In gaza, children, journalists and rescue workers who have seen their peers and colleagues killed in front of their eyes for the past two years have started to rejoice at the prospect that their living nightmare could finally be over. So, too, have the families of Israeli hostages who thought they might never see their loved ones again. We can only share in their relief. And still, the reasons to be wary of the ceasefire’s long-term prospects are endless.
We have been here before. I’m haunted by a video from back in January, in which 28-year-old Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif removes his press vest and helmet live on air before being hoisted aloft by a joyous crowd as he announces news of a ceasefire. That deal led to several successful exchanges of Israeli and Palestinian captives and brought two months of relative respite to Gaza – before Israel tore up the agreement by launching more than 100 airstrikes on the besieged territory in one night, killing more than 400 Palestinians. Five months later, Israel bombed a press tent outside a Gaza City hospital, killing Sharif and five other journalists.
A bad deal is better than no deal (and with Donald Trump and Tony Blair at the helm of Gaza’s future, this is certainly a bad deal), but what is especially concerning is the shift in official discourse that suggests we may not even get that far. According to Trump’s announcement on Wednesday night, what the parties have agreed to is, in fact, only “the first phase” – a term that does not appear anywhere in the text of the agreement itselfand is more reminiscent of the January deal which Israel moulded to facilitate a resumption of the war after a few dozen hostages were released.
This linguistic bait-and-switch was not arbitrary. As the journalist Amit Segal, considered one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s mouthpieces in the Israeli media, said on Thursday morning: “There’s no phase two. That’s clear to everyone, right? Phase two might happen someday, but it’s unrelated to what’s just been signed. The deal signed now is a hostage release deal. It doesn’t imply anything about the future.”
So should we take from this that Netanyahu is already planning to resume the war after the remaining hostages have been released, as he did last time? That is certainly one reading. But longtime observers of the Israeli prime minister will know that what has kept him at the top for so many years is his ability to spin multiple plates at once, juggling them as he works out which one will best serve his personal and political agenda at any given moment. And right now, his calculations appear to have shifted.
To understand Netanyahu, you need to understand what influences his decision-making. The first major factor is his ongoing trial in an Israeli court after his 2019 indictment for bribery, fraud and breach of trust – charges that carry significant prison time. Since then, Netanyahu has been more determined than ever to retain the position of prime minister in order to drag out the trial and fend off the charges. This is what led him to throw his political weight behind messianic fundamentalists ahead of the 2022 election in order to safeguard his return to the premiership, and it has been a key driver of his government’s crusade against the independence of Israel’s judicial system.
The second factor is the reason he got into politics in the first place: to thwart any meaningful progress toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. From driving a spear through the remnants of the Oslo peace process upon first taking power in the 1990s, to paying lip service to subsequent US peace initiatives while legislating piecemeal annexation of the occupied West Bank, Netanyahu has made it his life’s mission to ensure that no Palestinian state can ever come to exist between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Since 7 October, these motivations have fused to devastating effect. After the deadliest attack on Israelis in the country’s history, Netanyahu’s approval rating slumped to an all-time low. His desperation to cling to power led him to dive head-first into a genocidal war with no clear aims in the hope that it would keep his government together long enough for him to restore some semblance of his prior prestige. This meant sabotaging ceasefire negotiations at almost every turn, and cutting short the deal he signed last January when it suited him.
Having long pioneered a policy of “managing the conflict” in order to keep the Palestinians subdued, Netanyahu soon began spinning a different plate. Enticed by the prospect of removing 2 million Palestinians from the demographic equation once and for all, and emboldened by Trump’s own sudden fascination with a “Gaza Riviera”, the Israeli prime minister embraced the eliminationist agenda of the extreme right. He pursued various avenues in an effort to ethnically cleanse the territory of Palestinians, but ultimately ran up against a resolute Egyptian border and a lack of interest around the world in absorbing hundreds of thousands of starving refugees.
Netanyahu has decided to shift gears once again and sign the new ceasefire deal. His efforts to empty Gaza of Palestinians have failed. Israel is becoming a global pariah, with all the economic and cultural burdens that entails. His approval rating isn’t getting any higher – despite all of the military achievements he proudly proclaimed at last month’s UN general assembly – and there is an election on the horizon.
Now, it seems, he believes he has more to gain from declaring a comprehensive victory in Gaza to launch his re-election campaign than from continuing the war. If he loses the messianic wing of his coalition, whose leaders are threatening to quit the government in response to the ceasefire, so be it; he’ll reach across the aisle in the name of “national responsibility” and find old-new partners.
Photo ops with returning Israeli hostages and a triumphant Trump, who is set to visit Israel in the coming days, will do that campaign no harm. Nor would steps toward additional normalisation agreements which a ceasefire might make possible, perhaps with Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, or even Syria. As a result of his own calculations and a little more pressure from the White House than he is used to, Netanyahu is leaning into the deal, extolling its virtues and stroking Trump’s ego – most recently by tweeting an AI-generated image in which he is placing a giant “Nobel peace prize” medal around the president’s neck in front of an adoring crowd.
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Yet by splitting the implementation of the ceasefire into phases, the Israeli prime minister is once again giving himself the option of sabotaging it if he changes his mind. Certainly, he has no intention whatsoever of paving “a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood”, as the agreement stipulates. The rest of the international community, which has either stood by or given its backing for two years as Israel pulverised Gaza, simply cannot allow Netanyahu to subvert another deal, and should be intervening already to ensure that any deviation will be met with diplomatic might.
Nor can the international community take its foot off the gas as Israel inevitably shifts its focus to the West Bank, where tens of thousands of Palestinians have been forcibly displaced over the past two years. Recognition of Palestinian statehood means nothing as long as Israel is allowed to continue devouring Palestinian land with impunity. The annihilatory fervour that has taken hold among a large segment of Israeli society will not dissipate overnight, which is why the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has warned that the genocide could just as easily pivot to the West Bank.
And even if the ceasefire holds, there can be no going back to an illusory pre-7 October “business as usual”. Crimes against humanity demand accountability and justice, most of all for those who didn’t live to see them end. Gaza must be rebuilt, and Palestinians must be freed from Israel’s stranglehold.
