Israel has said it is still committed to the ceasefire agreement with Hamas despite conducting a series of air strikes in Gaza overnight that reportedly killed more than 100 people.
Both sides have accused each other of violating the US-brokered deal, with Israel claiming yesterday’s strikes were in response to the killing of an Israeli soldier last week and for Hamas’ failure to hand over the remains of all dead hostages.
As the fragile ceasefire begins to fray less than a month after it was signed, Donald Trump has been quick to jump in and defend his signature diplomatic achievement, saying “nothing is going to jeopardise” the peace plan.
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Having been “tested and challenged” in recent days, the “fragile ceasefire remains in place”, for now at least, said Sky News’ Middle East correspondent Adam Parsons.
There are likely to be “three factors at play here”. Firstly, Israel “felt it had to respond to a series of provocations”. At the same time, while Hamas have condemned Israeli air strikes, “they are distancing themselves from the attack on the Israeli soldiers” and trying to calm anger around a failure to return the bodies of hostages. To the surprise of many, the Islamist group has been keen to “make amends, to soothe doubts and to try to stay on a path that, long term” allows it to “still have a part to play in Gaza’s future”.
But it is the third factor – the reaction of the US – that is “perhaps the most decisive”. Trump, his Vice President J. D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have all spoken out against a return to hostilities in the last week, with the latter reiterating the message that “there is no plan B”.
But it is starting to feel that the ceasefire, hailed by Washington as a turning point for the region, is “more like a loophole than a real promise”, said Middle East Monitor. It was “never about peace in the first place” but “literally a hostage swap disguised as diplomacy”. In practice, it has “functioned as a calculated break, a short interval that allowed Israel to regroup, re-arm and resume its mass killing campaign with the full backing of the US”.
The Israeli government has “gone to lengths to undermine the peace process”, said Jonah Valdez in The Intercept. Aside from the attacks on Palestinians it continues to limit the amount of humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. It has overseen an increase in settler violence in the West Bank, and last week the Knesset even passed a symbolic vote on full annexation despite protestation from the US.
“They are trying to push the Palestinians to react,” said Ramy Abdu, chair of Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, a watchdog that has tracked Israel’s targeting of civilians in Gaza. “This is their strategy, they want Palestinians to do anything to react just to complete their mission.”
What next?
While recent incidents on both sides “reflect the current troubled state of the ceasefire”, said Jonathan Spyer, director of research at the Middle East Forum, in The Spectator, they “probably do not presage its imminent collapse”.
This is “because neither side has an interest at the present time in a full return to hostilities”. Hamas’ main aim was to prevent Israeli troops from occupying Gaza City, a move that “threatened the organisation’s continued existence as a governing structure”. It needs to maintain the support of key allies Turkey and Qatar, who pressured the group into accepting the terms of the ceasefire and who “in turn want to stay on the right side of the US administration”.
Israel, meanwhile, wants a “period of rest and recuperation for its exhausted soldiers and similarly has an interest in staying on the right side of the Trump administration”.
A “durable peace is still possible”, said The New York Times, but “speed is of the essence”. The “linchpin” will be “the creation and deployment of an international force” which would “create conditions to realise other aspects of the plan: filling the growing security vacuum in Gaza, allowing for Palestinian self-governance and ensuring that Israel will not be threatened”.
So far only Indonesia has pledged troops, with the paper reporting that Washington is struggling to recruit other countries.
In the end, it might be the “brutally simple” arithmetic in Gaza that scuppers peace in the long term, said The Critic. “A ceasefire there may be” but Hamas will never “abide by any agreement to commit suicide politically as the price of a transitional political arrangement in Gaza”. For its part, “Israel, or those in its ascendancy, is not any time soon going to run the experiment of accepting a Palestinian state”.
