Peace in the Middle East, Mr Trump? You’re not even close...

Not only have a hundred Palestinians been killed in Israeli air strikes on Gaza, but the US seems to have approved the retaliation against Hamas for faking the return of a hostage and killing an IDF soldier. Some ceasefire, writes Donald McIntyre

There’s no shortage of comforting euphemisms to describe the events of the past day and night, which culminated in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza estimated to have killed 104 Palestinians by this morning.

For US Vice President JD Vance, no one should be deceived by “little skirmishes” into thinking the ceasefire will not hold. For the Israel Defence Forces, the strikes were merely “enforcing the ceasefire.” If this is all compatible with the end of hostilities, it’s tempting to ask what a full return to war would look like.

That said, the detail, as ever in the Middle East, matters. Two separate incidents were the reason – or pretext, depending on how you look at it – for the “powerful strikes” which were ordered on Monday by Benjamin Netanyahu. One was Hamas’s return to Israel of some remains of a man killed in its attack of October 7 2023, whose body, it turned out, had been largely recovered by Israeli troops much earlier in the war. (The Israeli military says that the remains were deliberately placed by militants at an excavation site and then dug up again to present to the Red Cross as a new discovery.)

Hamas, committed to return all the remaining hostages under the ceasefire terms and having given up all the living hostages, has also returned 15 of the 28 dead ones. But under increasing pressure to find the remaining 13, it has said it will take time to recover them. The Israeli authorities claim that Hamas knows where most of them are.

The second was the fatal shooting by armed Palestinians of an IDF soldier on the Israeli-controlled side of the ceasefire “yellow line”, which cuts Gaza roughly in half. Israel has blamed Hamas for the soldier’s death; Hamas insists it was not responsible for the attack and that it remains fully committed to the ceasefire.

Whether the scale of Israel's onslaught was remotely justified is a matter of opinion. But what does this mean for the future of the ceasefire? With its lethal air strikes over – at least for now – Israel says it, too, is committed to maintaining it. The question, however, is whether the most recent will be the last major breach – really two questions. Will the present first phase of the ceasefire hold? And if it does, what happens then?

A boy stands in an opening of a wall at his home destroyed in an Israeli strike in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on October 29 (AFP/Getty)

On the first, a good deal depends on the Americans. Wednesday saw yet another indication of the kind of pressure from his own extreme right allies that Netanyahu is under. His Jewish supremacist national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, castigated the Israeli Prime Minister for halting his response to the soldier’s death and admitting more humanitarian aid – even though the international agencies say this is nowhere near what is needed – "instead of returning to full-scale war”.

Against this, Trump, having triumphantly announced to the world that the “war is over”, is unlikely to want Ben Gvir to get his way. That partly explains last week’s stream of US visitors to Israel, headed by Vance, to emphasise in person the President’s commitment to this phase of the ceasefire – a process of “Bibi-sitting”, as it’s jocularly known by diplomats. It also explains why Washington has insisted that Netanyahu tell the US in advance of any military operations. And why some 200 American officers are now deployed in a southern Israel centre to “coordinate” Israel’s future military steps.

The current phase of the ceasefire is every bit as fragile as it looks. After all, the US appears to have approved the latest Israeli strikes. Nevertheless, it does mean that there’s at least a chance it will hold for now – Vance’s “minor skirmishes” notwithstanding.

The problem is that, even if it does, Trump’s proclamation that he has somehow brought a lasting peace to Gaza, let alone the whole region, is as hollow as it is ambitious. It’s not to underestimate his achievement of a ceasefire at all, to say that the rest of his much vaunted 20-point peace plan increasingly looks more like a back-of-the-envelope wish-list than anything else.

To take a single example. Hamas is surely not going to disarm (if at all) as the plan requires, unless Israel fulfils its own requirement of pulling its forces back to Israel’s borders. Indeed Netanyahu may understand this only too well. In a long interview with the New York Times’s Ezra Klein, the right-wing Israeli commentator Amit Segal, seen as close to his government’s thinking, suggests that the partition of Gaza by the “yellow line” will be permanent.

In such a scenario, says Segal, 53 per cent of Gaza, centred on a “new Rafah” funded by the Sauds and the Emiratis, “in which there are no weapons and there’s an efficient police force — no tunnels, no Kalashnikovs and no hatred” — would be the “moderate” Gaza. “The other Gaza would be what lies in the ruins in Gaza City and the refugee camps in central Gaza.”

Even if you accept Segal’s blithely improbable assumption that the Gulf states are ready to fund and police this surreal construct, this is anything but a recipe for a lasting peace. Maybe Segal is jumping ahead of his government contacts. But that he can even suggest it illustrates the lack of a detailed, internationally agreed programme to make Trump’s plan a long-term reality.

So ceasefire, fragile as it is, is the right word for what there still – just – is. But to what Trump grandiosely announced on September 29 as the “whole deal, everything getting solved…peace in the Middle East”, well, it doesn’t even come near.

Donald Macintyre is the author of Gaza Preparing for Dawn (Oneworld)