The Gaza “Ceasefire” Is at a Crucial Crossroads
Netanyahu wants to blow up the deal, Trump’s team is doing doublespeak diplomacy and Hamas says it doesn’t need to run Gaza but won’t disappear
The first phase of the deal between Israel and Hamas for a ceasefire and exchange of captives is set to expire on Saturday, March 1, after what is supposed to be the final exchange on Thursday of the bodies of four Israeli captives for the freedom of several hundred Palestinians held by Israel. But, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu engaged in an active campaign to sabotage the internationally brokered deal that officially went into effect on January 19, the future of the deal is anything but certain.
Negotiations over the implementation of the second phase of the deal—which stipulates the Israelis must withdraw from the Philadelphi corridor along Gaza’s border with Egypt at the end of Phase 1—were scheduled to begin no later than February 3, but Netanyahu refused to authorize Israeli negotiators to begin talks. Instead, Netanyahu traveled to Washington, D.C. where he was the first foreign leader to meet with newly re-elected President Donald Trump. At their joint press conference, Trump made his surprise announcement that he intended to seize Gaza as a U.S. territory and build it up as a “Middle East Riviera.” Since that visit, Netanyahu has escalated his threats to resume a full-scale war in Gaza while grudgingly continuing to participate in weekly exchanges of Israeli captives for Palestinians snatched or imprisoned by Israel.
That all changed on Saturday. After Hamas and other Palestinian resistance factions released six Israeli captives—one of whom, Omer Shem-Tov, kissed two Qassam Brigades fighters on stage during the handover ceremony—Netanyahu subjected hundreds of Palestinian families awaiting the freedom of their loved ones to an agonizing game. After the Israeli captives were back in Israel, Netanyahu announced he was delaying the release of 620 Palestinians scheduled to be freed. Palestinians cleared for release had already boarded buses at a prison in the occupied West Bank.
Then, on Sunday, Israel announced that no more Palestinians would be released until Hamas agreed to end “ceremonies that demean our hostages’ dignity and the cynical use of our hostages for propaganda purposes.” Israel was also furious over a video released by Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, revealing that it had taken two other Israeli captives to the handover ceremony in Nuseirat on Saturday and filmed them from inside a van as they watched their countrymen released. On tape, the Israeli captives appealed to Netanyahu to comply with the terms of the ceasefire deal to ensure their release from Gaza.
Of the 620 slated to be freed this past Saturday, more than 400 are Palestinians from Gaza taken prisoner by Israel, including 23 children and one woman, along with 110 Palestinians serving life sentences or lengthy prison terms.
“By postponing the release of our Palestinian prisoners according to the Phase 1 ceasefire agreement, the enemy government is acting [rashly] and exposing the entire agreement to grave danger,” said Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, in a statement. “They talk about the way in which the Israeli prisoners are handed over, which expresses our respect for them in a manner consistent with our values, but in return all our prisoners are subjected to severe torture and isolation before their release, their families were threatened if they even expressed any kind of joy for the release of their sons and daughters from prison.”
Hamas said on Sunday it would not resume indirect negotiations on the broader ceasefire deal with Israel until the Palestinian captives are freed, though it also said it is open to proposals from international mediators to resolve the impasse. If Israel does not release the Palestinians they were supposed to on Saturday, Hamas said, “All options are on the table,” including delaying Thursday’s scheduled return of the bodies of four Israelis taken to Gaza on October 7.
Netanyahu has also used the events that unfolded last week surrounding the return of the bodies of Israeli captive Shiri Bibas and her two small children to justify a potential end to the deal. Ariel and Kfir were 4 years and 9 months old when fighters from the Mujahideen Brigades—another Palestinian armed group—took them back to Gaza on October 7. It has been clear for over a year that Netanyahu and his supporters have been using the family as an emotional weapon to stoke Israeli anger. Since November 2023, Hamas has maintained that the three were killed in an Israeli airstrike, but Israeli officials and media consistently implied they could be alive.
After the bodies were returned, Israel claimed a combination of forensics and Israeli “intelligence” had determined the children were “murdered” in captivity. Netanyahu claimed, without evidence, that their captors had “strangled the tender children with their own hands.” No public evidence has been produced to support this allegation.
Then, compounding an already intense situation, it emerged after forensic examination that the casket purportedly housing the body of Shiri Bibas did not actually contain her remains. Netanyahu accused Hamas of an evil and cynical act of psychological terror and implied the group had deliberately given Israel the body of a “Gazan woman.” Hamas responded by saying it would investigate and soon announced that the return of the wrong body was a mistake due to the fact that Shiri Bibas’s remains had been kept with those of Palestinians killed in the same strike. Within 48 hours, her remains were located and handed over to the Red Cross.
“Some unfortunate mistakes may occur, especially since the Zionist bombing resulted in corpses of Israeli prisoners mixing with corpses of Palestinians, thousands of whom are still under the rubble,” said Naim. “We would like to remind the world that we received thousands of bodies from the Zionist enemy in blue bags without any identification on them and without any respect for their humanity, and we did not hear any condemnation of these crimes from international officials and the official western media did not care about Palestinian human rights.”
The White House was quick to endorse Israel’s refusal to free the Palestinian captives on Saturday. “Given Hamas’s barbaric treatment of the hostages, including the hideous parade of the Bibas children’s coffins through the streets of Gaza, Israel’s decision to delay the release of prisoners is an appropriate response,” said National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes. He added that Trump “is prepared to support Israel in whatever course of action it chooses regarding Hamas.” Netanyahu has also claimed he is in possession of a so-called side letter from Trump (and one from former President Joe Biden) assuring Israel it can resume full-scale war against Gaza if it determines the ceasefire is untenable.
Trump’s point person on the Gaza negotiations offered a more nuanced picture of the current situation. “We will get to Phase 2. I’m very focused on that and I think it’s going to happen,” said billionaire businessman and Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff on Sunday, adding that he was confident the negotiations and ceasefire would continue.
Since it was signed, Netanyahu has repeatedly told his cabinet that he viewed the three-phase deal as only one phase, aimed at freeing as many Israeli captives as possible while stymieing any efforts to force a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza or a reconstruction plan that includes Palestinians remaining in Gaza. On Sunday, Witkoff acknowledged, “We have to get an extension of Phase 1.”
According to the deal Israel signed with Hamas, Israeli forces are supposed to begin their full withdrawal from the Philadelphi corridor along Gaza’s border with Egypt at the end of phase one. For months, Netanyahu has stated that Israel has no intention of doing so, despite the agreement. Analysts in Israel believe Netanyahu will reject a full implementation of the terms of Phase 2 and keep the situation in limbo through a series of mini-deals aimed at freeing more Israeli captives and bodies. Thirty-three Israeli and international captives in total were supposed to be released in phase one of the deal. There are currently believed to be 61 Israelis held in Gaza and Phase 2 provides for the return of all of them in exchange for a permanent ceasefire, Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the freeing of thousands of Palestinians.
Under the deal signed by Israel, some 60,000 mobile homes and 200,000 tents were supposed to enter Gaza along with heavy equipment to clear rubble. Israel has almost entirely blocked these shipments since January 19 in a clear sign that Netanyahu does not want to allow Palestinians the capacity to make any significant improvement in their living conditions.
Early last week, Hamas’s Gaza head, Khalil Al-Hayya, said the group is prepared to negotiate a comprehensive deal for Phase 2 that would include the return of all Israeli captives held in Gaza “as one package,” rather than the staggered weekly releases that have marked Phase 1 of the deal. In return, Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups would require Israel to completely withdraw all of its forces from the Gaza Strip and for international mediators, including the U.S., to certify a permanent truce.
Netanyahu wants no such deal with Hamas and claims that Trump "sees eye to eye with us on everything related to Gaza.” Trump’s barrage of contradictory messages, however, make it difficult to assess his preferred outcome. On its surface, Trump’s bombastic threat to snatch Gaza, displace its population, and build hotels and office buildings under U.S. ownership appears a naked threat of violent imperial conquest—possibly aimed at pressuring Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab nations to come up with their own plans.
Palestinian analyst Abdaljawad Omar, a professor at Birzeit University, believes this may also have been a message to Israel. “The idea of Americans taking over Gaza was kind of a rebuke of Netanyahu on the podium. It was meant to say that there's tension between these two figures,” Omar recently told me. “Trump didn't want to give Netanyahu too much credence. So this is why he said America will take it over, not Israel.” However, Omar said, Netanyahu was ultimately pleased with Trump’s threat of a Gaza takeover because it promotes the agenda that “the Palestinian issue can be only solved by the total eradication of the physical presence of Palestinians on the land of Palestine”—something that, if history offers insight, Palestinians in Gaza are not going to be complying with.
When asked Sunday during an interview with CBS whether Trump supports the right of Palestinians to return to Gaza after reconstruction, Witkoff said, “I’m not sure anyone has a problem with people returning. We’ve had these discussions around that. I just think the fundamental issue today is how we get phase two done and then develop a reconstruction plan for Gaza.” But he claimed that previous estimates of how long it would take to rebuild Gaza fall far short of current assessments. “Nobody can really live there in a safe environment for probably at least 15 years,” Witkoff claimed. “There’s a lot of work that has to be done there—there’s tons of demolition, there’s artillery shells all over the place that could explode at any moment. This is a much longer project and people don’t belong living there right now.”
Egypt has been working on a counterproposal of its own for the reconstruction of Gaza, one which it says would not require the wholesale or forcible displacement of Palestinians. The plan, which is scheduled to be discussed at an Arab League summit on March 4, involves a three-to-five year plan that envisions establishing safe zones to temporarily relocate residents within Gaza in mobile homes and shelters as rubble is removed and construction begins, according to Egypt’s state-run newspaper Al-Ahram. The paper said the plan was designed to “refute American President Trump’s logic” and “any other visions or plans that aim to change the geographic and demographic structure of Gaza Strip.”
“The [amount of] rubble in Gaza isn’t as large as the US and Israel would suggest, and contractors have confirmed that much of it can be recycled in the reconstruction process,” former Egyptian deputy foreign minister Rakha Hassan said recently. “Hospitals can be restored quickly, within months, because many of their exteriors are left standing… Gazan labour is going to be essential for the rebuilding plan. Gaza’s population needs to stay there to do the rebuilding themselves.”
In the coming weeks, intense focus is going to be placed on what role Hamas will play in the reconstruction and governance of the Gaza Strip. In all of his speeches, Netanyahu reiterates that he will continue the war until Hamas is either eliminated or its leadership forced into exile and its military wing disarmed. When pressed on Sunday on whether this meant Hamas cannot be in government or must disband entirely, Witkoff told CNN, “I would say at this point for sure they can’t be part of any governance in Gaza. As to existing, I’d leave that detail to [Netanyahu].” He later told CBS, that phase two of the agreement signed between Israel and Hamas calls for a “permanent ceasefire, a cessation of all violence, and, in addition to that the fact that Hamas cannot be allowed to come back into the government. And I think the way you square that circle is that Hamas has to go. They’ve gotta leave—and the negotiation will be around that—I would say physically.”
Hamas has also publicly stated that it will voluntarily relinquish its governance of Gaza. “We have said many times, even before October 7, that we are willing immediately to leave the governing position in the Gaza Strip and to allow any Palestinian unity government or a technocratic government or any alternative which is decided by Palestinians within the Palestinian consensus,” Naim, the Hamas official, said. At the same time, Hamas has made clear it will not disappear as a political movement or a resistance group and it maintains it will not disarm unless the occupation is ended and a Palestinian state formed.
“We will continue our struggle with all other factions and all our people to achieve these goals through all means, including political and diplomatic means and armed resistance,” Naim said. “But to run the daily lives of Palestinians, like health, education and social affairs, we are ready to leave it to a consensus-based solution.” Palestinian analysts have pointed out that Hamas has served as the governing authority in Gaza for two decades and eliminating it from any role in governance could prove disastrous in a variety of sectors, including security and basic administration.
The Egyptian plan reportedly contemplates an arrangement wherein the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah would authorize the creation of an independent 15-person committee of Palestinians to temporarily administer Gaza and oversee the reconstruction. However, according to some reports, in this vision neither the PA nor Hamas would play a formal role in the governing of the Strip. The PA, which is deeply unpopular and viewed widely as an agent of Israeli occupation, has maintained it will not accept any plan for Gaza in which it is not involved. Israel has said it will not accept a plan involving either Hamas or the PA.
Witkoff said he planned to travel to Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE later this week, which will likely lift the veil on the current thinking in the White House on Arab-sponsored alternatives to Trump’s Gaza Riviera ethnic cleansing proposal. He will begin his trip to the region in Israel where, he said, he aims to secure a continuation of the Gaza deal. But, as Witkoff is fond of saying, the devil is in the details.
That Hamas might be the most honest players of all those involved speaks volumes as to what shit show this is. All at innocent peoples expense.
You can see why Hamas insisted on a drip feed process. Now that the Israeli hostages have been released, Netanyahu is going to breach the agreement, citing a frivolous excuse