Just days before the presidency of the United States was going to pass from Joe Biden to Donald Trump, the world woke up to the news that Netanyahu had accepted a ceasefire in Gaza, something that he had opposed for months. The proposal that he accepted did not differ much, if at all, from the proposals he had rejected going back to May of 2024.
His acceptance of the ceasefire unleashed a lot of speculation on whether his acceptance had something to do with the negotiator that Trump had sent to Qatar. He was not a man with diplomatic experience.
His specialty was in real estate. In his inaugural speech, President Trump took full credit for the ceasefire, which left his predecessor, who was seated just a few feet away, visibly shocked. We may never know why Netanyahu accepted the ceasefire. Maybe he and Trump had ironed it out when the two of them met in Mara Lago, Trump’s estate in Florida, in July 2024.
But what we do know is that the ceasefire involves three phases. Currently, Phase I is underway. It is expected to last six weeks and involve the exchange of hostages. According to Egypt, 33 Israeli hostages will be exchanged for 1,890 Palestinian hostages. The details of Phases II and III still need to be negotiated to bring the war in Gaza to a permanent end. At this point it is entirely unclear whether that will ever come to pass.
Netanyahu has said in no uncertain terms that Israel “reserves the right to resume war,” if Hamas refuses to accept the terms of Phases I and II. In his words, Phase I is but a “temporary ceasefire.”
Since it began its onslaught in October 2023, Israel has reduced Gaza to ruin, just as the Romans laid waste to Carthage. It is plagued with shortages of food, water, energy and medicines. Only infectious diseases exist there in abundance. Schools, universities, apartments, shops, offices and just about every other building, including hospitals and clinics, have been pummelled to the ground.
At least 50,000 Palestinians are known to have died, most of whom are children and women. Hundreds of thousands have been injured. There is hardly any one of the 2 million who live in Gaza, or the millions of Arabs and Muslims who live around the globe, who are not grieved. While there is hope that reconstruction of Gaza will commence because of the ceasefire, analysts agree that it will only begin once all three phases have been executed. It is unclear who will fund the reconstruction and who will carry it out.
Israel’s prime minister is not even contemplating, let alone talking about the creation of a Palestinian State. That would be Phase IV of the plan - without which the region will continue to be tormented by war
Netanyahu is under extreme pressure from the far-right parties in Israel to resume hostilities, since it is clear that he has not been able to achieve his goal of exterminating Hamas. In a related development, President Trump said that most of Hamas has been killed. The optimists among the analysts will say that he openly signalled to Netanyahu to end the war while the pessimists will say he was helping Netanyahu redeem his place in history by claiming victory.
But Netanyahu knows better than anyone else that once the war ends, so will his political tenure. The head of the Israeli Defence Force has resigned recently and taken responsibility for the failure of the military to prevent the attack from taking place. Attention will shift to Netanyahu’s political failure to anticipate the attack. An article in The Times of Israel carried the bold headlines, that we have just witnessed the first war that Israel has ever lost.
Of course, even if the war in Gaza comes to a complete end, which seems highly unlikely, the situation in the West Bank will continue to deteriorate. Blatantly, in the public eye, Israel has launched two military operations in the West Bank. One operation was based on an allegation that Palestinians were hurling firebombs at Israeli vehicles. Several were arrested and marched through the streets. Another operation was launched in the town of Jenin, which has been the scene of numerous confrontations between the Palestinians and the Israeli military.
At the same time, Israeli settlers, who number over 450,000 in the West Bank, are on the rampage. To add fuel to the fire, the US has lifted sanctions against the instigators that were half-heartedly imposed by President Biden. The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, believes the areas of the West Bank which are home to 3 million Palestinians, and which have been occupied by Israel since the Six Day War of 1967 are the Judea and Samaria of the Bible and, thus, a divine right of the state of Israel. The designated US ambassador to the UN, Elise Stefanik, has concurred.
It is worth noting that an additional 220,000 Israeli settlers reside in East Jerusalem and an additional 25,000 in the Golan Heights, to which Netanyahu has claimed an eternal divine right, forgetting once again that it was seized by force.
In 1999, Professor Edward Said wrote that a two-state solution was a non-starter. He argued for a one-state solution, saying that was the only way to achieve genuine peace. Israel would turn into a genuine democracy and confer equal rights on all its citizens regardless of their ethnicity or religion.
That concept was also endorsed by a US president, the late Jimmy Carter, who was instrumental in restoring peace between Egypt and Israel in what became known as the Camp David Accords in 1978. In 2006, Carter advanced that idea in a landmark book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.
But Israel’s prime minister is not even contemplating, let alone talking about the creation of a Palestinian State. That would be Phase IV, without which the region will continue to be tormented by war. Since he came to power in 1996, he has consistently opposed the creation of a Palestinian state.
Against that backdrop, it is difficult not to conclude that the ceasefire, contrary to the expectations of many analysts, is nothing but a mirage in the desert.