After more than two years, Israel and Hamas have finally reached a ceasefire deal to free all remaining Israeli hostages and allow aid to flow into Gaza again. I spoke with my colleague Zack Beauchamp about the deal, what it could mean for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and what comes next for Vox’s daily newsletter, Today, Explained. Our conversation is below, and you can sign up for the newsletter here for more conversations like this.
Israel and Hamas have a deal. What’s been agreed upon?
Both Israel and Hamas have agreed to a staged process, but only phase one is fully agreed upon. The top line here is that you have the release of Israeli hostages and the bodies of those hostages that have died or been killed, in exchange for a release of Palestinian prisoners and an end to the fighting. Israel will withdraw from large chunks of the Gaza Strip, but it will retain a presence on the ground, at least during phase one. The most important thing is that they will stop fighting. There will be no more attacks happening inside Gaza, and aid will be allowed to flow into Gaza.
A month ago, Israel was bombing Hamas negotiators. How are we, a month later, at a deal?
Right now, based on the limited information we have, the key factor seems to be political will, specifically political will from the Trump administration. They had not been making a priority out of Israel-Palestine peace, to put it mildly, after the first ceasefire they brokered foundered in March.
Israel imposed the aid cutoff on Gaza, and the Trump administration basically said, Go ahead. We’re not going to do anything about it. And that led to the worst humanitarian crisis of war, including the outbreak of what appeared to be famine in Gaza.
Recently, the Trump administration decided that it wants to get back involved in trying to make an end to the Gaza war. It’s not clear exactly what the timeline was going to be, but that timeline changed when Israel attacked Doha, Qatar. The Trump administration has very strong ties to the Gulf Arab states, so they accelerated their timeline and started to put immense pressure on all of the different parties in lots of different ways to try to force a ceasefire.
How much credit do Trump and his administration deserve for getting this done?
Honestly, a lot — at least, if the early evidence continues to be borne out. Trump had a unique relationship with many of the key people involved. Trump has very strong ties not only to Netanyahu and his political fortunes — Trump is very popular on the Israeli right, and so he had a lot of leverage politically over Netanyahu — but relationships with the Gulf monarchies, as well as the leaders of Egypt and Turkey.
One of these dictatorships, Qatar, was a really important international partner of Hamas. So Trump worked with Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey to push Hamas from their end to accept the deal, and Trump uses his leverage over Netanyahu to try to force the Israelis into a deal. So you end up getting a situation where the stars have aligned for there to be at least a temporary ceasefire.
One of the dynamics here is that none of the leadership on either side really wanted an end to the war on terms the other would accept. They had to be forced into it. There were multiple points where it looked like each side wanted the talks to fail to be able to credibly blame the other one. And in each case, negotiators on either side, especially the US, said, No, we’re just going to keep going forward.
One example is that when Hamas gave its answer to the deal, it was a partial yes. Netanyahu rushed to declare that Hamas had rejected the deal, and Trump said no, and then berated him in private. Trump wanted the fighting to stop in the immediate term, and so treating the Hamas answer as a yes turned it into, at least for now, a real yes, even though that’s not how Netanyahu saw it.
The Israeli hostages are going home. What impact do you think that’s going to have on Israel, politically, societally, on how they feel about the conflict with Gaza?
An overwhelming majority of Israelis wanted this deal. They wanted the hostages in exchange for a permanent ceasefire agreement. They didn’t think the war was producing anything for them. This wasn’t really out of concern for Gazan civilians. They were worried about hostages suffering and dying. They worried about soldiers being killed and the psychological damage of soldiers being called up all the time.
There was also very little belief that the war was accomplishing much in practical terms. You might hear from some Netanyahu-supporting Israelis that everybody thought they were beating Hamas, but if you look at the polling in Israel, the majority view was that this war was being continued for Netanyahu’s personal political ends. He was doing it to help prop up and maintain his coalition, and that there wasn’t really any strong military rationale for keeping the war going. So they wanted a deal.
With the hostages returned, it does seem like that’s going to happen. We can’t be certain that it will, but it seems like it would be very difficult, politically, for Netanyahu to restart the war. It would be an extremely unpopular position. Now, he does unpopular things all the time, so that doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen, you know, but it would also cross the United States, which is a much bigger problem for him. And I think if Netanyahu were to do it, it would guarantee a significant defeat in next year’s elections. The dynamics of Israeli public opinion here will play a constraining role in a return to war after this. But I think the more significant one is crossing the United States. That is something Netanyahu will not do lightly at this point.
Does that not put Netanyahu in a jam? He’s going to be pressured by the right flank of his coalition, Ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, on backing down on the war and the annexations. Is he going to be stuck between them and the US?
Netanyahu is in a lot of trouble. There are signs of his coalition fraying right now. I don’t know whether it will actually collapse and force early elections. That is an open question. But it certainly could if enough of the right-wing partners bolt and depends on how they perceive their electoral logic. There’s a lot of specific stuff that we can’t predict right now, but I do think it puts Netanyahu in a very difficult position.
The war, in and of itself, was the glue that cemented this coalition together: The far-right parties wanted Netanyahu to conquer Gaza permanently and rebuild settlements there. And now it seems like that’s not happening, at least if the deal continues, which is more of an if that will. As long as this deal is in place, that will not happen, and they’re going to be unhappy. The risks of a coalition rupture become larger. There’s also the still-unresolved issue about conscripting the ultra-Orthodox, which, when there’s not a war on, the ultra-Orthodox might be more likely to fold over and destabilize the government, because there’s been no ability to resolve that question, and they’re very angry about it.
There’s a lot of complicated stuff swirling there, but I think that Netanyahu is really between a rock and a hard place, and has been for a while. One should never count him out — he’s the longest-serving prime minister of Israel and has extraordinary political instincts, even though he is an authoritarian leader who was also on trial for corruption charges. So you can never count him out, but you wouldn’t want to be in his shoes, politically.
What are you keeping an eye on as we hopefully see this phase one agreement take effect?
The first thing to look for is whether the terms of phase one are implemented as planned. I predict that they will be. But you have to watch carefully: are the hostages returned, does Israel withdraw to the agreed-upon points, what about the Palestinian prisoners? Keep an eye on all the details, because there’s a lot of them.
The second question is very obvious, but it’s worth repeating: What happens with the negotiations on phase two? Because right now, they’re not agreed upon. And this is how the last ceasefire fell apart. Trump had set up a two-phase agreement. The first phase was a time-limited ceasefire, and then that led to an indefinite agreement, and then phase two was never agreed upon. The difference this time around is this is not a time-limited ceasefire, right? There’s nothing that says this deal expires after a certain point.
Phase two also involves some more permanent issues. I don’t know if phase one is going to hold, but phase two is really important, because it determines whether or not there will be durable change on the ground that could prevent this kind of thing from happening again. Because even if the ceasefire lasts for a year, two years, three years, four years — as long as Hamas is in charge of the Gaza Strip, this fighting is going to happen again.
There’s going to be something, either on the Israeli side or the Palestinian side, that provokes the other and leads to violence that escalates and that leads to full-scale war. This has been by far the most devastating war in this pattern, but the pattern has been going on since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip 20 years ago. This is not a new thing. It’s predictable. Israel even had a strategic term for it, “mowing the grass.” It was a horrible equilibrium that led to a disaster for the people inside Gaza and poor prospects for any kind of long-term peace agreement that could make everybody safer.
So are you going to do something about the hawkish Israeli posture that led to that fighting over and over again? Are you to do something about Hamas being in charge of Gaza? Are you going to link it to a broader political negotiating situation that can provide an actual peace agreement and create a Palestinian state? These are the big existential questions that will determine whether or not this is a ceasefire that’s ultimately temporary, even for a longer time horizon than previous ones, or whether it’s the beginnings of a durable base agreement. No pessimist has been wrong in betting on the Middle East recently, so I’m not sure that I would say we’re likely in for one of the better scenarios, but it’s possible. It’s more possible than it was a few days ago. That’s encouraging.
