Eight dark and lethal months since US President Joe Biden first unveiled his plan for a Gaza ceasefire to release the hostages kidnapped on 7 October, 2023, it may finally happen. Vain hopes have so often been raised for the families of hostages still held in Gaza, and for more than two million stricken and displaced Palestinians, that the “may” is a necessary qualifier.
But Hamas and Israel are closer than ever before – the daunting, phased and gradual process of swapping 98 remaining hostages (of whom at least 36 are believed to be dead) for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israel could start any day now.
That this is a function of the Donald Trump effect is not really in doubt. The impact, if any, on Hamas of Trump’s threat that “all hell will break loose” without a deal by his inauguration on Monday, remains unclear. The vice-president in waiting, JD Vance, said this week it meant the US “enabling the Israelis to knock out the final couple of battalions of Hamas and their leadership”, and chose to attribute the progress to Hamas’s fears of just that outcome.
But it is clear that the incoming administration’s pressure on Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to forego his months-long habit of erecting obstacles to a deal, has been strong. According to Israeli media reports, Trump’s emissary Steven Witkoff, a billionaire property developer with little time for diplomatic or religious niceties, was told that Netanyahu would see him after the Sabbath ended on Saturday evening. Witkoff insisted on a Saturday morning meeting at which he reportedly told the Israeli leader bluntly that delays were no longer acceptable.
This could all change, of course. But it does seem that Netanyahu’s “red lines” – such as his insistence on keeping the military on the Gaza-Egypt border, and on the Netzarim line splitting the Strip in two, in defiance of Hamas’s demand for an eventual troop withdrawal from Gaza – might not be quite so red after all.
The two most extreme right-wing Israeli cabinet ministers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, remain opposed to a deal. (Unhelpfully for Netanyahu’s hand in the coming blame game over why the deal has taken so long, Ben-Gvir asserted on Tuesday that his opposition and not Hamas, as Netanyahu has repeatedly claimed, was the cause.) But would they really be willing to abandon their considerable power and threaten Netanyahu’s coalition, as they would if both resigned and took their parties out of it?
They may believe that Trump’s victory would help to turbocharge their already determined efforts to annex large parts of the occupied West Bank. Then again, they may also worry that Trump’s grand hopes for a Saudi-US-Israel deal might limit their “greater Israel” ambitions because the Saudi ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, would require some evidence of progress towards the Palestinian state they recoil at.
None of these political consequences will currently be much bothering either the hostages’ families or the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza in dire need of food, water, medicine and shelter.
Darkness is coming in 2025 - it's up to us not to look away
Read MoreEarlier this week, Ashraf al-Masri, a driver, told how one of his prematurely newborn (probably because of his mother’s malnutrition) twin grandchildren died from cold last week, as has been the case with increasing numbers of Gaza babies.
Al-Masri and his family, no worse and perhaps better off than many Gazans, have moved eight times since he left his now half-destroyed home in Beit Hanoun; they had to leave the Rafah for the Khan Yunis sector of the coastal Mawasi “humanitarian zone” last month because his tent was damaged by an Israeli military bulldozer demolishing a nearby building.
The four-generation family is having to share with that of a friend in a single tent now sheltering 20 people. Because of the shortage of aid, his only hope of getting a tent of his own is to buy one on the black market for £570 – a sum impossibly out of reach.
Meanwhile, Sharone Lifschitz, a London based filmmaker from kibbutz Nir Oz, whose parents were taken hostage on 7 October, spoke this week with quiet eloquence about her hopes for the release of her 84-year-old father Oded and all the other hostages. “I’m trying to breathe; I’m trying to be optimistic,” she told the BBC Today programme.
She for one is convinced that the hopefully imminent deal is not so different from one Netanyahu could have done last July but baulked at, she thinks, because he feared a “reckoning” over the missteps that failed to prevent the Hamas-led massacre on 7 October.
And since July, she added, so many “hostages died… soldiers, Palestinians, so much suffering”. But she talked movingly about how “profound” it would be to have a longed-for talk to her “opinionated peace activist” father about what he thought and felt.
Needless to say, for Ashraf al-Masri and Sharone Lifschitz, the ceasefire cannot come a moment too soon.
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