From the moment that Gaza’s ceasefire deal was signed between Israel and Hamas in Doha earlier this month, anxious speculation about its longevity quickly followed. Would the 42-day Phase 1 be the end, or would the deal continue?
Netanyahu, his coalition partners, and senior officials of the Trump and Biden administrations have all made clear that Israel has the green light to resume the war without consequences.
Yet, multiple forces – domestic and international – are exerting pressure to maintain the truce. This tension has led several experts to suggest that the odds of Israel fully upholding the deal are 50-50. Here are the indicators and likelihood of each scenario.
Scenario 1: The ceasefire collapses
As soon as the three-stage ceasefire deal was announced, veteran Israel journalist Zvi Barel warned it was merely a ruse and that Netanyahu’s government has “malicious intent” to never reach Phase 2, because they prioritise “entrenching themselves in Gaza”.
Similarly, Walla’s political correspondent, Tal Shalev, said: “Netanyahu is already looking for a way to evade the agreement, even after closing it”.
Netanyahu’s far-right government needed this temporary pause to appease Trump, reduce public pressure, and give overstretched Israeli army reservists a moment of respite. More importantly, they exploited the calm to force the resignation of top Israeli military generals who had defied Netanyahu during the war.
Such resignations would have not been possible during the war, but as soon as a moment of quiet was realised, the ruling coalition ousted the Israeli army’s chief of staff and the head of the Southern Command. This way Netanyahu and his extremist ministers can reshape the security establishment and appoint cronies who would endorse their ‘forever war’.
Making this scenario crystal clear is Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who said: “I demanded and received a commitment from Prime Minister Netanyahu that Israel will return to the battle to destroy Hamas”.
Smotrich last week held a secret meeting with strategic advisors and pro-Netanyahu families of 7 October victims “to work strategically on how to pressure the [Israeli] public so that it would be possible to return to fighting immediately after the first phase,” according to an official present at the meeting.
He added that the extremist minister asked them to prepare the Israeli and international public psychologically for the collapse of the deal.
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Netanyahu’s loopholes and landmines
Netanyahu himself speaks in a thinly veiled language that does not explicitly promise to collapse the deal after Phase 1 but implicitly makes that a clear inevitability.
Instead of directly saying he is planning to resume the war, the Israeli prime minister has made the resumption of the war conditional on the failure to reach Phase 2, or the deal being violated; language which indicates he’s setting the stage for blaming Hamas when he deliberately collapses the deal in order to garner international legitimacy.
As a result, Netanyahu filled Phase 1 with loopholes, landmines, and provocations designed to allow him to torpedo the agreement, some Israeli experts warn.
For instance, the Israeli premier said on the eve of signing the deal that his terms of negotiations for Phase 2 would be Hamas agreeing to Israel “achieving the war objectives”. Those objectives include dismantling Hamas’ military wing, demilitarising Gaza, and removing Hamas from government (while simultaneously preventing the Palestinian Authority from filling the vacuum).
Hamas has long rejected disarmament as a prerequisite to a political process rather than the outcome of a solution to the overall conflict, so Netanyahu asking them now to do so unrequitedly, without even a political horizon to ending the occupation, is a sure-fire way of collapsing the negotiations before they even begin.
That’s why Israel’s Cooperation Minister Dudi Amsalem said, “Stage two will not happen – Hamas will not lay down its weapons and Israel will return to war in a forceful manner”.
Netanyahu also deemed the agreement as “not legally binding”, according to Israel’s Channel 12, and will therefore not withdraw Israeli forces from the Philadelphi Corridor by day 50 as stipulated. He even instructed his minister to call the ceasefire agreement an “outline” instead of a “deal” or “agreement” to indicate its nonbinding nature.
Furthermore, Israel’s negotiating team told the hostage families last Friday that Netanyahu hadn’t even given them a mandate yet to negotiate Phase 2. Add to this the fact that since the ceasefire went into effect, Israel has killed over 21 Gazan civilians, including five children.
Also, Trump’s circle of pro-Israeli fanatics, like Mike Waltz, have made clear they would support Israel resuming the war until the end, and Trump himself resumed arms supplies to Israel of the 2,000-pound bombs Biden withheld in May.
Scenario 2: The deal will hold
There are also multiple Israeli experts, on the other hand, who believe the war is over, citing several reasons.
One is that US President Trump, who is seriously seeking a Nobel Prize, is trying to position himself as a peacemaker, and ending the war on Gaza is a lot easier than ending the war in Ukraine. Trump has already been basking in the glory of claims that his envoy managed to “sway Netanyahu more in one meeting than Biden did all year”.
The septuagenarian republican is also pursuing Saudi-Israeli normalisation as his “baby” project, which cannot proceed before calm is restored. Adding optimism to this is that Trump fired and marginalised hawks like Brian Hook, John Bolton, and Mike Pompeo.
Furthermore, Trump’s top pro-Israeli donor, Mariam Adelson, has reportedly pressured him to push for a Gaza deal that gets all hostages out. The Israeli-American billionaire widow enjoys significant influence in both the White House and Israel.
Trump’s team is already “hard at work on the next phase of the talks,” while at the same time, the Republican president gave Israel a huge “gift basket” to lure them away from the Gaza war. This includes “rolling out the red carpet” to Netanyahu and inviting him to the White House after President Biden refrained from doing so.
It also includes lifting all sanctions on Israeli extremists, settlers, and spyware companies, while imposing heavy sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) for prosecuting Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant.
Netanyahu himself also gave Smotrich a dangerous set of “gifts” to get him on board, which included releasing administratively detained terrorist settlers and increasing checkpoints in the West Bank against the advice of the Israeli army chief, who warned such measures to choke Palestinians would bolster armed resistance.
It also included quietly updating the Gaza war’s goals with a new item of “strengthening security in Judea and Samaria” which has promptly translated into the Israeli military launching a major assault on Jenin along with airstrikes across the West Bank to treat it like Gaza.
While those bribes may prove insufficient for Smotrich to stay in government, another “gift” might substitute for the extremist minister’s insistence on resuming the war, namely the depopulation of Gaza. As soon as President Trump contemplated transferring Gazans to Jordan and Egypt, Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir rallied behind his call.
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A senior Israeli cabinet minister said Trump’s Proposal was surely “coordinated” with Netanyahu and meant to help save his coalition by giving Smotrich an alternative victory image of Gazans leaving the besieged enclave en masse.
There are also many other sources of pressure on Netanyahu to stick to the deal. One such example is the hostage families’ relentless pressure and momentum in Israel for the release of the rest of the Israeli captives in Gaza. Also, Netanyahu’s ultra-orthodox coalition partners have been keen to see an end to the war to subdue mounting pressure for drafting haredim men into the army.
There has been similar pressure for a ceasefire from within the overly exhausted Israeli army that is not accustomed to fighting long wars and that relies on reservists who have suffered economically and socially from being on duty for many months. Not to mention the Israeli economy being severely impacted by a war that has cost Israel about $70 billion.
Finally, Israel’s partial withdrawal on Monday from the Netzarim Corridor, which allowed a deluge of hundreds of thousands of forcibly displaced Palestinians to return to the northern half of Gaza, took away the strongest pressure card Israel held. This prompted Israeli analysts like Chaim Levinson to say “The war is over. That’s it”.
Muhammad Shehada is a Palestinian writer and analyst from Gaza and the EU Affairs Manager at Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.
Follow him on Twitter: @muhammadshehad2
