The war presents a new opportunity for a deal. Matthew Partridge reports
US president Joe Biden has said that the war between Israel and Hamas “might be close to a major turning point” following progress in negotiations, say Peter Baker and Michael Shear in The New York Times. A proposed agreement would halt Israel’s military operations in Gaza within a week in exchange for the release of at least some of the more than 100 hostages being held by Hamas. As well as pausing hostilities, any deal could form the bridge to a more lasting political settlement.
Easier said than done
It may seem an “unlikely time” for ambitious diplomacy, say Amy Mackinnon and Robbie Gramer in Foreign Policy magazine. The whole region is in turmoil following Hamas’s terrorist attack and Israel’s response. Biden, though, thinks the crisis could provide the opening for “an ambitious grand bargain” that leverages Israel’s more positive relations with Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, to push Israel and the Palestinians toward a permanent solution. This would involve security guarantees for Israel and a “clear and irreversible pathway to Palestinian statehood”.
Biden seems confident that both sides “may be open to compromise”, but those involved in the negotiations are less sure, says Emma Graham-Harrison in The Guardian. Officials from Israel, Hamas and Qatar agree that progress has been made, but they all say that a deal is “a long way off” and that “significant differences” between the two sides remain. Hamas, in particular, has said Biden’s words are “premature”. But even if a deal is agreed, there’s no guarantee it will succeed – a previous deal in November 2023 “lasted seven days before collapsing in acrimonious accusations of bad faith from both sides”.
Return of the two-state solution
Agreeing a deal, even for just a temporary ceasefire, may be particularly politically dangerous for the Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, says Neri Zilber in the Financial Times. Ultra-nationalists in his cabinet hold the whip hand, and have pledged that any deal they consider “reckless” would “lead to the dissolution of the government”. Given that Netanyahu and his Likud party have “cratered” in opinion polls in recent months, this puts Netanyahu in a position “where agreeing to a pause in the fighting and major Palestinian prisoner releases could end his time in power”, and leave him open to legal challenges
