard to think that Iran will simply give up on Syria. “Iran is well entrenched into the country and has allies inside the Syrian army and the bureaucracy,” he said.

Tehran, he suggested, could be tempted to try something rash to compensate for its losses of the past year. One option, he argued, could be to try and boost pro-Iranian militias in Iraq to help them act across the border in Syria; another could be to go the extra mile and top up its support to Yemen’s Houthis who are already targeting vessels in the Red Sea.

According to other sources, informed on the dynamics inside Iran, it is almost certain that Tehran’s hardliners will be strengthened by the latest events. Political squabbles in Iran have been simmering for some time, and if the hardliners take over there is a danger that they will fast-forward plans to build a nuclear bomb, a scenario that will take the confrontation between Iran and Israel to a whole new level.

Meanwhile, Arab capitals are keeping a close eye on the start of Netanyahu’s trial on corruption charges which opened on Tuesday.

In Cairo, the government source raised the possibility that a government reshuffle in Israel could complicate the chances of reaching a deal in Gaza and “might actually allow for more hardliners to join any new government”.

“Despite his failure to bring back the hostages, the major advances Netanyahu made in combating Iran and the axis of resistance will certainly give more power to the extremists in Israel,” he said.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 12 December, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly