After 15 months of unceasing destruction in Gaza following the October 7th attack on Israel and the death of tens of thousands of Palestinians, Israel and Hamas have seemed to reach an agreement on a ceasefire deal.
President-elect Donald Trump confirmed the ceasefire on Truth Social: “WE HAVE A DEAL.” US officials told the Associated Press mid-day Wednesday that the ceasefire would be implemented in the coming days. Still, there are chances of rupture. While the negotiators have agreed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement that tonight details will be “finalized” barring final approval of his cabinet.
The deal is complex. It depends on a phased release of Israeli hostages held within Gaza as Israeli forces draw back; 1,000 of the over 9,500 Palestinians currently held in Israeli prisons will also be released over a period of six weeks. After the first hostages are released, according to a draft of the deal shared with the Associated Press, Israel is obligated to begin withdrawing its troops from Gaza.
The New York Times reports that the deal reached on Wednesday is highly similar to the one pushed by President Joe Biden in May. Donald Trump’s victory helped push Israel to accept the deal, according to the Washington Post. An unnamed diplomat told the paper that it was “the first time there has been real pressure on the Israeli side to accept a deal.”
Israel’s army has leveled two-thirds of the buildings in Gaza, rendered most of its infrastructure unusable, and killed a massive portion of the Palestinian population. The exact number of dead will be unknown for some time, as unrecorded deaths and those trapped under the rubble are added to the tally. Gaza’s health ministry puts the official death toll at 46,600; last week, the latest in a series of independent studies estimated that at least 64,000 people were killed in the first 9 months of the war alone. 90 percent of those left alive in Gaza have been displaced, most of whom are at risk of famine.
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared a deal was “right on the brink.” Hamas accepted a deal that was near-identical to one proposed by President Joe Biden and endorsed by the UN Security Council—which Israel scuttled in July. This time, though, the threat of Trump’s inauguration served as something closer to a real deadline. (The President-elect repeatedly threatened that there would be “hell to pay” if the remaining hostages were not returned by January 20th.) His envoy, Steve Witkoff, joined this past week’s negotiations in Qatar, alongside Qatari mediators, US negotiators and representatives for Israel and Hamas.
When the bombs stop, the question of aid will remain. Nearly every hospital in Gaza has been destroyed or stripped of nearly all its capabilities, over 42 million tons of rubble cover the enclave, and an estimated one and a half million Gazans are spending the winter in tents or makeshift shelters. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres welcomed Wednesday’s deal, and urged the parties to remove “the significant security and political obstacles to delivering aid across Gaza so that we can support a major increase in urgent life-saving humanitarian support.”
At a press conference Wednesday, the Prime Minister of Qatar announced that the first six-week phase of the ceasefire plan would go into effect Sunday. Residents of Gaza expect that Israel will continue to bomb them in the interim.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
