Very many people – in Israel, the occupied territories, the Middle East and well beyond – will feel immense relief at the news of a ceasefire and hostage deal.
But the provisional nature of the pause in the Israeli offensive into Gaza combined with the number of captives remaining with Hamas mean any hopes of a definitive end to hostilities remain tragically slender.
The consequences of the agreement are already rippling out across the region and beyond, but those most immediately affected will be the people of Gaza.
So far, between 13,000 and 14,000 Palestinians are thought to have been killed since Israel launched its offensive after the 7 October Hamas attacks that killed 1,200 in southern Israel, mostly civilians in their homes or at a dance party.
Much of the north of Gaza has been made uninhabitable by the Israeli bombardment, and 1.7 million people displaced. All are now crammed into the south, which has been without adequate food, fuel, clean water, shelter and much else for almost seven weeks after Israel cut off supplies.
Any cessation of hostilities and promises of increased aid will provide only very partial relief to the shattered, battered, grieving inhabitants of the the territory.
One UN official who has spent six weeks living in a compound near Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, with his family, told the Guardian on Wednesday: “I wish that once the ceasefire starts its opens the way for political solution, but it’s not clear yet …. It also it makes us think: what are we going to do when the war ends? Where to go when most of the people, and I am one of them, have lost their home? Where to live, when there is no infrastructure, no schools, no hospitals? It would take years just to remove the rubble.”
The deal will also provide only partial relief to the families of those 239 mainly Israeli hostages thought to be in Gaza. Even for families whose relatives are not immediately released, the deal offers hope. But for the families and friends of captured military personnel, possibly numbering about 100, there is the deeply distressing knowledge that these are the most valuable to Hamas and so will be the last to be freed.
Ofri Bibas Levy, whose brother, sister-in-law and two nephews – aged four and 10 months – are among the captives, said the deal puts families in an “inhumane” situation. Her brother, 34, is not expected to be among the first groups released.
“Who will be released, who won’t? Will the kids be freed? Will they be freed with their mothers or not?” she said, shortly before the deal was announced. “No matter which way it happens, there will still be families that will remain worried and sad and angry.”
Though far-right parties largely supported the deal, averting an immediate political crisis, many in Israel oppose the ceasefire. The Israeli military and intelligence services are reported to have backed the agreement with Hamas – despite the propaganda coup it hands their bitter enemy – but are clearly committed, like most of the public, to continuing the effort to “crush” Hamas.
Even as the deal was being debated in Israel, an airstrike hit a residential building in the southern town of Khan Younis, killing 17 people, witnesses reported. An Associated Press reporter saw the bodies of two children pulled from the rubble, one badly burned.
On Wednesday morning, the apps that many Israelis use to warn of incoming rocket fire from Gaza also sounded.
A military official told the Guardian last month that he and his colleagues had always known Israel would have to pay “a painful price” for the return of the hostages, but the heroic status that Hamas will win by forcing the release of young and female prisoners from Israeli jails is a bitter pill nonetheless.
Israel claims to have killed thousands of Hamas fighters, although it has not presented evidence, and destroyed parts of the group’s tunnel system. It also controls swaths of Hamas’s former strongholds in northern Gaza.
But it is clear that much of Hamas’s infrastructure is intact, and any pause will give the militants a chance to regroup. The Israeli military says 68 soldiers have been killed in ground operations – and the job of eliminating the threat from Hamas is incomplete.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, promised ministers and coalition partners sceptical of the deal that the military offensive would continue “with full force” after the ceasefire ends in four or five days.
Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza, has been described as a “dead man walking” by Israeli ministers but is still, apparently, sufficiently alive to give his final and deciding consent to the deal. The combination of Israeli rhetoric and Sinwar’s longevity does not make a durable peace appear likely soon.
