By Jonathan Sacerdoti. For full text see https://jonsac.substack.com/p/can-trumps-gaza-peace-deal-last?triedRedirect=true
Together, Trump and Netanyahu have achieved what few thought
possible: an agreement for the release of all hostages held in Gaza and a broad
cessation of hostilities, at least for now. The is a big moment, but also an
unclear and perilously risky one.
The deal, announced publicly but still potentially in flux,
contains both substance and shadow. According to Israeli sources, 20 live
hostages are to be released in the initial phase, with expectations that this
will occur by Sunday night. Hamas, for its part, has confirmed a framework
involving the end of fighting, Israeli withdrawal from Gaza (possibly 70 per
cent of the strip), the entry of humanitarian aid, and a prisoner exchange. The
guarantor states – Qatar, Egypt, Turkey, and the United States – have
reportedly secured assurances against the resumption of war so long as both
parties honour the terms.
Yet many details remain ambiguous, and deliberately so. Maps
of Israeli withdrawal have been amended, and five crossings are set to open for
aid. It’s reported that for every living hostage, as many as 100 convicted
terrorists will be freed, among them senior figures sentenced to life for
murder. This is a brutal price for Israel. But for many families awaiting a
son, a daughter, a child, it is one they have long been willing to pay.
President Isaac Herzog said what millions feel: ‘All the
people of Israel stand with the hostages. All the people of Israel stand with
the families.’
But not all images comfort. From Gaza, videos immediately
emerged of men who appear well-fed and strong, celebrating in the streets.
Terror-affiliated media chant genocidal slogans – ‘Khaybar, Khaybar ya Yahud’ –
whose message is one of eternal battle and endless death of Jews. Senior Hamas
operatives, including Zaher Jabarin, photographed smiling in the Sharm
El-Sheikh negotiation rooms, do not smile for peace. Their smile indicates that
for them at least survival, and perhaps advantage, has been secured.
This agreement will bring a kind of calm. But calm is not
peace. It is not justice. It is not safety. Even yesterday, Hamas-aligned media
were promoting videos of their military wing training to abduct IDF soldiers,
declaring such operations ‘inevitable.’ Meanwhile, those in Gaza who worked
with Israel to protect non-Hamas aligned Gaza residents, such as Yasser Abu
Shabab, have become targets of death threats and face possible annihilation in
the vacuum of Israeli withdrawal. And what of the ‘innocent civilians’? If
Hamas clings on to power it will reinforce it brutally and ruthlessly as it
always does. If not, it can be easily replaced by other equally brutal Islamic
terrorist factions keen to fill its place.
The Palestinian movement has not earned peace. It must show
that it wants more than survival, more than revenge, more than martyrdom. That
it wants a future. Until then, no agreement, no photo-op, no negotiated phrase
can promise stability, even if the hostages come home for now.
In the days ahead, we will see weeping and celebration,
heartbreak and healing. The hostages will come home, and with them, untold
stories of horror and survival. We will also see funerals. Some will return
dead. Some, not at all, for the Palestinian terrorists are likely to stall and
lie at every possible opportunity and ensure the pain is dragged out. It is
unlikely they will truly give up every last hostage.
No single agreement can reverse decades of indoctrination
and incitement. No single gesture can dismantle the machinery of hatred that
has ruled Palestinian political life and ideology for generations. In the days
ahead, Israel will witness scenes that test the limits of the human heart.
There will be reunions so overwhelming they will shake the nation to its core,
and losses so final that no agreement on earth can soften them.
But even as we embrace the living, we must not ignore what
else this deal unleashes. Celebrations erupt in Gaza not just for the return of
prisoners, but for the return of convicted murderers, some of them architects
of massacres, now welcomed home as heroes. It is a decision made under
unbearable moral pressure, and one that may come to stain the future with fresh
blood.
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