Ceasefire deal in the Middle East, but where to now?

Is the start of a ceasefire the end of a conflict? History says only sometimes. In the Middle East, in particular, permanency is a fluid concept. Within the announcement this week of a Gaza ceasefire exist myriad obstacles to a genuine end to the violence. The foundations of peace rest on reconciling seemingly irreconcilable interests, and building a 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 cabinet oppose the agreement. Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said his Jewish Power party would quit the coalition if a deal went ahead.

Palestinian children play among the rubble of the Khan Younis neighbourhood in the Gaza Strip last month.Credit: AP

Senior 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.

Israel, however, can argue it has had some success in this area. In the 15 months since Hamas massacred more than 1200 people in southern Israel and took more than 250 people hostage, Israel has killed Hamas’ fighters and leaders, including its head in Gaza. It has inflicted damage on a large section of Hezbollah in Lebanon and weakened Iran’s regional standing.

But, in doing so, it has also killed 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 arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former minister of defence, Yoav Gallant, for alleged war crimes.

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, hope will seep into the air. Israel will withdraw its forces from populated areas of Gaza. Hamas will begin releasing Israeli hostages.

Palestinians this week celebrate the imminent announcement of a ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel.Credit: AP

The first 33 will include women, the elderly and the wounded; three on Sunday, four on the seventh day and then three every seven days, and 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.

US Secretary of State 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.

On the truce, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said: “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.”

Supporters of Israeli hostages demand their release from Hamas during a rally in Tel Aviv, Israel this week.Credit: Reuters

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.”

The federal government on Friday announced $106 million in funding to toughen measures against extremists and terrorists. As the pro-Palestinian protests and the antisemitism attacks have shown that Australia, and other countries, are no longer a distant shore from the centre of the crisis. We are all neighbours.

With the pause in the fighting, will it also ease the animosity festering in our cities?

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