NYT (“White House Works to Preserve Gaza Deal Amid Concerns About Netanyahu“):
The White House worked to hold together the Gaza peace deal on Monday as American officials said they were increasingly concerned that Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, could dismantle the U.S.-brokered agreement.
Vice President JD Vance was headed to Israel, where he was to join Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Middle East peace envoy, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, who were instrumental in brokering the deal.
At the same time, President Trump warned that he would allow Israeli forces to “eradicate” Hamas if violence in the enclave continued.
“We made a deal with Hamas that, you know, they’re going to be very good. They’re going to behave. They’re going to be nice,” Mr. Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday. “And if they’re not, we’re going to go and we’re going to eradicate them if we have to. They’ll be eradicated. And they know that.”
Mr. Vance’s expected arrival was meant to add an extra symbolic layer to illustrate the administration’s commitment to keeping the deal intact. The administration brokered a cease-fire this month in a two-year war between Israel and Hamas. But a new round of violence on Sunday has highlighted the fragility of the 10-day-old cease-fire. According to the Israeli military, two Israeli soldiers were killed and another was wounded when Palestinian militants launched an anti-tank missile at an army vehicle.
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Israel and Hamas have accused each other of violating the truce after repeated flare-ups of violence in recent days. But both sides have said they were still committed to maintaining the truce.
For now, the president believes that Hamas leaders are willing to continue negotiations in good faith and that the attack on Israeli solders was carried out by a fringe element of the group, according to a White House official who spoke privately to convey the president’s thinking.
Indeed, Mr. Trump has bucked Israeli declarations that Hamas had violated the agreement. On Monday, he characterized the current fighting in Gaza as a “rebellion” in Hamas that was not representative of the organization’s leadership. He said that some Hamas fighters “got very rambunctious,” but that if the violence continued, the United States would permit Israel to violently eliminate the organization.
When one side in the conflict is a terrorist group, it doesn’t take much for a fringe element to create incidents that spark retaliation. It has happened time and time again in the Middle East wars, whether the negotiating partner is the PLO, Hezbollah, or Hamas.
Still, while the Israeli government has every right to demand that Hamas leadership reign in violence, the response here has been grossly disproportionate.
An Economist leader (“Why Gaza’s ‘eternal’ ceasefire is holding—for now“) is more optimistic than events on the ground seem to warrant.
It was not the first time Israel and Hamas have broken their commitments. The latter has dragged its feet on returning the bodies of hostages who died in captivity. Just 12 of 28 have been handed over to Israel, which in turn has refused to reopen the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have repeatedly shot at Gazans who strayed across the ill-defined boundary into areas under Israeli control.
None of this means the ceasefire is about to collapse. Even though there will no doubt be further violations, for now a mix of self-interest and American pressure should ensure that Israel and Hamas remain party to the deal. But the events of the past week underscore both how urgent it is to negotiate the next phase of the ceasefire—and how difficult it will be.
The Israeli unit that was attacked on October 19th had been tasked with demolishing tunnels in an Israeli-controlled part of Rafah. The IDF said it came under fire from Hamas militants, who launched anti-tank missiles that killed two soldiers. Israel then carried out dozens of air strikes across the territory, killing at least 26 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry. The bombardment went on for several hours, until Israel announced that the ceasefire was back in force.
Such incidents seem almost inevitable. Although the ceasefire demands that Hamas disarm, negotiators have yet to agree on a practical mechanism by which it might be forced to do so. The IDF continues to control an estimated 53% of Gazan territory. And after two years of war that killed many of Hamas’s leaders, its surviving military units operate semi-autonomously: their commanders elsewhere in Gaza do not always know what they are doing, let alone their political leaders living in villas abroad. All of that makes for a combustible mix.
Yet both sides also have an interest in avoiding a total breakdown. Some of Hamas’s commanders no doubt hope to keep up sporadic guerrilla attacks on Israeli troops. They will be keen to test how much they can get away with. But they do not want the ceasefire to fall apart entirely. With no living hostages left in its grasp, Hamas would have little leverage to stop the next round of fighting.
In Israel, meanwhile, far-right ministers have wanted to tear up the deal since it was signed. Mr Netanyahu has pointedly refused to say that the war is over for good. Mr Trump has a lot at stake, though: he has made it clear to Israel that it cannot abandon the ceasefire, at least for now. When the fighting began in Rafah, Israel announced that it would suspend the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza. It reversed that decision within hours under strong American pressure.
While Netanyahu was under great pressure to get the living hostages back—which has now been achieved—he’s under substantial pressure from within his coalition to finish what was started: the complete destruction of Hamas, if not the reclaiming of Gaza for Israel. It seems that pressure from the Trump administration is the chief obstacle to that.
Even so, the long-term future of the ceasefire is uncertain. Mr Trump’s plan calls for a multinational peacekeeping force that will take charge of security in Gaza. A few countries have expressed interest in joining, but none has made a firm commitment yet. Several diplomats in the region say the violence in Rafah will reinforce fears among Arab leaders, who worry about a political backlash at home should their troops wind up in a shootout with Palestinians.
Even if pledges do materialise, it will probably take several months to field the force. There is little chance of disarming Hamas until then, nor will the IDF carry out further withdrawals. Hamas will use that time to consolidate power in Gaza by killing and torturing rivals (it has already executed dozens). There will be no return to all-out war—but it will hardly be eternal peace.
The negotiated settlement is a good one on paper. An international peacekeeping force is likely the only hope for a sustained peace. But the path from the first stage of the plan to that stage was never clear.
