Israel-Hamas: what do both sides need in order to agree a sustainable ceasefire?

The admission by Israel's army that it mistakenly shot and killed three of its own hostages has piled pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu to agree a lasting ceasefire in Gaza.

In recent days Israel has seen some of its most significant demonstrations since the outbreak of the war as calls grow at home for Prime Minister Netanyahu to secure the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas. 

At the same time, the 10-week bombardment of Gaza has sparked "increasing unease" among Israel's allies about its conduct of the war, the Financial Times said.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

With pressure mounting at home and abroad, Reuters has reported Israel and Hamas are "both open to a renewed ceasefire and hostage release, although disagreements remain on how it would be implemented".

What the papers said

The problem for Israel, said Anshel Pfeffer in The Times, is that it "has struggled to reconcile its key objectives, to destroy Hamas's military and governing capabilities in Gaza and to rescue more than 240 hostages captured by the terrorist group". As the accidental killing of the three hostages by Israeli troops at the weekend proved, "doing both is proving to be extremely difficult".

At the same time it is also losing friends abroad. Last week, US President Joe Biden, Israel's most vocal and important ally, warned its "indiscriminate" bombing risked losing it international support.

The former UK defence secretary Ben Wallace warned in a strongly worded article in The Telegraph: "We are entering a dangerous period now where Israel's original legal authority of self-defence is being undermined by its own actions. It is making the mistake of losing its moral authority alongside its legal one."

The Biden administration is exerting "maximum pressure to convince the Israeli government that the downsides of its prosecution of the war, particularly the shockingly high Palestinian civilian death toll, now outweigh the potential gains". That's the view of Ian Parmeter, from the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University, on The Conversation.

Both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have joined calls for a "sustainable ceasefire" in Gaza, said The Guardian, as "the political rhetoric continues to shift away from unqualified support for Israel's assault in line with moves from the US and others".

In a joint article in The Sunday Times, the foreign secretaries of the UK and Germany, David Cameron and Annalena Baerbock, set out a three-step process to "pave the way to a sustainable ceasefire, leading to a sustainable peace".

First, they said the Israeli government "should do more to discriminate sufficiently between terrorists and civilians". Second, more aid needed to be delivered to ordinary Palestinians. And third, Israel needed to clamp down on extremist settlers in the West Bank, after nearly 300 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied territory and many more forced from their homes in Israeli raids and settler violence since 7 October.

What next?

"Hopes for peace were raised" on Saturday when Reuters reported that Israel's spy chief had spoken with Qatar's prime minister, who was instrumental in negotiating an earlier week-long ceasefire and hostage release.

Sources told the news agency that Hamas is "insisting on setting the list of hostages to be released unilaterally, and demanding that Israeli forces withdraw behind pre-determined lines".

The group continues to make demands that Israel "would find hard to accept", said Parmeter, including "no further hostage releases until the war ends; and insistence that a deal would involve release of large numbers of Palestinian prisoners, including high-profile militants". There is concern Hamas will be further emboldened by polling that showed is support has risen substantially in Gaza since the war began.

For its part, Israel has insisted it will not withdraw until it has destroyed the Hamas leadership but Israeli defence officials have "privately admitted in recent days that the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] is already planning to change its strategy and in a few weeks adopt more mobile tactics, with fewer personnel on the ground in Gaza", Pfeffer reported in The Times. They hope that will "assuage Israel's allies and make it easier to negotiate a new hostage agreement with Hamas, or launch more effective rescue operations".

Goodwill and, crucially, time are running out for Israel to achieve its military objectives before the clamour for a ceasefire becomes too hard to ignore.