CEASING FIRE

 

Even a temporary ceasefire displays the
moral power of peacemaking. Last
week, as a shaky truce to allow prisoner
and hostage swaps and aid deliveries quieted
the ruinous war between Israel and
Hamas, Israeli families welcomed back
more than a hundred children and older
adults whom Hamas and its allies had
kidnapped on October 7th. They included
Yaffa Adar, age eighty-five, who had been
seized at the Nir Oz kibbutz; photographs
of her being driven away by gunmen in a
golf cart went viral. Reunited with relatives
at a Tel Aviv hospital, she told them,
“I’m O.K. I’m here. . . . I survived it.” In
the West Bank, jubilant crowds waved
the flags of Fatah and Hamas as Palestinian
parents hugged their teen-age children
released from Israeli jails.

On both sides, the celebrations were
tempered by an awareness of those still
in captivity. Hamas freed children and
their mothers but not their fathers, and
elderly women but not their husbands.

The two hundred and forty prisoners
whom Israel released were, according to
the Jerusalem-based human-rights group
B’ Tselem, a fraction of the nearly five
thousand Palestinians held on security
grounds as of September—a figure that
rose sharply after October 7th. In Gaza,
where Israeli bombing has killed more
than fifteen thousand Palestinians—twothirds
of them, reportedly, women and
children—the respite last week offered
meagre solace after seven weeks of immeasurable
suffering. Thousands of Gazans
used the break to inspect homes
they had evacuated; many found only 

“We are trying to collect bits of
wood to build a tent to shelter us, but to
no avail,” Tahani al-Najjar, a fifty-eightyear-
old mother of five, told Reuters.

Ceasefires usually don’t end wars, because
they don’t address the issues that
underlie them. (A study of sixty-seven
civil wars published in the Journal of Peace
Studies in 2021 found no evidence that
ceasefires and prisoner releases led to
sustainable peace agreements.) Yet truces
can reveal much about the combatants.
In Israel, the families of hostages have
emerged as a political movement; tens
of thousands of people recently attended
a rally in Tel Aviv where speakers demanded
the liberation of every hostage.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—
deeply unpopular and increasingly sounding
like a caricature of himself—declared
nonetheless that his unity government
is committed to resuming combat “as
soon as this phase of returning our abductees
is exhausted.” He visited Gaza

during the ceasefire and cited three aims:
“eliminating Hamas, returning all of our
hostages, and insuring that Gaza does
not become a threat to the State of Israel
again.” He did not explain how the
second could be achieved in tandem with
the first. According to a recent poll, fewer
than four per cent of Jewish Israelis believe
that Netanyahu is a reliable source
of information about the war—an impression
that won’t be helped by the news
that, according to the Times, Israeli intelligence
officials became aware of the plans
for Hamas’s attack more than a year ago
but dismissed them.

Following an initial four-day accord
brokered by Qatari, American, and Egyptian
negotiators, Israel and Hamas agreed
last week to extensions. Then, on Friday,
combat in Gaza resumed and more Palestinians
were killed; in Doha, efforts to
reinstate a truce continued. Qatar and
Egypt are reportedly pressing for a longterm
ceasefire, which Israel has rejected.

The Biden Administration had explicitly
opposed an indefinite ceasefire, on
the basis that Hamas would use it to regroup,
but its position appears to be evolving.
Biden’s national-security spokespersons
have pointedly pressed Israel to
insure that any renewed attack on Hamas
is more precise, and more protective of
civilians. On Tuesday night, Biden’s campaign
posted a statement by the President
on X that sounded like a call to stop the
fighting altogether: “To continue down
the path of terror, violence, killing, and
war is to give Hamas what they seek. We
can’t do that.” An unnamed Administration
official told a reporter that the statement
did not herald a change in policy,
but such a curated posting cannot have

been inadvertent, and may signal where
Biden is heading.

Because of Israel’s deep alliance with
this country, its wars run on a timer: When
will the U.S. conclude that its interests,
and Israel’s, require that hostilities end?

After the atrocities of October 7th, the
Israel Defense Forces launched an unprecedented
retaliation and, because of
the predictable killing and immiseration
of innocents which followed, effectively
shortened the time that the Biden Administration
and European allies were
likely to offer unqualified support.
Meanwhile, Gaza’s humanitarian crisis
remains severe. Health centers that
remained operational were able to get
medical supplies during the ceasefire, but,
according to the U.N. Secretary-General,
António Guterres, “the level of aid to Palestinians
in Gaza remains completely inadequate.”

Israel may be able to better
spare civilians during renewed attacks in
the south of Gaza, but there is no way
for the I.D.F. to fight what amounts to
a war of attrition without killing many
more noncombatants. The ceasefire negotiations
and hostage releases revealed
that Hamas’s chain of command in Gaza
remains substantially intact. Before October
7th, in the occupied West Bank and
Gaza, the group appeared to be at least
viable politically, and it has probably increased
its standing since then. Many Palestinians
regard Hamas’s attack as a legitimate
response to Israeli oppression;
according to a poll by the Arab World for
Research and Development, three-quarters
of Palestinian respondents expressed
support for it. For many Israelis, such attitudes
reinforce a conviction that they
have no Palestinian partners with whom
to forge a lasting peace.

In any event, Israel cannot “destroy” or
“eliminate” Hamas anytime soon. With
international diplomatic support, however,
it might be able to disarm, suppress, and
further delegitimatize the group. Doing so

would require the committed help of
those powerful Arab states, such as Egypt
and Saudi Arabia, whose leaders fear and
despise the Islamist ideology that Hamas
espouses. Yet any engagement by those
countries in postwar reconstruction or negotiations
would almost certainly depend
on whether Palestinians have a clear path
to statehood. With good reason, Israelis
and Palestinians alike have lost faith
in the catchphrases of nineteen-nineties
diplomacy: the “two-state solution” and
“land for peace.” The Palestinian Authority,
the most important institution to
emerge from those negotiations, is moribund
and corrupt. And crafting a feasible
peace settlement will almost certainly require
a new era of Israeli leadership. Durable
Israeli security cannot be achieved
without Palestinian sovereignty. The alternative
to re-starting the difficult work
toward a sustainable deal is violence with
no end in sight.

—Steve Coll

THE NEW YORKER