Reuters explains in some detail, “What’s in the three-phase ceasefire deal Hamas backs, but Israel does not?”
PHASE ONE
– 42-day ceasefire period
– Hamas freeing 33 Israeli hostages, alive or dead, in return for Israel releasing 30 children and women for each released Israeli hostage, based on lists provided by Hamas according to the earliest date of detention.
– Starting from the first day of the ceasefire, the entry of intensive and sufficient quantities of humanitarian aid, relief materials, and fuel (600 trucks per day, including 50 fuel trucks, of which 300 are for the north), including the fuel necessary for operating the power plant, trade, and equipment needed for rubble removal, rehabilitation and operation of hospitals, health centres and bakeries in all areas of the Gaza Strip, and the continuation of this in all stages of the agreement.
– Hamas will release three Israeli hostages on the third day of the agreement, and then release three more hostages every seven days, prioritising women if possible, including civilians and conscripts.
– In the sixth week, Hamas will release all remaining civilian hostages covered by this phase. In exchange, Israel will release the agreed number of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, according to the lists that will be provided by Hamas.
– Israel partially withdraws troops from Gaza and allows the free movement of Palestinians from south to north Gaza.
– Cessation of military flights over the Gaza Strip will take place for 10 hours per day and 12 hours on the day of releasing the hostages and prisoners.
– On the third day after releasing the first Palestinian prisoners, the Israeli forces will completely withdraw from al-Rashid street in northern Gaza, and all military sites will be dismantled.
– On the 22nd day of the first phase, Israeli forces will withdraw from the centre of the strip, east of Salah al-Din road to an area near the Israeli border.
PHASE TWO
– Another 42-day period that features an agreement to restore a “sustainable calm” to Gaza, language that an official briefed on the talks said Hamas and Israel had agreed in order to take discussion of a “permanent ceasefire” off the table.
– The complete withdrawal of most Israeli troops from Gaza.
– Hamas releases Israeli reservists and some soldiers in return for Israel releasing Palestinians from jail.
PHASE THREE
– The completion of exchanging bodies and starting the implementation of reconstruction according to the plan overseen by Qatar, Egypt and the United Nations.
– Ending the complete blockade on the Gaza Strip.
– Start of the implementation of a 3-5 year plan for reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, including homes, civilian facilities and infrastructure, and compensation for all those affected, under the supervision of a number of countries and organisations including Egypt, Qatar and the United Nations.
The deal strikes me as laughably one-sided. It gives Israel the hostages criminally abducted by Hamas back very slowly in exchange for massive numbers of prisoners of war, a very long respite, and gobs of assistance. It essentially gives Hamas everything it wants—rewarding its crimes—while Israel eventually gets back its hostages, quite possibly dead. It does nothing to dismantle Hamas. Why on earth would Israel agree to that?
Frankly, any deal that doesn’t return all of the hostages on Day 1 is a non-starter.
Steven Erlanger details the domestic politics of this for the NYT (“With a Gaza Cease-Fire in the Balance, Netanyahu Maneuvers to Keep Power“):
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, is known as a man who likes to play for time and postpone big decisions. But he may not be able to do that much longer.
Domestically, his coalition partners on the far right threaten to break up the government if he agrees to a cease-fire and does not try to clear Hamas out of Rafah, in southern Gaza.
Militarily, the strategic logic is to complete the dismantling of Hamas by taking Rafah and controlling the border with Egypt. But diplomatically, his allies, especially the United States, are pushing him to agree on a cease-fire, and skip Rafah and the potential civilian casualties a large-scale operation would cause.
So Mr. Netanyahu is now negotiating and maneuvering on several fronts at once, all of which have a significant effect on the conduct of the war and his own future as prime minister.
His recent warnings to Palestinians in parts of Rafah to move to areas Israel has designated as safe, followed late Monday night by the Israeli military’s seizure of the Gazan side of the Egyptian border, signaled to his far-right government coalition, to Hamas and to the Biden administration that he would continue to prioritize Israel’s security interests. More important, Israel’s more narrow war cabinet, which includes senior opposition figures, backed those decisions.
The seizure of the Rafah crossing to Egypt, to try to complete Israel’s security control of Gaza’s borders, has, for now, avoided a large-scale and contentious military operation in Rafah itself, which is filled with displaced civilians. It may signal that Israel is preparing at long last to agree to at least a temporary cease-fire in Gaza, even as the outcome of those negotiations remains uncertain.
Aside from the hostage families, there is essentially no Jewish group in Israel pushing for an end to the war short of the utter annihilation of Hamas. Even the left-most parties share that goal—however unrealistic it may be.
Israeli military officials and analysts emphasize that cutting off the smuggling of arms and equipment from Egypt through the tunnels under Rafah is strategically more important to Israel than the Hamas fighters left in Rafah.
Despite Egyptian denials of extensive smuggling into Gaza, Israeli officials believe that much of the extraordinary arsenal and the building supplies that Hamas accumulated in Gaza came through tunnels from Egypt.
“If we end the war without blocking the tunnels, we would enable Hamas or any other terrorist organization in the Strip to rebuild their military capacities,” said Kobi Michael of the Institute for National Security Studies, a research group in Tel Aviv.
Nitzan Nuriel, a reserve brigadier general and former director of the counterterrorism bureau of the Israeli National Security Council, worked with Mr. Netanyahu for several years. “Rafah is important not because of the four Hamas battalions that are still there,” he said. “Rafah is important because the message to the Palestinians who live in Gaza is that Hamas will not be able to control Gaza for good.”
Otherwise, he said, Gazans would “stay afraid of Hamas and therefore will cooperate with Hamas.”
Even a modest operation in Rafah “fits several of Netanyahu’s goals simultaneously,” said Natan Sachs, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.
Like many Israeli officials, including those who want a cease-fire deal now, Mr. Sachs said, “Netanyahu genuinely believes an operation in Rafah is central to Israel’s overall goals — not merely in going after the remaining Hamas forces, but in cutting off their ability to resupply via smuggling through the Egyptian border.”
The military operation “also puts pressure on Hamas to relent on some of its more expansive demands in the cease-fire negotiations,” Mr. Sachs said.
Pretty much across the board, October 7 was seen as an existential crisis. A return to the status quo ante, in which Hamas is capable of murdering Israelis whenever they choose, is not an acceptable outcome.
The external pressures, while understandable, are just unrealistic given that reality.
Mr. Netanyahu is under enormous pressure diplomatically — from allies like Washington and Berlin, from the United Nations, from the European Union and from regional Sunni Arab states — to avoid a major operation in Rafah.
They want him to allow in much more humanitarian aid to Gaza and agree to a deal with Hamas that could, at least, promise what the current draft text calls a “sustainable calm,” rather than a permanent cease-fire.
But such a deal still would not resolve the fundamental divide between Israel and Hamas over how to conclude the conflict.
Hamas wants the war to end now, with the withdrawal of all Israeli troops from Gaza and the release of all hostages in exchange for a large number of Palestinians held in Israeli jails.
Such an outcome would essentially reward Hamas for October 7. It’s just not going to happen.
The problem remains what it has been from the outset: there’s no obvious endstate that leads to a better state of the peace. Even if it were somehow possible to kill every single Hamas operative, it wouldn’t necessarily end the terrorist threat. And the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian noncombatants will almost surely create another generation of volunteers.
Nor is there a plausible diplomatic solution that yields a “sustainable calm.” A two-state solution is a fantasy. Not only do the Israelis and Palestinians want the same capital city and historic landmarks but there just isn’t a large enough parcel of land available to sustain the entire Palestinian diaspora. And, even if there were and we could convince the political leadership of the Palestinians and the Jews alike to come to an agreement that resettles people in their respective new states, the extremists will continue to have a veto power by killing innocents and restarting the war.
