It is hard to forecast how the ceasefire talks in Egypt this week will conclude and whether they will lead to an end to the two-year war on Gaza.
There are questions that relate to everything from the content of the talks, the guarantees for anything agreed in them, and the political and diplomatic oversight that they entail.
One major question that diplomatic and security sources close to this week’s talks pointed to is whether they will lead to a temporary or a durable ceasefire.
“It will not be a comprehensive, sustainable, and overarching end to the war. It will just be a ceasefire or a truce, whatever it might be called,” said a diplomatic source with insight into the last two years’ attempts to end the war that started in the early hours of 7 October 2023 after Hamas conducted an attack on targets in Israel.
This week’s talks kicked off in Cairo prior to their official launch in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, which has for years been hosting talks on the Palestinian-Israeli struggle.
The talks have three sets of objectives, according to sources who spoke to Al-Ahram Weekly. First, there is the objective of turning the Trump plan to end the war in Gaza — put out on 29 September — into a workable set of proposals that could meet the requirements of both Hamas and the extremist government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The Trump plan has so many things that are very hard to apply on the ground, and the idea is not to get into a diplomatic argument with the US. The idea is to use this plan as a base and then to draft a text that the parties can agree to,” an Egyptian diplomat said.
Once this is in place, sources say, the plan must be divided into segments with a timeline. This is the second objective that sources say is problematic, because while Hamas wants to connect every step on its side with a simultaneous or consecutive step on the part of Israel, Netanyahu is not willing to do this.
“Netanyahu is playing the political game to the very end. The map he is proposing for the gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces lacks a great deal of definition on the exact points that Israel would withdraw from and the exact dates it would do so,” said Egyptian Major-General Wael Rabia.
According to Rabia, it is more probable that Netanyahu will not honour his commitments. “He did this during the ceasefire last time. He worked with the ceasefire for a while and then he resumed the war,” he said.
“This is the hardest thing about the proposed ceasefire — to make sure that Netanyahu honours his commitments, especially when the Israeli hostages are handed over.”
According to a source informed on the preparations for the talks on Monday and Tuesday, the first phase of the implementation will relate to the hand-over of the living Israeli hostages, estimated to be 20 people, taken from Israel during the Hamas operation on 7 October 2023.
Then there is the third objective of the talks, which is to try to separate the possible-to-achieve from the difficult-to-achieve, the sources say.
According to the Trump plan, Hamas is expected to hand over all the living Israeli hostages and the remains of the hostages who have died while in captivity 72 hours after the ceasefire enters into effect.
In press statements he made shortly after Hamas announced its willingness to work with the Trump plan, Hamas leader Moussa Abu Marzouk said that the three-day deadline included in the plan for the hand-over of the hostages and the remains of the dead hostages is unrealistic.
Sources say that the objective of the first round of the talks hosted by Egypt is to get Israel to agree to give time for Hamas to be able to assemble the bodies of the hostages who have died while in captivity, given the fact that they did not all pass away in one place and that their bodies need to be retrieved and identified with DNA tests.
According to the source informed on the preparations for the talks, it is not easy to expect Netanyahu to show openness on this matter because this means he will have to maintain a ceasefire for longer than he might be planning to.
Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey, he said, are talking to the US and European countries with influence in Israel to try to get it to agree to the consecutive hand-over of the bodies within “a reasonable timeframe”.
“I think that a few days is a hard target, but a few weeks might be reasonable. It is somewhere between the few months that Hamas is proposing and the few days that Israel wants,” the source said.
On Tuesday afternoon, hours after Trump said that Hamas had agreed to some “very important things” in the talks, Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty said that he hoped for “real progress” in the talks to end the Israeli war on Gaza and to deliver aid to ease the humanitarian catastrophe.
Humanitarian organisations and UN organisations have been saying that they have truck-loads of aid stationed at the borders with Gaza waiting for Israeli approval to enter and start distribution.
The source informed on the preparations for the talks said that every detail of the elements of the ceasefire require consultations and agreement, “including the distribution of humanitarian aid,” because Israel is still insisting that this should be done essentially through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was established early this year by the US and Israel and has been slammed by UN and humanitarian organisations for causing the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian civilians shot by Israeli occupation forces while trying to access food.
Then comes the last and most difficult objective of the talks: the points that are not subject to agreement by either side. These include the full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, specifically back to the 6 October 2023 lines, Hamas’ surrender of its arms, the future administration and security plans for Gaza, the role of the Palestinian Authority, and the reconstruction of Gaza.
On Monday evening, the Egyptian diplomat who spoke to the Weekly said that these questions of the “so-called day after” are the most difficult to answer. However, he said that nobody is expecting everything to be resolved at one go or even at several rounds of a week or two of negotiations.
“We want to start somewhere. We want to give the Palestinians in Gaza a chance to breathe, and then we will take it from there,” he said.
He added that “nobody knows what Netanyahu has in mind or for how long Trump will pressure him to engage popular this attempt to end the war. Part of what we are trying to do, in cooperation with other concerned [countries], is to provide guarantees, as much as we can, to keep the process moving forward.”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 9 October, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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