WASHINGTON (news agencies) — On Monday, the fragile ceasefire in Gaza led to freedom for Israeli hostages and the release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. It was the culmination of a long and tortuous process — but it may, in the end, have been the easier part.
The coming weeks, months and years will require more than just rebuilding from the devastation that has left much of Gaza in ruins. Key details of the peace plan may remain unsettled. Granular details will need to be negotiated to keep the plan moving forward and prevent the resumption of fighting. The path to long-term peace, stability and eventual rebuilding will be a long and very precipitous route.
“The first steps to peace are always the hardest,” President Donald Trump said as he stood with foreign leaders in Egypt on Monday for a summit on Gaza’s future. He hailed the ceasefire deal he brokered between Israel and Hamas as the end of the war in Gaza — and start of rebuilding the devastated territory.
And while Trump expressed optimism that the most challenging part was over — “Rebuilding is maybe going to be the easiest part. I think we’ve done a lot of the hardest part because the rest comes together” — others were more tentative about the intricacies that lie ahead.
“Peace has to start somewhere,” said Mona Yacoubian, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She called it an important and “euphoric moment.”
But, Yacoubian warned, “Unfortunately, I think there are several potential points of failure going forward.”
As publicly presented, the plan brims with unanswered questions.
How and when Hamas is to disarm, and where its arms will go, are unclear, as are plans for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. A new security force is to be established for Gaza, made up of troops from other nations, but it is not known which countries will send forces, how they will be used and what happens if they encounter resistance. It’s also not clear who will staff a temporary governing board for Gaza, where it will be located and how the population will respond.
To settle those details and keep fighting from returning, the United States and other nations that pushed to reach the ceasefire must continue to exert pressure and devote attention, experts say.
All of that is layered atop a legacy of conflict, deep distrust among the sides and a vague, conditional possibility of an eventual Palestinian state — an issue that has been a core sticking point for decades. “When you realize how far things have to go for that current pause to be sustained, that’s where I think it does become very daunting,” Yacoubian said.
Since the war began with Hamas’ attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, two other ceasefires have come and gone without any progress beyond temporary pauses in fighting and limited exchanges of hostages and prisoners. With Hamas demanding a permanent halt to the fighting and Israel demanding the release of all hostages, talks on postwar arrangements never got off the ground. Those positions began to change after Trump’s reelection as he leveraged his power and relationships — both with Israel and Arab mediators with sway over Hamas — to push things forward.
Despite the enthusiasm for this latest deal, there are reasons for skepticism, not least of which being that U.S. attempts to bring about an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have failed for decades.
Starting with the 1991 Madrid Conference and moving through various iterations — including the landmark Oslo Accords in 1993 and 1995, which created the Palestinian Authority — all the efforts to restart the process through 2014 collapsed.
Lucy Kurtzer-Ellenbogen, a senior fellow with the Middle East Institute, said the current ceasefire is “a welcome and meaningful but fragile pause.” Now, she said, it’s a question of “whether or not it fully collapses and just serves as a chance for both sides to regroup, rather than a launching pad for progress on these issues. That’s going to depend on President Trump and the other actors he’s coordinating with staying with it.”
In the peace proposal brokered by the Trump administration, it remains unclear to what degree agreements have been reached on two of the biggest sticking points: the extent of Israel’s withdrawal and the extent of Hamas’ retreat from power. Israel remains in control of roughly half of Gaza.
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