Israel reached a ceasefire in Lebanon. Why does Gaza seem so hard?
Biden wants to use the momentum to get a ceasefire in Gaza before he leaves office on Jan. 20.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Joe Biden meet on July 25, 2024. (Amos Ben-Gershom/Israeli Government Press Office)
(JTA) — WASHINGTON — After announcing a ceasefire deal on the Israel-Lebanon border, President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had sharply different takes on what might happen next in the Gaza Strip.
The divide between the two men is the same one that’s existed for months: Biden wants to use the momentum from the Lebanon deal to reach a ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza before he leaves office. Netanyahu also wants to end the Gaza war — but by eliminating Hamas militarily.
Which one is likely to happen? Analysts say the answer is neither.
Unlike with the fighting in Lebanon, they say the war in Gaza is likely to continue, even if it is at a simmer. That’s both because a ceasefire would have to include the release of hostages held by the terror group, which makes reaching a deal more complicated — and because there’s no longer a clear leader of Hamas who could sign off an agreement.
“Is there anyone left to make a deal with in Gaza? Who is in charge?” said Barbara Slavin, a distinguished fellow at The Stimson Center think tank. “Hamas hasn’t even named a new leader, for obvious reasons, because they figure Israel would kill that person.”
Israel is widely assumed to have killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July; it then killed the terror group’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, in October. Now, it’s not clear where the remnant of Hamas’s leadership lives, particularly amid reports that Qatar was expelling Hamas leaders who had sheltered there.
“Where the hell are they?” Slavin said. “Are they in Turkey? Are they in Egypt? Are they in Saudi Arabia?”
Still, the ceasefire in the north shows that a prospect that has at times felt remote — a negotiated end to fighting on one of Israel’s fronts — is in fact possible. So, despite the fact that nearly a year of intensive U.S. efforts toward a Gaza ceasefire have failed to bear fruit, Biden said on Tuesday that he wants to try again.
He repeated the same formula he and his administration have put forward for months: an end to the fighting, a release of the approximately 100 Israeli hostages held by Hamas, and a cascade of humanitarian aid into Gaza.
There was a weeklong ceasefire and release of more than 100 hostages one year ago, about six weeks after Hamas invaded Israel, killing some 1,200 and taking more than 250 captive, and a month into Israel’s response on the ground. Since then, negotiations have repeatedly stalled, an impasse Biden has mostly blamed on Hamas, as he did again this week.
“Now Hamas has a choice to make,” the outgoing president said on the White House lawn, after emerging to praise Israel and Lebanon for taking the deal his team brokered. “Their only way out is to release the hostages, including American citizens which they hold, and, in the process, bring an end to the fighting, which would make possible a surge of humanitarian relief.”
But in his own remarks, Netanyahu did not appear eager for a ceasefire in Gaza, where Israel appears to have crushed much of Hamas’ fighting force in a war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of Israeli soldiers.
“We are of course committed to completing the annihilation of Hamas,” Netanyahu said in announcing his endorsement of the deal, prior to his cabinet’s affirming the deal. One of three reasons he agreed to the ceasefire, he said, “is to separate the fronts and isolate Hamas. From day two of the war, Hamas was counting on Hezbollah to fight by its side. With Hezbollah out of the picture, Hamas is left on its own.”
Slavin said Hezbollah’s enduring power made a ceasefire in Lebanon an attractive prospect for Israel. What remains of Hamas’ organized forces is unclear, but it was apparent this week that Hezbollah remains intact, if diminished — and that it is still capable of firing missiles at Israel.
On Monday, shortly before agreeing to the deal, the terrorist group kept millions of Israelis in their shelters for portions of the day as it barraged the country with 250 missiles.
“There’s no way they can get rid of all the rockets that Hezbollah has had squirreled away for all this time,” Slavin said, referring to reports that Hezbollah has stockpiled more than 120,000 missiles since its 2006 war with Israel. “So if they want peace and quiet in the north, they have to make a deal.”
The Biden negotiator who brokered the deal with Lebanon, Amos Hochstein, conveyed a similar message on Wednesday. In an online presentation for the American Jewish community, he said that the two wars were different because it was never a realistic goal for Israel to destroy Hezbollah, and Israel has not evinced much interest in keeping its soldiers in Lebanon.
He added that Israel’s true adversary in the war was Iran, Hezbollah’s sponsor.
“In Lebanon, the goal was never a full dismantling of Hezbollah,” he said. “As you all know, Israel does not have territorial claims to Lebanon. And the war itself was not between Israel and Lebanon. It was a war between Israel and Hezbollah, or a war between Israel and Iran fought by Hezbollah.”
David Schenker, a Lebanon expert and senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that Netanyahu faces political pressures from the far-right flank of his coalition to remain in Gaza. Cabinet ministers such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir have talked of reestablishing Israeli settlements there, with Smotrich saying recently that Israel should encourage “voluntary’ Palestinian emigration from the enclave to clear the way for “civilian authority” there.
That’s a far cry from Biden’s preference, which is to give the Palestinian Authority, which governs Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, a role in Gaza’s postwar leadership. Keeping the war going, Schenker said, allows Netanyahu to avoid talking about the so-called “day after.”
“He’s got coalition partners who want to settle Gaza, to recolonize Gaza,” Schenker said. “He’s got coalition partners, himself included, who have no interest in seeing the Palestinian Authority play a role.”
Schenker added, “If he wraps up [the Gaza] war, there may also be discussions in many quarters about how to reengage in the political track with the Palestinians, something that this coalition has little interest in pursuing.”
Hochstein, Biden’s negotiator, said in the call that Hamas may be more amenable to a ceasefire now that Hezbollah is out of the game.
“Here’s the deal, they will wake up this morning at 4 a.m. with Hezbollah, that used to be actively supportive of Hamas in the northern front, cutting a deal and ending that conflict,” he said. “And Israel is now not distracted by two fronts. It is fighting a one-front war, and there’s no cavalry coming from the north anymore for Hamas.”
David Makovsky, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute who specializes in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said that scenario did not seem likely: Pressure on Hamas has so far not forced it to soften its negotiating positions.
“I’m hearing stories that there are people on the inside from the [Hamas] military wing that are still calling the shots,” he said of Hamas’ Gaza leadership.”I think the hope was, after Sinwar was killed, that it would be just the external people, they might be more amenable to pressure from Qatar and the like. But certainly we didn’t see that shift happen in the latest round of hostage talks.”
Schenker said removing Lebanon from the equation would provide Israel with much-needed relief by easing pressure on its society and economy. Those same pressures don’t exist anymore when it comes to the fighting in Gaza, which is conducted by a smaller fighting force than it was at first.
In Lebanon “they required reserve troops to do this work,” he said. “I think in Gaza they can accomplish what they need to accomplish with the standing army. So there’s less of a tax on society and the economy.”
Jonathan Schanzer, the vice president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who has for decades tracked the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said Gaza may not be quiescent for the foreseeable future — but noted that Israel may not be focused on it anymore. Israelis, he said, may be more worried at this point about other regional actors — including militias in Yemen, Iraq and Syria that have joined Iran’s proxy war against Israel.
“I think the real question that I have right now is not so much Gaza, which could remain a low-intensity insurgency for months, if not years,” he said. “The real question is whether the Houthis [in Yemen], the militias in Iraq, the militias in Syria, whether the Iranian regime itself whether they all retreat, or whether this is just one front that goes quiet.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
