
On the evening of 15 January, a wave of relief seemed to sweep through what is known as “Hostages Square” in central Tel Aviv. Apart from at least a dozen foreign and national TV correspondents and their camera crews, the square was packed with relatives of the Israeli hostages as well as other Israelis who had come out in solidarity. There was music, people were deep in dialogue, people were comforting one another. They seemed to have a sense that the most nerve-wracking part was just beginning.
Gil Shohat directs the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Tel Aviv Office.
The visuals of the hostages being released have since gone around the world: the still incredulous, relieved families of the three Israeli hostages, finally able to embrace their loved ones in the hospital after more than 470 days. In Ramallah and elsewhere in the West Bank, we saw entire coaches full of women and youths arriving from Israeli prisons (especially Ofer Prison, close to Ramallah) to a jubilant welcome in the centre of the city. These images conveyed a faint glimmer of hope that, in spite or even because of the immense destruction over the last 15 months, there might be a pause for breath in these existential times marked by death, trauma, and a void of political perspective.
Since the deal began, the past two weeks in Israel have been defined by a mix of nerve-wracking tension, national uproar and self-affirmation, as well as relief, grief, and rage. This was when the first two phases of the plan for an exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners were being implemented: on 19 January, three Israeli hostages, all civilians, were freed, and 90 Palestinians were released from Israeli prisons in exchange, all of them women and youths. The following Saturday saw the release of four Israeli soldiers who had been kidnapped from the base in Nahal Oz at the border of the Gaza Strip in exchange for 200 Palestinian prisoners (some of whom were immediately deported, such as those directly responsible for suicide bombings in Israel during the Second Intifada).
In recent months, the Israeli media has turned those four female soldiers into a symbol of the neglect that left forces stationed close to the Gaza border totally exposed to the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, while multiple battalions had been transferred away from the border in order to provide security for “messianic“ settlers in the West Bank. For all the justifiable joy at the release of these four young women from captivity, their return to Israel led to yet another demonstration of the current yearning among many in Israel for national self-affirmation and confirmation of their own moral superiority over the Palestinians — a phenomenon that is also being fuelled by the media. The suffering of the Palestinians, and the immense destruction and death that Israel has inflicted on them in Gaza and the West Bank as well as within its own borders in pursuit of the war, have been and continue to be almost completely ignored.
Internal and External Pressure
After the massacre on 7 October and over 15 months of brutal warfare between Israel and Hamas, in which (according to conservative estimates) more than 47,500 lives have been lost, around 45,900 Palestinians and some 1,700 Israelis, the current ceasefire agreement provides for a gradual cessation of hostilities. In the first stage, Hamas is to release 33 Israelis (soldiers and civilians) in exchange for between 30 and 50 Palestinians from Israeli prisons. Israel will also allow the return of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip.
The first days of the ceasefire made clear what opening the border crossings makes possible: some 650 trucks a day have been able to bring in desperately needed humanitarian aid and supplies, so far without these goods being subject to significant looting. Moreover, since 28 January, hundreds of thousands of forcibly displaced Palestinians have been able to return to their homes in the north of the Gaza Strip. Talks for the second and third phases of the truce have already begun. By the end of the first phase, all 98 Israeli hostages (including those murdered in captivity) are supposed to have returned home, and, following the same ratio as the first exchange, Israel will release Palestinian prisoners — among them convicted terrorists, but also numerous women and youths as well, many of whom have been held in administrative custody for years, having been arrested on no charge.
The first days of the ceasefire made clear what opening the border crossings makes possible: some 650 trucks a day have been able to bring in desperately needed humanitarian aid and supplies.
Three central questions are on the minds of many people in Israel, although from different perspectives and with different emphases. First: Why is the ceasefire plan only being implemented now? According to media reports, the plan has existed since last May. Worked out in its basics by then US President Joe Biden, it had to wait eight months and for around 12,000 more Palestinians to be killed before it was implemented. Was it really the so-called “Trump factor“ — the naked threats made by the then former and now newly re-elected US president, that if no deal were reached before he took office on 20 January ”all hell will break loose“ in the region? Notwithstanding the fact that for Palestinians in Gaza, and for the relatives of the Israeli hostages and those murdered by Hamas on 7 October, reality has already been a kind of hell for some time now. There are strong suggestions that it was in fact the pressure from Trump’s new Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, that brought Netanyahu around to agreeing to Biden’s May 2024 plan.
Israel’s Ambitions in the West Bank
Or was it internal political pressure from Israeli society — the months of protests by the families of the hostages, the relaunched corruption proceedings against Netanyahu, the swelling number of Israeli casualties in Gaza — that tipped the balance? It is a fact that in recent months public support in Israel for a hostage deal through a ceasefire with Gaza has grown steadily. According to current polls, public approval for the present deal, in all its stages and with the associated release of all Israeli hostages (dead or alive), hovers at around 70 percent. Even the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, the largest association of Israeli hostage families, now officially argues that there can be no end to the war without the release of the hostages, and the hostages cannot be released without an end to the war.
If the answer to the first question is that, in the end, it was likely a combination of both US pressure and pressure from within Israel that forced the political gambler Netanyahu to take this step, then it also becomes clear just how much uncertainty surrounds the answer to the second big question: Will the deal last? Its opponents within the Israeli government, clustered around the extreme-right messianic fundamentalists Itamar Ben-Gvir (now the former national security minister) and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, are putting massive pressure on Netanyahu. Unlike Ben-Gvir, Smotrich stayed in the government because of Netanyahu’s assurances that the war would resume once the first stage of the deal was complete. Smotrich has also likely been further placated by renewed IDF incursions into the Palestinian cities of Jenin and Tulkarm in the West Bank, a whole two days after the Gaza ceasefire began, as well as by the continued expulsion of Palestinians from the south of the West Bank by illegal Israeli settlers with IDF support.
All of this makes clear the fragility of Israeli compliance with the agreement’s three stages. Thus there are strident calls for the full implementation of the deal, both in the media as well as from the protest movement for the freeing of the hostages, which by now unanimously accepts the necessity of ending the war and began joining forces with broader anti-government protests months ago. The social movements and the media are both entirely cognisant of the fact that the Trump administration and its envoy, Steve Witkoff, have an interest in implementing all three stages of the hostage deal and in an enduring cease-fire.
No one knows whether the extreme-right, messianic forces within and outside the government will succeed in blocking the implementation of the current deal.
The answer to the second question concerning the deal’s viability will entirely determine the answer to the third central question of this moment: What happens next? Much has been written and said about “the day after” since the war began — often with blatant disregard for atrocities committed daily by the Israeli army, and for the additional wounds that will doubtless result from these and shape the fatefully intertwined and asymmetrical relationship between Palestinians and Israelis for generations to come. Since Trump took office, we have once again seen regional formulas being floated for an end to the conflict, which exhibits both a national and a colonial character.
At the same time, the US president has been airing plans for a population transfer of Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt and Jordan. Yet simultaneously, we see efforts from progressive segments of Israeli civil society and academia to develop perspectives for a peace policy out of this intolerable situation, which also constitutes an existential threat to Israel, and to disseminate these ideas among the Israeli population. Examples include the position paper “The Day That Is Now” by a group of intellectuals and regional academics led by Dr. Assaf David from Jerusalem’s Van Leer Institute, or the political mobilizations launched by initiatives like Peace Partnership or Standing Together.
The space for these more fundamental debates and ideas is limited in Israeli society given the daily drama — what dominates is the uncertainty of the weeks to come. No one knows whether the extreme-right, messianic forces within and outside the government will succeed in blocking the implementation of the current deal, or whether the deal’s advocates will be able to gain the upper hand with the emotional tailwind lent by every successfully freed Israeli hostage, as well as the force of international pressure. Only once this becomes clear will it be possible to gauge the political prospects for a region so persistently shaped by violence.
This article first appeared in analyse & kritik. Translated by Sam Langer and Alice Naomi Rodgers for Gegensatz Translation Collective.