Can Israel and Hamas co-exist? Trump’s ceasefire depends on it

After months of grim bloodshed there seems to be some movement. On Friday night, Hamas said it was “seriously ready” to discuss a ceasefire. Whether it is ready to resolve the conflict by trading all remaining hostages in return for a lasting peace and thousands of prisoners remains unclear.

President Trump, always quick with an upbeat take on international negotiations, said: “There could be a Gaza deal next week.” He will meet Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, on Monday and has said he will be “very firm” about the need to end the conflict.

As this chatter went on, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) had already mounted days of heavy strikes, probably an attempt to force Hamas over the line. And indeed, it was only late last week that the Palestinian Islamist group signalled it was open to discussions, apparently overcoming a deep-seated scepticism after the collapse of two previous ceasefires.

An Israeli strike on Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on Saturday FADEL A A ALMAGHARI/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES

“Although Hamas has been severely degraded and much of its leadership eliminated,” says Hasan Alhasan, senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, “it’s difficult to see how Israel can apply any more pressure to the group.”

Israel’s military response to the attack of October 7, 2023 — destroying the Hamas-led paramilitary organisation that had carried out the massacre — was effectively complete by early last summer. It probably accounted for the death or capture of most of the 25,000 militants serving at the start of war.

Yet its success — achieved at the cost of thousands of civilian deaths — was temporary. Unable to end the conflict without collapsing Israel’s governing coalition, Netanyahu cut troop levels and Hamas began to regenerate.

By the time of the second ceasefire, intelligence assessments put the group’s strength back at 15,000 to 20,000.

Meanwhile, Israel had eliminated its senior leadership, including three men cited by the International Criminal Court for possible war crimes: Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s overall leader in Gaza; Mohammed Deif, its military commander; and Ismail Haniyeh, its exiled political leader, assassinated in Tehran by Mossad.

Sinwar was Hamas’s leader in Gaza MOHAMMED SALEM/REUTERS

When the January cessation began, the group attempted to deal with tensions within the Palestinian community by a combination of propaganda — stage-managed hostage releases — and coercion. Beatings increased, as did executions of those rebelling against Hamas’s rule and blaming the group for dragging the people of Gaza into a disastrous war.

Israel’s answer to the question of how to put Hamas under additional pressure involved launching a huge military operation in mid-May to reoccupy most of the Gaza Strip and further squeeze relief operations. Israeli politicians generally deny using aid as a weapon, since it takes them into legally fraught territory. However, security officials have privately expressed their aim as being to free the Israeli hostages and bring about the eviction of the Palestinian militant leadership by ratcheting up pressure on ordinary citizens.

Their have some anti-Hamas protests by Palestinians, including in Beit Lahiya in March REUTERS

Given Gaza is hardly a democracy, and Hamas relies in part on coercion to exercise control, this strategy has clear limitations. But the Israeli argument is that it produced the two previous ceasefires that freed the great majority of its citizens being held in the strip.

Now, Israel says, harsh measures have brought Gaza’s rulers to the table again. Hamas “is certainly weaker”, says Colonel Eran Lerner, a military intelligence veteran now at the Jerusalem Institute for Security and Strategy, citing the reoccupation of large parts of Gaza and shattering of the command structure. But, he concedes, “still they are persistent enough to be able to impose their authority on the people of Gaza, and the holding of the hostages gives them great leverage”.

With new talks in prospect, what happened in March, when Israel abandoned the previous phased deal and resumed operations, stands as a significant obstacle.

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Thus, the Trump team’s talk of a 60-day truce, during which a further ten hostages (out of an estimated two dozen still alive) would be released, appears to the Palestinian leadership to be an invitation to repeat exactly what happened at the start of this year. So, the Hamas spokesman Taher al-Nunu insisted last week that the movement was “ready to accept any initiative that clearly leads to the complete end to the war”.

For Hamas, there has always been an understanding that its survival is linked to the terms on which it surrenders the final hostages. And, while negotiations have explored such subjects as getting the top tier of the leadership to leave Gaza, or forming a broad-based administration to run the enclave, the group has tried to do everything possible to keep its cadres intact for the day after this war.

The judgment now of whether satisfactory terms can be achieved will rest mainly with Izz al-Din al-Haddad, Hamas’s surviving leader in Gaza. Also known as Abu Suhaib or the “Ghost of Qassam”, Haddad is a man whose rise up the chain of command has involved successive steps into dead men’s shoes.

Izz al-Din al-Haddad seen in a video in 2022

Thus in 2021 he succeeded the assassinated commander of the Gaza City brigade, in November 2023 took charge of the northern part of the strip, when another leader was slain, and in May this year of the whole organisation, after an airstrike killed Mohammed Sinwar, who had himself stepped into his brother Yahya’s place. Attempts this year to kill Haddad, a senior commander on October 7, took the lives of two of his sons.

Haddad’s home patch, in the north of the strip, was long regarded by the Israelis as Hamas’s main stronghold. Consequently, the north, and Gaza City, have been subjected to the most intense military action of the past 20 months. Much of the population is now dispersed in the tented camps of the Al-Mawasi humanitarian zone on the coast.

Haddad owes his position to good fortune — or divine providence, as his supporters might see it — and his ability to maintain a grip on the remaining Israeli hostages. Released captives speak of the close personal interest Haddad took in them, with visits where he spoke to them in Hebrew. He will not want to surrender this card unless he is confident his movement will survive.

Israeli demonstrators plead for President Trump to help secure the release of Hamas’s hostages JACK GUEZ/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

So the word is that Trump’s people are trying to convince Hamas that the 60-day ceasefire will work this time as the opening phase of a comprehensive deal that ends the bloodshed. For their part, the Israelis acknowledge they cannot eradicate support for the Islamist movement, which, as Lerner puts it, may carry on, “as long as [Hamas] are disarmed as a fighting organisation, and no longer in power”.

This is not simply an Israeli demand. “Hamas’s crackdown on dissent is intensifying,” Moumen al-Natour, a Palestinian dissident and co-founder of the We Want to Live movement, wrote last week in the The Jewish Chronicle. “As soon as the ceasefire is announced, Hamas militants will rise from their tunnels, hungry for revenge.”

Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, bitterly opposed to the movement and its Muslim Brotherhood allies elsewhere in the region, also favour removing Hamas from power. But the issue is whether the group’s political survival also allows it to retain a coercive hold.

Qatar, having given a home to the Hamas leadership for years, has hitherto sought to ensure the movement’s survival. Majed al-Ansari, Qatar’s foreign affairs spokesman, effectively echoed the Palestinian movement’s demands when he said late last month: “We are trying to find that sustainable process that would bring us to lasting peace in the region.”

But since the Iran-Israel war, Qatar’s position may have shifted, Alhasan believes “the key Arab states are mostly aligned on the need to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and put Israel off its current war footing in the hope of lowering tensions across the region”.

Hamas fighters prepare to hand over Israeli hostages during a previous ceasefire in January OMAR AL-QATTAA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

So there may be a window of opportunity to halt the Gaza conflict. But the questions of who would dominate any post-conflict broad-based authority in Gaza, and who would provide its security muscle, remain vexed, to say the least.

The killing in recent weeks of hundreds of people at aid points set up by the Israelis to break the militants’ hold over food supplies serves as a grim portent. As desperate Gazans have rushed in, security contractors hired to protect the sites, Israeli troops, Palestinian tribal gangs and Hamas itself have all ended up with blood on their hands.

Gazans mourn relatives killed while waiting for humanitarian aid KHAMES ALREFI/ANADOLU/GETTY IMAGES

Some believe a lawless, divided enclave where the IDF can operate at will is precisely what Netanyahu wants. But for those who will be asked to invest in rebuilding the place, from the Gulf states to Europe, that will hardly be acceptable. They will want security, though until now have proved reluctant to commit forces to guarantee that future stability.

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All of these challenges await the would-be peacemakers — and that is before we even look at the business of whether the currently constituted Israeli coalition could agree to a long-term peace deal, or whether Netanyahu will have to call an election to form such an administration. Given the disappointments of previous attempts, it’s best not to get ahead of ourselves.

The questions for next week will centre on whether the combination of bitter hardships in Gaza and White House guarantees are enough to convince Hamas to deliver. If it does, both the US and Israel will have to ask themselves just how much of a Hamas presence they can live with in the enclave after the guns have fallen silent.