A ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect today, beginning the first phase of an agreement intended to pause more than fifteen months of war in Gaza and secure the release of Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Under the first stage, fighting is supposed to stop for 42 days, Israeli forces will withdraw from some populated areas, humanitarian assistance will increase substantially and Hamas is expected to release 33 Israeli hostages over the course of the phase while Israel releases hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Three Israeli hostages were released today and transferred through the Red Cross, while Palestinians displaced by the fighting have begun moving through devastated areas of Gaza. The immediate humanitarian importance is enormous. Yet the agreement should not be confused with a peace settlement. It is better understood as a temporary change in incentives: both sides have concluded, for now, that pausing the war produces more value than continuing it. The central question is whether that calculation survives once the first hostages and prisoners have been exchanged.
Ceasefires are difficult because war itself changes bargaining power. Israel possesses overwhelming conventional military superiority and has severely degraded Hamas’s military infrastructure and leadership. Hamas nevertheless retains hostages, fighters and enough organisational capacity to survive as a political-military actor. Each side therefore controls something the other wants. Israel can impose enormous military costs but cannot recover every hostage through force without risking their lives. Hamas cannot defeat Israel militarily but can use hostages and its continued survival as bargaining assets. The agreement emerges from this asymmetric interdependence: actors with radically unequal military power can still possess leverage over one another when they control different scarce assets.
Hostages are particularly powerful bargaining instruments because their political value greatly exceeds their numerical significance. Israel is a country of roughly ten million people, yet the fate of individual hostages has become a central national political issue. Families know their names, faces and histories. Demonstrations demanding a deal have repeatedly mobilised large crowds. This creates a concentrated political preference: the benefit of securing one hostage is distributed intensely among families and a wider public that identifies with them, while many of the strategic costs of concessions are more diffuse and uncertain.
Hamas understands this.
That does not make hostage-taking legitimate. Deliberately abducting civilians is prohibited under international humanitarian law. It explains why the tactic creates leverage despite Hamas’s military inferiority.
The prisoner releases create a different political calculation for Israel. Some Palestinians being released have been convicted of serious offences, while others were detained under different legal circumstances. Israeli security officials therefore need to consider whether released prisoners could eventually return to militant activity. The government is effectively exchanging a known immediate benefit — returning hostages — for an uncertain future security cost.
This is a classic intertemporal trade-off.
The political pressure naturally favours the immediate identifiable person.
Future risk is probabilistic.
Governments routinely struggle with this distinction because citizens value visible lives differently from statistical ones.
A hostage returning home appears on television.
A future attack prevented because one prisoner remained incarcerated is invisible.
This does not mean governments should ignore future risk.
It explains why negotiations involving hostages become emotionally and politically different from ordinary strategic bargaining.
For Palestinians in Gaza, the ceasefire has a different immediate meaning: survival and access to basic necessities. More than a year of Israeli military operations following the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks, in which around 1,200 people were killed in Israel and roughly 250 taken hostage, has devastated much of Gaza. Palestinian health authorities report tens of thousands killed during the subsequent war, while enormous numbers of residents have been displaced and infrastructure has been destroyed. Whatever arguments continue over military responsibility, proportionality and casualty measurement, the physical destruction is unmistakable.
The ceasefire therefore creates a humanitarian opportunity whose value increases with every day it survives.
Food can enter.
Hospitals can receive supplies.
Water infrastructure can be repaired.
Families can locate relatives.
Humanitarian organisations can operate with lower immediate risk.
But humanitarian recovery and political settlement are not the same process.
A truck entering Gaza today does not answer who governs Gaza next year.
That is the central unresolved question.
Israel’s stated war objective has included destroying Hamas’s military and governing capabilities. Yet Hamas representatives negotiated this ceasefire and its fighters have appeared publicly during hostage transfers. The organisation therefore remains sufficiently coherent to implement agreements.
This creates an uncomfortable strategic fact.
Israel has severely weakened Hamas.
It has not eliminated Hamas as an organisation.
The distinction matters because military degradation is continuous while political elimination is binary.
A military can destroy 70% of an adversary’s capabilities and call that substantial success.
A government promising that the adversary will no longer govern needs an answer to who governs instead.
That replacement problem has remained unresolved throughout the war.
The Palestinian Authority could theoretically play a larger role, but it suffers from weak legitimacy and limited control even in parts of the West Bank. Israel strongly distrusts aspects of its leadership. Arab governments are reluctant to administer Gaza indefinitely without a credible political pathway towards Palestinian statehood. Israeli military occupation would impose enormous long-term security, fiscal and diplomatic costs.
The absence of a replacement creates political regeneration space for Hamas.
An armed organisation survives partly because institutions around it remain weak.
If Gaza eventually possesses functioning policing, administration, reconstruction and political representation independent of Hamas, the organisation’s monopoly over resistance and social organisation can weaken.
If Gaza remains devastated and politically ungoverned, Hamas or another armed movement has fertile conditions for recruitment.
This is why reconstruction is security policy.
A teenager with education, employment and political participation faces different incentives from one growing up among destroyed infrastructure, displacement and permanent military confrontation.
That does not mean poverty automatically causes terrorism.
It means political and economic environments affect recruitment opportunity.
Military force can suppress organisations.
Stable institutions reduce the demand and space through which they regenerate.
The agreement’s phased structure reflects this uncertainty. The first phase secures only a temporary cessation and partial hostage release. Negotiations over the second phase are supposed to address remaining hostages, further Israeli withdrawal and a more durable end to fighting.
This is sequenced bargaining.
Instead of requiring both sides to solve every disagreement before receiving any benefit, the agreement creates smaller exchanges.
Hamas releases some hostages.
Israel releases prisoners and reduces military operations.
Humanitarian aid increases.
Both sides then decide whether compliance makes further cooperation worthwhile.
Sequencing helps solve commitment problems because neither side needs to trust the other completely at the beginning.
The weakness is equally clear.
After receiving benefits from phase one, either side can decide that proceeding to phase two is no longer optimal.
Israel could conclude that renewed military operations provide a better route towards eliminating Hamas.
Hamas could conclude that retaining remaining hostages provides more leverage than releasing them.
The agreement therefore contains a backward-induction problem.
If each side expects the other eventually to defect, cooperation earlier becomes harder.
External guarantors are supposed to reduce this problem.
Qatar, Egypt and the United States played central roles in mediating the agreement because each possesses leverage unavailable to the combatants alone. Qatar maintains channels with Hamas. Egypt controls an important border relationship and fears instability spilling across Sinai. The United States possesses enormous influence over Israel through military, diplomatic and economic support.
Mediators matter because they can alter the payoff from defection.
Break the agreement and diplomatic support can decline.
Comply and reconstruction financing, security guarantees or political concessions can become available.
This is third-party enforcement without formal enforcement authority.
Nobody can guarantee compliance completely.
They can make compliance more valuable.
The timing is politically remarkable because the ceasefire begins one day before Donald Trump returns to the White House. The outgoing Biden administration conducted months of negotiations, while Trump’s incoming team also pressured parties to complete a deal before inauguration.
Both administrations therefore have incentives to claim credit.
The more interesting point is that diplomatic continuity across rival American administrations may have increased leverage.
Israel and Hamas knew that waiting for a completely different US policy might not eliminate pressure for an agreement.
This is a rare example where bipartisan strategic signalling can strengthen bargaining power.
Foreign actors exploit American political transitions when they expect policy reversal.
Continuity removes that option.
Netanyahu faces particularly difficult domestic politics because members of his governing coalition oppose ending the war while Hamas survives. Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir resigned from the government over the ceasefire, arguing that the agreement concedes too much.
This creates a tension between coalition survival and national bargaining strategy.
A prime minister may believe a ceasefire is strategically necessary while coalition partners believe continued war better serves their objectives.
Parliamentary politics therefore enters battlefield calculations.
If Netanyahu needs support from parties demanding renewed fighting, the credibility of Israeli commitments to later phases becomes weaker.
Hamas will account for that.
Likewise, Israeli negotiators need to ask whether Hamas leadership can control all armed factions inside Gaza. An agreement signed by leaders matters only if fighters on the ground obey it.
This is the principal-agent problem of ceasefires.
A spoiler does not need to defeat the agreement politically.
It can fire one rocket, attack one patrol or provoke retaliation.
The other side then needs to decide whether the violation represents central policy or unauthorised action.
If every local violation collapses the agreement, spoilers possess enormous power.
Successful ceasefires therefore need procedures for distinguishing breach from breakdown.
One incident should trigger investigation and correction before automatically triggering renewed war.
That requires communication channels precisely when trust is lowest.
The same principle has governed nuclear deterrence and interstate armistices for decades.
Hotlines exist because ambiguity kills agreements.
The humanitarian side also requires verification. Hundreds of aid trucks are expected to enter Gaza daily during the ceasefire. Their distribution needs to avoid diversion while reaching civilians rapidly. Israel worries that Hamas can appropriate resources and rebuild. Humanitarian agencies warn that excessive restrictions can prevent aid reaching populations facing severe shortages.
Again, the objective is dual:
increase civilian welfare without rebuilding military capability.
That is administratively difficult but not impossible.
Monitoring, distribution networks and international oversight can reduce diversion.
The larger reconstruction problem will be far more difficult because Gaza requires enormous quantities of cement, steel, machinery and money — exactly the kinds of dual-use materials Israel fears could support tunnel and military reconstruction.
Every apartment building requires materials that can also build fortifications.
This is the dual-use reconstruction dilemma.
Restrict materials heavily and civilian reconstruction becomes impossible.
Permit them freely and military diversion risk increases.
The solution requires governance and monitoring institutions strong enough that Israel does not need to choose between those extremes.
Again, everything returns to the question of who governs Gaza.
This is why a ceasefire can stop violence without resolving the political system producing violence.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains fundamentally a conflict over territory, sovereignty and security.
Israel wants assurance that a Palestinian territory cannot become a platform for attacks like 7 October.
Palestinians want political rights and an end to permanent occupation and displacement.
Neither objective disappears because shooting pauses for six weeks.
The two-state solution remains internationally supported precisely because it attempts to reconcile those claims through separate political sovereignty combined with security arrangements.
Its feasibility has become much harder.
Israeli settlement expansion has fragmented the West Bank.
Palestinian political institutions are divided.
Israeli public trust after 7 October collapsed.
Palestinian trust after Gaza’s destruction has collapsed further.
The problem therefore is not merely designing borders.
It is creating credible commitments.
Israel asks: what prevents a future Palestinian state from becoming another security threat?
Palestinians ask: what prevents temporary Israeli security control from becoming permanent occupation?
Each side’s proposed safeguard appears to the other as the mechanism through which its worst fear could occur.
That is why external guarantees may eventually be unavoidable.
Arab states could participate in reconstruction and security.
The United States and Europe could provide economic and diplomatic guarantees.
A reformed Palestinian political structure could provide administration.
Israel could receive monitoring and security arrangements.
None works without a political horizon.
Reconstruction without political change risks rebuilding the conditions for another war.
Political promises without security mechanisms will not persuade Israelis after 7 October.
The ceasefire therefore should be treated as strategic breathing room, not resolution.
Its success should initially be measured modestly.
Do hostages return?
Do prisoners transfer according to the agreement?
Does aid increase?
Do displaced civilians move without being attacked?
Do both sides distinguish minor violations from total collapse?
Does phase-two negotiation actually begin?
Those are meaningful achievements.
A ceasefire surviving one day creates the possibility of surviving two.
Repeated compliance changes expectations.
This is how trust sometimes begins — not through sudden reconciliation but through iterated evidence that agreements can work.
The reverse is also true.
One major breach can restore the expectation that only force produces security.
That is why the next six weeks matter disproportionately.
Israel and Hamas have spent fifteen months demonstrating how much damage each can impose.
The agreement creates a brief opportunity to demonstrate something strategically different:
that restraint can produce benefits force cannot.
For Israelis, that benefit is hostages returning alive.
For Palestinians, it is survival, aid and the possibility of rebuilding.
For regional governments, it is reducing the probability that Gaza continues feeding escalation across Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and the wider Middle East.
Those benefits are real.
Whether they become durable depends on solving the question the war itself could not answer.
What political order makes another war less useful than preserving the peace?
Until there is an answer, every ceasefire remains temporary by default.
Today is therefore important.
But it is not the end of the conflict.
It is the beginning of a test.
For fifteen months, both sides repeatedly concluded that continuing the war was preferable to accepting the available bargain.
Today, for the first time in a long time, they concluded otherwise.
The challenge is making tomorrow’s calculation produce the same answer.
