Fragile ceasefire could still provide the mould for a longer peace

Diplomats will be hoping that both Israel and Hamas realise they have little to gain from continuing on a war footing

Palestine
A Palestinian man cries as he carries the body of his niece who was killed in an air strike on Gaza Credit: Mohammed Salem/Reuters

There could hardly be a more fragile ceasefire than that announced in Gaza, but diplomats across the Middle East, America and Europe will be working flat out to try and mould it into a longer peace.

On the surface there is little cause for optimism. Despite the prospective release of 50 Israeli women and children and 150 Palestinians, the deal is shorn of the language of ideals and Israel has vowed to continue its offensive once the 4-5 day truce ends.

“We are at war, and the war will continue until all our goals are achieved,” said prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of the Israeli cabinet meeting which approved the deal late on Tuesday night.

But the realpolitik of the war in Gaza for both sides will provide diplomats with a chink from which they may be able to carve a more meaningful ceasefire; that together with the softening of hearts the release of so many people must surely bring.

Hamas, for its part, has taken a brutal pummelling. Forty-six days of airstrikes, artillery bombardment and close quarters combat has left its northern divisions in tatters and much of its vital infrastructure and leadership decimated.

Israel, too, must face reality, military and political. At the start of the conflict, it estimated there were 30,000-40,000 Hamas fighters in Gaza.

Smoke rises from northern Gaza following an air strike Credit: JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/Getty Images

It has since killed an estimated 14,000 people in its stated military objective of “ending” the organisation and its infrastructure in Gaza but, of those, just 4,300 were adult males, according to the Hamas controlled Gazan health authority.

The hard truth Israeli military strategists now face is this: for the most part, Hamas, like legions of terrorist insurgents before them, have stashed their grab-bags and vanished into the general population in the south of the Gaza strip.

Most will go unnoticed for what the vast majority of combatants the world over really are: poor and uneducated boys led by cultish thugs and grasping psychopaths.

Trying to kill them within a zone that Israel itself has asked civilians to move risks collateral damage on a scale that even the cold legal logic of proportionality in war would struggle to justify. The incremental military gain will be too slight to justify the likely civilian carnage.

Israel also has a unique humanitarian crisis on its hands, and one that could yet prove its undoing.

In most wars of the type being fought in Gaza, much of the potential humanitarian fallout is mitigated by people fleeing. But in Gaza, mass migration is not possible. Some 2.3 million people are sealed into a crowded hellhole into which only a trickle of food, water and power is currently flowing.

Israel’s hardmen like to say they don’t care what the world thinks when it comes to protecting the Jewish homeland. But if Gaza’s ragged millions start to starve or succumb to infectious diseases such as cholera and typhoid this winter it won’t be long before commentators like me start to recall the ghettos of Poland and Ukraine that our great grandparents died in.

Interestingly, it is from within the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) itself that these and other strategic worries are being most acutely felt.

The defence establishment in Israel maybe tough and disciplined but it is by no means the most right wing or reactionary of the country’s institutions.

Many of its soldiers have a deep empathy for their Palestinian neighbours. Moreover, their commanders know that there are limits to the usefulness of military action alone.

It is the Israeli defence establishment that has continued, over many years, to try and keep the idea of a long-term peace alive, and many within it are now looking to the country’s politicians to start pulling their weight in the current crisis.

“The military is a tool, we cannot be the only solution. We hope that in the coming days we will see more from the political and humanitarian sides,” one IDF officer told me on Tuesday.

But are Israel’s politicians up to the job? It is widely acknowledged that several cabinet ministers are no more than racist thugs and the interior minister has a long police charge sheet against his name.

Can these extremists, who were only on Monday accusing the families of Israel’s hostages of aiding Hamas, be held in check long enough to allow a longer peace to be negotiated, or might the country be sucked into an counterinsurgency and humanitarian disaster in Gaza that it cannot win?

In security terms alone, the Americans and many within Israel’s defence establishment will see that such an outcome would leave the country dangerously exposed to Hezbollah on its northern border.

But even that – something which without US assistance could prove genuinely existential – may not be enough for the country’s Messianic right.

We must hope that cooler heads prevail.