Hostages and prisoners have been exchanged. What now for Gaza?

Jerusalem: Israel and Hamas moved ahead on a key first step of the tenuous Gaza ceasefire agreement on Monday by freeing hostages and prisoners, raising hopes that the US-brokered deal might lead to a permanent end to the two-year war that ravaged the Palestinian territory.

In an address to Israel’s parliament, US President Donald Trump urged lawmakers to seize a chance for broader peace in the region. And in Egypt, he and other world leaders gathered to set the trickier parts of the deal into motion.

Granular details will now need to be negotiated to keep the ceasefire plan moving forward and prevent the resumption of fighting. The path to long-term peace, stability and eventual rebuilding will be a long and very precipitous route.

Thorny issues will need to be addressed, such as whether Hamas will disarm, who will govern Gaza in the future, and the question of Palestinian statehood – all of which remain unresolved. For now, this fragile agreement only pauses the deadliest conflict in the history of Israel and the Palestinians.

What political challenges lie ahead?

Despite the enthusiasm for the latest deal, there are reasons for scepticism, not least of which is that US attempts to bring about an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have failed for decades.

Starting with the 1991 Madrid Conference and moving through various iterations – including the landmark Oslo Accords in 1993 and 1995, which created the Palestinian Authority – all the efforts to restart the process through 2014 collapsed.

For Israelis, the release of the 20 remaining living hostages brought elation and a sense of closure to a war many felt they were forced into by Hamas after the October 7 atrocities. However, many have pledged to fight on for the return of deceased hostages still in Gaza.

With the living hostages freed, the urgency with which many were driven to call for an end to the war will also likely diminish, easing pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to advance the next phases of the agreement.

The bodies of four hostages were returned to Israel on Monday, and another 24 are supposed to be turned over as part of the first phase of the ceasefire, which also requires Israel to allow a surge of food and other humanitarian aid into Gaza.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has said any delay by Hamas in returning the remaining bodies would be viewed as a violation of the ceasefire deal.

What happens now for people in Gaza?

While there was an outburst of joy in Gaza for prisoners returning from Israel under the hostage release deal and hope that the fighting may wind down for good, the torment drags on for war-weary Palestinians.

Gaza has been decimated by two years of Israeli bombardment. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed. More than 90 per cent of Gaza’s population of more than 2 million people is displaced. The medical system is shattered. Little remains of its prewar economy. And basic services are in disarray. Homes and buildings have also been flattened and croplands razed. Hunger is pervasive.

Those urgent needs will need to be addressed while simultaneously standing up the transitional security and government systems. “There’s really no luxury of sequencing here,” Lucy Kurtzer-Ellenbogen, a senior fellow with the Middle East Institute, says. “Everything has to happen all at once.”

The World Bank, the United Nations and the European Union estimated earlier this year that the cost of rebuilding Gaza would be about $53 billion – a process that could take years. Wealthy Arab states are expected to help with that cost, but that buy-in is expected to be met by reassurances that there will be a pathway to Palestinian independence and there will not be a return to fighting.

Who will control Gaza now?

In Trump’s peace proposal, it remains unclear to what degree agreements have been reached on two of the biggest sticking points: how far Israel withdraws from Gaza and how far Hamas retreats from power.

Israel still controls roughly half of Gaza, and the territory’s future governance remains unclear.

Under the US plan, a temporary international body would govern the territory, overseeing Palestinian technocrats responsible for day-to-day affairs. But it’s uncertain who would staff this temporary body, where it would be located and how the population would respond.

It’s also unclear who would oversee the so-called “Board of Peace”, which Trump said he would chair. Despite Trump’s plan announcing that former British prime minister Tony Blair would help head the board, the president on Sunday made that sound tentative, too. The Palestinians have expressed displeasure over Blair’s possible involvement.

Hamas has said that Gaza’s government should be worked out among Palestinians.

While the plan envisions an eventual role for Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority – something Netanyahu has long opposed – it requires the organisation to undergo reforms.

Abbas himself – at 89 years old – is unpopular among many Palestinians, and it is unclear whether any uniting figure could emerge to bring together the various factions.

Will Israeli troops withdraw completely from Gaza?

Under the plan, Israeli forces would leave the area as a multinational force deploys. Again, this timeframe is still to be worked out. The plan would allow the IDF to retain a presence along Gaza’s perimeter until the territory is “properly secure from any resurgent terror threat”.

The plan calls for an Arab-led international security force in Gaza, along with Palestinian police – but it is not known which countries will send forces, how they will be used and what will happen if they encounter resistance. Meanwhile, some 200 US troops are in Israel to monitor the ceasefire, but the Pentagon has said they will play no role inside Gaza.

So far, the Israeli military has withdrawn from much of Gaza City, the southern city of Khan Younis and other areas. Troops remain in most of the southern city of Rafah, towns of Gaza’s far north, and along the length of Gaza’s border with Israel.

Will Hamas disarm?

Among the most difficult issues left to resolve is Israel’s insistence that Hamas gives up its weapons. Hamas, while weakened after two years of war, is far from being out of governance and fully disarmed, as Netanyahu sought. It has so far refused to disarm and wants to ensure Israel pulls out its troops completely.

Under Trump’s plan, once all hostages were returned to Israel, members of Hamas were to be granted amnesty if they committed to peaceful co-existence and to decommissioning their weapons. Those who wanted to leave Gaza would be provided safe passage to another country. The plan calls for “regional partners” to provide a “guarantee” that Hamas complied with these obligations. But a Hamas spokesperson told Al Jazeera that while they were discussing with mediators how to reach a ceasefire, that was “not on the basis of surrendering weapons”.

What about a Palestinian state?

The Trump plan acknowledges that statehood is the Palestinian people’s aspiration and expresses the possibility that, in time, conditions would create “a credible pathway” to achieving it.

That seems “purposely very vague” on the issue of Palestinian statehood, according to Mona Yacoubian, the director of the Middle East Program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

The agreement seems designed, she says, to “thread the needle between the minimum that the Palestinians and their Arab supporters will accept” without mentioning a “two-state solution”, which seems to remain a non-starter for Israel.

On his way back to the United States on Monday night, Trump pushed aside questions about an independent Palestinian state and told reporters that the issue was separate from his plan for rebuilding Gaza.

“A lot of people like the one-state solution. Some people like the two-state solution. We’ll have to see,” Trump said. “At some point I’ll decide what I think is right, but I’d be in co-ordination with other states and other countries.”

The next steps

To settle these issues and prevent further fighting, the US and other nations that pushed for the ceasefire must continue to exert pressure and devote attention, experts say.

Everything is layered atop a legacy of conflict, deep distrust among the sides, and the vague, conditional possibility of an eventual Palestinian state — an issue that has been a core sticking point for decades – and a non-starter for Netanyahu.

AP, Bloomberg

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