Gaza ceasefire deal hits critical moment

Where next? The first six-week phase of the Gaza ceasefire ends on Saturday.

The 42 days since 19 January have seen their fair share of uncertainty, hope, grief and anger, but everything that should have happened in that time has.

Israeli hostages – the living and the dead – have been released. Palestinian prisoners set free.

But negotiations on phase two, including the release of all remaining living hostages and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, have barely begun.

Talks opened in Cairo on Friday but Israel’s delegation returned home in the evening.

Reports suggested that negotiations would continue “at a distance” and that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was due to hold late-night talks with the delegation, senior ministers and intelligence chiefs.

For such a meeting to take place late on the sabbath was highly unusual. But as of mid-morning on Saturday, no details have been released.

Israel appears to be looking to extend the current phase for another six weeks, to get more hostages back and release more Palestinian prisoners but without withdrawing its troops.

The government here is adamant that Hamas, the group responsible for the massacres of 7 October 2023 and the taking of 251 hostages, has to lay down its arms and relinquish any form of authority in the Gaza Strip.

Israel also says it is not yet ready to leave the Philadelphi corridor along the Egypt-Gaza border – a process that should have begun on Saturday.

In a statement sent to reporters on Friday, an unnamed Israeli official said: “We will not allow the Hamas murderers to again roam our borders with pickup trucks and guns, and we will not allow them to rearm through smuggling.”

Such anonymous quotes are often believed to come directly from the prime minister’s office.

Last summer, efforts to secure a ceasefire in Gaza faltered when Netanyahu insisted on keeping Israeli troops stationed along the Philadelphi corridor.

On Friday night, Hamas said it would not agree to any extension of phase one without guarantees from American, Qatari and Egyptian mediators that phase two would eventually take place.

Hamas seems determined to remain a force in Gaza, even if it might be willing to hand over day-to-day governance to other Palestinian actors, including the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority.

Egypt has been working on a reconstruction plan for Gaza, as an alternative to Donald Trump’s proposal to take the area over and evacuate its entire civilian population.

But Western diplomats are not optimistic that the plan, due to be unveiled at an Arab League summit in Cairo next Tuesday, has the sort of robust security and governance arrangements that will be needed to meet Israeli demands.

This is a critical moment.

For all the emotional turmoil of the last few weeks, Israelis have come to expect the gradual release of hostages. There are believed to be 24 alive, still waiting to be freed, with another 39 presumed to be dead.

Israelis desperately want them all back, without the sort of propaganda displays that have disgusted and infuriated the entire country.

If the whole process now grinds to a halt, public anger – at Hamas and their own government – will mount. Further street protests are planned, including one on Saturday night in the place in Tel Aviv that all Israelis now know as Hostages Square.

“We demand the return of all 59 remaining hostages by day 50 of the agreement,” reads the invitation from the Hostages and Missing Families Forum HQ.

“Now is our only window of opportunity – we won’t get another.”

UN Secretary General António Guterres has weighed in, urging the parties “to spare no effort to avoid a breakdown of this deal”.

There’s a widespread belief that, sooner or later, the war will begin again.

It’s a bleak prospect, for the hostages and for two million Palestinians in Gaza who are trying to put their lives back together in the current, fragile peace.

In a place where families are still digging bodies from the rubble, sometimes with their bare hands, the thought of a resumption of a conflict which has already claimed tens of thousands of lives is chilling.

Areas in the middle of the Gaza Strip that have so far escaped the worst of the conflict would likely suffer badly from any return to war, making it even harder to sustain life in this ravaged strip of land.