Deliverance
Israel and Hamas agree to the first phase of Donald Trump’s peace plan
But neither side is fully reconciled to what is supposed to come next
Photograph: EPAIT WAS a surreal end to a horrific war.
On October 8th, in the middle of a White House event about the supposed threat of left-wing radicals in America, Marco Rubio suddenly dashed over to his boss.
The secretary of state gave Donald Trump a handwritten note, the text of which was visible to eagle-eyed photographers in the room.
Negotiators in Egypt, it said, were “very close” to a ceasefire agreement to end the war in Gaza.
Mr Trump was urgently needed in order to approve a social-media post that would announce the deal.
Sleepless souls across the Middle East spent the next hour refreshing Truth Social, Mr Trump’s social-media site.
His missive finally came just before 2am in Israel and Gaza.
The deal was done, Mr Trump wrote: “Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first phase of our peace plan.”
They were scheduled to accept the ceasefire formally at noon in Egypt on October 9th.
The fighting is supposed to stop as soon as the ink is dry.
Mr Trump said the 20 living Israeli hostages in Gaza could return home on October 13th, after 737 days in captivity.
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) would pull back from cities in Gaza and allow a flood of humanitarian aid to enter.
For the 2m Gazans, who have endured two years of death, destruction and famine, the deal is a mercy.
It will bring catharsis to Israelis, most of whom had long since come to despair for the hostages and the endless fighting.
It is a diplomatic triumph for Mr Trump after months of failed negotiations.
And it is a relief to the wider world, where the plight of the Palestinians has stirred anguish.
When news of Mr Trump’s announcement arrived in “Hostages Square” in central Tel Aviv, where relatives of the Israelis held in Gaza have gathered for the past two years, there was muted cheering and gasps of disbelief, followed by tears.
“That’s it, our family will be whole again,” sobbed and laughed Einav Zangauker, a single mother of three, whose son, Matan, is one of the 20 hostages still believed to be alive in Gaza.
In Gaza the euphoria was tempered by exhaustion.
“We got used to war—it’s all we’ve known for two years—how to run from one place to another,” says Hisham Mater, a civil engineer and father of four in Khan Younis, a city in the southern part of the Strip.
A mother in Deir al-Balah, in the centre, hopes that she can at last show her three-year-old his first egg.
Step by step
Yet as Mr Trump acknowledged, it is only a first step.
The 20-point peace plan he unveiled on September 29th outlines a far-reaching vision for post-war governance, security and reconstruction in Gaza.
It is a mile wide and an inch deep: he left the details vague, and the negotiators in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh did not even try to clarify them.
Instead they deferred the fine print to future talks.
For now, there will be much to celebrate.
Gazans will be safe at last from bombs and hunger.
Israeli hostages will be reunited with their families.
A war that started with the massacre of nearly 1,200 people in southern Israel on October 7th 2023, and went on to kill 67,000 people in Gaza, will come to a long-overdue end.
But much still needs to be done to prevent it from restarting—and to put Gaza on the path to a better future.
The hostage release will be the centrepiece of the deal’s first phase.
Mr Trump’s plan gives Hamas 72 hours to release them after the agreement is signed.
The group told negotiators it may need more time to gather them (some are held by other militant groups).
Both Israeli and Palestinian sources, though, expect they will be freed within days.
It is less certain that Hamas will meet the deadline to turn over the bodies of 28 hostages who died in captivity.
The group admitted to mediators that it does not know where all of them are.
In parallel, Israel will release 1,950 Palestinians from its jails.
Most are prisoners detained since the massacre (some have been held without charge).
But 250 of them are serving life sentences for taking part in deadly attacks.
Their names are likely to be negotiated until the last minute.
Hamas, for example, wants Israel to release Marwan Barghouti, a politician and militant convicted of complicity in an attack that killed five people.
He is more popular with Palestinians than any other politician; polls suggest he would win a presidential election.
Israel is determined to veto his release.
Once the hostage release is complete, the IDF will conduct its first partial withdrawal from Gaza, although it would continue to occupy around half of the enclave (see map).
It will also open five border crossings for aid deliveries.
The quantity of supplies is meant to be at least equal to that during a previous ceasefire in January, a time when the UN and aid groups said Gaza had enough food and medicine.
This first phase is, in theory, the more straightforward part of Mr Trump’s plan.
The second stretches far into the future.
It involves the disarmament of Hamas; the creation of a transitional authority to govern Gaza; and the deployment of a multinational peacekeeping force to provide security.
Mr Trump would chair a “board of peace” to oversee all this.
The IDF would carry out further withdrawals, eventually pulling back to a narrow buffer on Gaza’s periphery.
At the end, if all goes well, Israel and the Palestinians would resume talks about Palestinian statehood—the “two-state solution”, in the jargon.
Negotiators decided to reach a deal on the first phase while leaving the details of the second fuzzy.
But the plan was not so easily cleaved in two.
Even during the narrow talks of the past few days, the pace and scale of Israel’s future withdrawals became an issue.
In public, some Hamas officials demanded that it pull out entirely once the last hostage was released—a big change to the Trump plan and a non-starter for Israel.
That turns out to have been a negotiating ploy.
In the end, Hamas settled for assurances from Mr Trump that he would hold Israel to the plan.
Yet its woolliness leaves lots of room for misunderstanding.
It talks, for instance, of the IDF pulling out “based on standards, milestones, and timeframes linked to demilitarisation”.
That language is vague enough to generate fear that future withdrawals might never happen.
It does not help that Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, says Israel will remain “deep inside the Strip” for the foreseeable future.
Photograph: Getty ImagesIt took enormous pressure from foreign powers to convince the warring parties to agree.
For once, an American president got tough with Mr Netanyahu.
The lobbying of Hamas was no less intense.
In July the entire Arab League called on the group to disarm.
Officials from numerous Arab countries told Hamas that it had no choice but to accept the Trump plan.
If it refused, the consequences would not just fall on civilians in Gaza: the political leaders of Hamas themselves also risked exile from Qatar, and it was unclear who else might take them in.
Even as Arab leaders tried to end the war, though, they were quietly nervous about their role in what comes next.
Reconstruction is one worry.
Rich Gulf states will be on the hook to help pay for the rebuilding of Gaza, which the World Bank estimated in February would cost $53bn.
They have endorsed an Egyptian plan to clear the rubble, build new homes and repair Gaza’s wrecked infrastructure.
But they are reluctant to invest in Gaza if their investment might be blown up in a future war, a real concern if Hamas or other militant groups keep their weapons.
Still wary
A peacekeeping force might help alleviate that fear, but assembling one is itself another difficulty.
Turkey this week said it would be willing to participate; there are rumours that Azerbaijan and Indonesia are also prepared to send troops.
But so far, no Arab countries have signed up. Much of the Middle East thinks Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
Arab leaders worry that, in the eyes of their subjects, they may look as if they are helping the IDF heap further violence and misery on Palestinians.
For Hamas, the fact that they were involved in any sort of negotiation at all was something of a relief.
Mr Trump’s original 20 points had sounded like an ultimatum, and not only because of its strict deadline on releasing the hostages.
It also decreed that Hamas would have to disarm and disavow any role in government.
If it did not accept, Israel would be free to “finish the job” of obliterating it.
The group tried to turn this order to capitulate into a blueprint for a comeback.
It hesitated for longer than the stipulated time before agreeing to the plan, and then did so with sweeping qualifications: it refused to disarm and insisted that it would play a role in Gaza’s future.
Mr Trump nonetheless praised Hamas’s half-hearted acceptance as proof that “they are ready for a lasting PEACE” and reposted a Hamas statement defending the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.
A whisper two years in the makingPhotograph: APBehind the scenes, Hamas’s leadership was having a hard time deciding what it was ready for.
Unlike its rival, the Palestinian Authority (PA), whose president has the final say on everything, Hamas operates by consensus.
The diverging interests of its many arms—its fighters, its exiled leaders, its West Bank contingent, those on the ground in Gaza and those in prison in Israel—are accentuated by the rivalries of its patrons in Iran, Qatar and Turkey.
Messages can take weeks to travel from tunnels in Gaza to office-blocks in Doha and Istanbul.
Wrangling follows.
Israel’s decapitation of Hamas’s senior ranks, both in Gaza and abroad, further complicated decision-making.
The head of its delegation in Sharm el-Sheikh, Khalil al-Hayya, narrowly escaped an Israeli missile strike in September that killed his son, an aide and three bodyguards.
The group’s 15-man politburo has no leader after the assassination of the two previous incumbents.
The membership of its Shura Council is a secret.
All elements of Hamas, however, were feeling the heat.
For the exiles, as well as the risk of assassination, there was the prospect of being left with no friends except Iran, which itself is isolated and cowed.
Inside Gaza, too, the pressure was building.
Intelligence sources think Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, can still muster perhaps 10,000 fighters.
Some 2,000 of its crack Nukhba force are said to be hiding in Gaza city.
But that means more than half of Hamas’s footsoldiers have been killed.
A recent change of Israeli tactics skewed the odds even further against the remainder: as well as warplanes and drones, the IDF made growing use of driverless vehicles.
Remote-controlled armoured cars packed with explosives careened around Gaza city.
Meanwhile, ordinary Gazans were bridling at the price they have paid for Hamas’s tahawur, or recklessness.
Powerful clan networks grew increasingly defiant.
“There’s huge pressure from Gaza,” says a Palestinian diplomat.
“People don’t care about Hamas.
They just want the war and displacement to stop.”
All this helps explain why Hamas accepted the idea of releasing the hostages.
Indeed, some of its leaders may have wondered if they had played into Mr Netanyahu’s hands by keeping them so long, given his seeming reluctance to end the war.
That is why the group was so keen to secure promises from Mr Trump: it does not want to repeat the experience of the previous ceasefire, when Mr Netanyahu refused to negotiate over its second phase and ultimately resumed the war.
Beyond the hostage release, however, consensus within Hamas quickly evaporates.
Some in its politburo are minded to accept a handover of power to a foreign governing body, as Mr Trump’s plan dictates.
Yet Hamas’s statement on the plan undertook “to entrust the administration of the Gaza Strip to an independent Palestinian administration” without mentioning Mr Trump and his “board of peace”.
Weapons introspection
Above all, Hamas is divided about surrendering its weapons.
Some want to postpone disarmament until Israel has fully withdrawn, or even until Palestine has a functioning state.
Others suggest handing over its rockets, but keeping its guns, which Hamas fighters might need to defend themselves against vengeful clans.
The Trump plan itself goes even further, calling not just for disarmament but for the destruction of military infrastructure such as the movement’s tunnel network.
Behind the disagreement about disarmament lies a broader rift over Hamas’s future.
Its formal name is the Islamic Resistance Movement.
Its armed wing holds two seats on its politburo.
This faction continues to see the horrors of October 7th as a victory, which proved Hamas’s mettle and drew the world’s attention back to the Palestinians’ plight, whatever the human cost on both sides.
But others wish to put politics above arms.
A former leader speaks of abandoning the armed struggle and creating a new political movement, Justice and Development (echoing the name of Morocco’s and Turkey’s ruling Islamist parties), to prepare for statehood and peace with Israel.
Israel’s leadership has been wrestling with similar dilemmas.
Despite the devastating force with which the IDF has pummelled Gaza for the past two years, Hamas has not been wiped out.
A recent Israeli operation in Gaza city involved pumping thousands of gallons of cement into a narrow shaft beside a hospital compound, to seal the entrance to an underground factory in which the army says Hamas was building rockets.
As he watched his troops secure the area, a senior officer admitted, “There are other strategic assets like this we need to take out.
Hamas are proving they can still operate.”
Another senior soldier complained, “I have to keep planning on parallel timelines.
We have our mission here but at the same time at any moment they may tell me there’s a ceasefire and we’re pulling back.”
Most of the upper ranks of the IDF are in favour of Mr Trump’s plan.
In part, they simply reflect Israeli public opinion, which is overwhelmingly enthusiastic: a recent poll found that 72% of Israelis approve of it, with only 8% opposed.
The top brass also want to give their forces some breathing space—especially the tens of thousands of reservists who have spent hundreds of days in uniform, away from their families and their civilian jobs.
“We can’t wait to give the order to fall back and leave Gaza,” the first officer said.
But that view is not universal.
A subordinate passing by the command-post in the blitzed neighbourhood wears a patch on his helmet which says “Gush Katif”—the name of an area of Israeli settlements in Gaza that the Israeli government forcibly evacuated in 2005 as part of its complete withdrawal from the enclave.
Others also wear such patches, an expression of their hope to see the settlements rebuilt and a permanent occupation resume.
That hope is shared by a faction within Mr Netanyahu’s government, which does not see any peace deal with Hamas as reliable or desirable and instead wants to occupy Gaza.
They champion an earlier plan of Mr Trump’s, first aired in February, in which he seemed to envisage the expulsion of the local population to make way for a ritzy seaside development that he called “the Riviera of the Middle East”.
The president’s new plan still emphasises economic development.
He wants Gaza to be a “special economic zone” with “preferred tariff and access rates”.
But he now specifies that “no one will be forced to leave”.
Quite the opposite, in fact: he calls for “jobs, opportunity and hope” for Gazans and “will encourage people to stay”.
In the long run, he wants Israel to agree to “a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood”.
It is not just the hard right that rejects this idea.
Despite Israelis’ enthusiasm for Mr Trump’s plan, a recent poll by Gallup found that 63% of them would not support a two-state solution and that only 21% thought a lasting peace would ever come about.
They are aware that most Gazans are descendants of refugees who fled the war which led to Israel’s creation in 1948.
They have now been displaced again, within the tiny territory in which they have been trapped for generations.
Long before the attacks of October 7th, Israelis had feared that Gazans would strike back.
In a speech in 1956, the chief of staff of the IDF at the time, Moshe Dayan, claimed that, on the other side of Israel’s fortifications, “crowd hundreds of thousands of eyes and hands praying for our moment of weakness, so that they can tear us apart”.
Such views of Gaza remain commonplace, and Israelis assume the misery they have inflicted over the past two years has only made things worse.
What is more, few imagine that barring Hamas from Gazan politics, as the Trump plan requires, will do much good.
Hamas was founded in 1987, but its origins lie in charities and social movements operating in Gaza’s teeming refugee camps.
Even if Hamas does disarm and disband, the conditions that underpinned its rise have only intensified over the past two years.
“Hamas’s social networks will remain deep in the strip’s fabric,” says an Israeli intelligence analyst.
“It’s pointless to think they can be removed.”
Anyway, few Israelis have much faith in the obvious alternative, the PA: only 12% supported its return to Gaza in a survey carried out in July.
Israelis have learned to be sceptical of plans that appear to resolve Gaza’s status once and for all.
The first stage of the Oslo accords, in 1994, saw the PA take over the administration of the territory.
But Hamas overthrew the PA there in a bloody coup in 2007.
Neither repeated military incursions, nor the high-tech system of surveillance and fences the IDF constructed, succeeded in insulating Israel from Gaza.
Mr Netanyahu appears to be pandering to the Israeli public’s ambivalence when he says that he accepts the Trump plan and then says things that are manifestly counter to it, including that he will resist a two-state solution and that “the IDF will continue to hold all of the controlling areas deep inside the Strip”.
He also pointedly ignored Mr Trump’s request to stop bombing Gaza while talks were under way.
On his way home Photograph: Ziv Koren/Polaris/EyevineGaza will almost certainly be the main issue in Israel’s next election, which must be held by next October.
The opposition parties will hold Mr Netanyahu responsible not only for failing to prevent the October 7th attack, but for prolonging the war when an agreement similar to the Trump plan could have been reached much earlier.
His current hard-right coalition partners will accuse him of ending the war prematurely, before Hamas was destroyed and full control over Gaza established.
But none of the sides in Israeli politics has a coherent plan for Gaza’s future or Israel’s relationship with it.
Few politicians support a two-state solution or see any future in collaborating with the PA, even though the Trump plan calls for both.
In other words, even if Mr Netanyahu and his hard-right allies lose power, there is little prospect of a government eager to implement the Trump plan in full.
The strategy of deferring negotiations over the longer-term elements of the Trump plan and focusing instead on the most immediate problems was understandable.
The prospect of bringing home all of the hostages at once proved a powerful inducement for Israel.
Pressure from Mr Trump should ensure Israel does not renege on the ceasefire.
Half-settled
Yet signing a half-done deal carries risks.
One is that Mr Trump fails to apply the needed pressure, as he did earlier this year.
His attention might wander or Mr Netanyahu might convince him to relent.
The other is that the phase-two talks flounder.
They are full of issues that are not only thorny but intertwined.
Israel wants Hamas to disarm before its next withdrawal, but many in Hamas see the armed struggle as the only way to achieve Palestinian statehood.
Yet Palestinian statehood is unpalatable to Mr Netanyahu and his likeliest successors, especially if Hamas plays any part in its genesis.
Negotiators focused their efforts on the first few days after a two-year war—but the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has lasted for the better part of a century in part because it is so difficult to disentangle its many strands.
The ceasefire will bring great relief and optimism, but the dire conditions in Gaza will be hard to rectify. Reconstruction will be slow.
Armed gangs will proliferate.
The thriving economy that is supposed to underpin a broader peace will take deal years to build, if it ever materialises.
The challenge for Mr Trump will be to make sure that his plan does not simply end one round of fighting while sowing the seeds for the next.
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