A three-phase ceasefire agreement has been reached for the Gaza Strip, offering a much-needed respite from the ongoing conflict. However, the path to sustainable peace remains fraught with challenges, including reconciling seemingly irreconcilable interests and addressing the deep-seated grievances that fuel the violence.
Is the start of a ceasefire the end of a conflict? History suggests only sometimes. In the Middle East, particularly, permanency is a fluid concept. Within the announcement this week of a Gaza ceasefire, myriad obstacles to a genuine end to the violence exist. The foundations of peace rest on reconciling seemingly irreconcilable interests, and building strength from that fragility. Even as the world welcomed news of the ceasefire, fractures appeared on both the Hamas and Israeli sides.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday he would convene his security cabinet later that day and the government would then approve the agreement. However, the hard right faction of the cabinet opposes the agreement. Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said his Jewish Power party would quit the coalition if a deal went ahead. Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya said he saw the deal as a defeat for Israel. “Our people have thwarted the declared and hidden goals of the occupation. Today we prove that the occupation will never defeat our people and their resistance,” he said. But the path to this ceasefire has been paved with immense loss. The conflict, marked by the October 7, 2023, massacre, has resulted in the deaths of more than 46,000 Palestinians, according to Gazan health officials. Most of them were civilians, more than 13,000 were children. Gaza’s infrastructure is destroyed. Almost 2 million people have been displaced. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, further complicating the situation. Still, as it stands, on Sunday the first part of the three-phase ceasefire begins. It is planned to last six weeks. The missiles will stop, death and destruction will pause. The first phase, lasting 33 days, will involve the release of hostages. This will begin with the return of 33 hostages; three on Sunday, four on the seventh day, and then three every seven days, with the final 14 in the last week of phase one. For each hostage returned, Israel is to release between 30 and 50 Palestinian prisoners. Sixteen days from Sunday, negotiations are scheduled to start to release the rest of the hostages, thought to number about 65, and the implementation set in train for a permanent ceasefire and withdrawal of all Israeli troops from Gaza. The third phase is the return of the bodies of hostages if a reconstruction plan, supervised by world entities, for Gaza over three to five years can be agreed to.After 15 months of immense misery, suffering, and loss, it cannot be denied this ceasefire is a ray of light that hopefully will prevail where other attempts have not. The questions that arise in trying to establish peace in the region after the ceasefire are another matter. It comes down to this, and then what happens? First, international aid must start flowing into Gaza at pre-conflict levels. Gaza is now a war-ravaged landscape; fuel, food, water, and health services are crucial to inching towards rebuilding both the infrastructure and the ascendancy of hope over despair. The normalising of life, as much as it can be, requires some stable form of government. The ceasefire does not detail how the Gaza Strip will be governed. Hamas has governed Gaza since 2007, and given the October 7, 2023 massacre, Israel is strident in declaring Hamas should not be involved again. Antony Blinken summed up the intractability of the situation saying that, as a consequence of the war, “Hamas had been able to recruit almost as many new militants than it had lost, a recipe for an enduring insurgency and perpetual war”. How to prevent this from happening is the question that has broken on the wheels of generational hatred, internecine political power plays, and reprisals for decades. Another ceasefire may be, in the bleakest view, just another false dawn. Where this truce leaves the model of a two-state solution is unknown. “This is not the end. This is a really important breakthrough and step forward, the Palestinians need to have reform ... Hamas can play no rule in a future Palestinian state,” Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus is in Israel and said the ceasefire “should signal the end to grotesque exploitation of the conflict by politicians in Australia. Now more than ever, we need unity, and political point-scoring has only fuelled more social discord at home.” Recent events have shown that Australia, and other countries, are no longer a distant shore from the centre of the crisis. We are all neighbours.
GAZA CEASEFIRE ISRAEL-PALESTINE CONFLICT INTERNATIONAL AID HAMAS TWO-STATE SOLUTION PEACE NEGOTIATIONS
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