Jeremy Bowen: Two years on, will Israel and Hamas seize the chance to end the war?

Jeremy Bowen: Two years on, will Israel and Hamas seize the chance to end the war?

After two years of war, there is a chance of a deal that will end the killing and destruction in Gaza and return the Israeli hostages, living and dead, to their families.

It is an opportunity, but it is not certain that it will be seized by Hamas and Israel.

It is a grim coincidence that the talks are happening exactly two years after Hamas inflicted a trauma on Israelis that is still acute.

The 7 October attacks killed around 1,200 people, mostly Israeli civilians, and 251 were taken hostage. The Israelis estimate that 20 hostages are still alive and they want the return of the bodies of 28 others.

Israel's devastating military response has destroyed most of Gaza and killed more than 66,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians and including more than 18,000 children.

The figures come from the health ministry that is part of the remains of the Hamas administration. Its statistics have usually been regarded as reliable. A study in The Lancet, the medical journal based in London, suggested they were an underestimate.

Israelis and Palestinians both want the war to end. Israelis are war-weary and polls show that a majority want a deal that returns the hostages and ends the war. Hundreds of thousands of reservists in the armed forces, the IDF, want to get back to their lives after many months in uniform on active service.

More than two million Palestinians in Gaza are in a humanitarian catastrophe, caught between the firepower of the IDF and hunger and in some areas a man-made famine created by Israel's restrictions on aid entering the Strip.

The version of Hamas that was able to attack Israel with devastating force two years ago has long since been broken as a coherent military organisation. It has become an urban guerrilla force mounting an insurgency against the IDF in the ruins.

Hamas wants to find a way to survive, even though it has agreed to give up power to Palestinian technocrats. It accepts it will have to have to hand over or dismantle what is left of its heavy weapons, but it wants to keep enough firepower to defend itself against Palestinians who want to take their revenge for nearly two decades of brutal rule and the catastrophe the Hamas attacks brought down on them.

It is not saying so publicly, but an organisation that still has followers and a charter that seeks to destroy Israel will also want to emerge with enough left to rebuild its capacity to live up to its name, which is an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement.

Israel would like to be dictating the terms of a Hamas surrender. But the fact that Hamas has a chance for a serious negotiation opens up more possibilities for it than looked likely just a month ago. That was when Israel tried and failed to kill the Hamas leadership in a series of strikes on a building in Doha where they were discussing peace proposals from Donald Trump. Their main target, the senior leader Khalil al-Hayya, is leading the Hamas delegation at the talks in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. Al-Hayya's son was among the dead, though the leaders escaped with their lives.

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a different kind of survival in mind. He wants to preserve his power, keep on postponing his trial for corruption, win elections due next year, and not to go down in history as the leader responsible for security blunders that led to the deadliest day for Jews since the Nazi holocaust.

To achieve that he needs a credible way to declare "total victory", a phrase he has used repeatedly. He has defined it as the return of the hostages, the destruction of Hamas and the demilitarisation of Gaza. If he cannot to do that, it will not be enough for him to point to the very real damage Israel has inflicted on its enemies in Lebanon and Iran in the last two years.

Hamas and Israeli negotiators will not meet face to face. Egyptian and Qatari officials will be the intermediaries, and the Americans who will also be there will be a major influence, perhaps a decisive one.

The basis for the talks is Donald Trump's 20-point Gaza peace plan. What it will not do, despite his insistent social media postings about permanent peace, is end the long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians for control of the land between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. It does not mention the future of the West Bank, the other part of the territories the UK and others have recognised as the state of Palestine.

The stakes are high in Sharm el-Sheikh. There is a chance to get to a ceasefire that could lead to the end of the most destructive and bloody war in well over a century of conflict between Arabs and Jews.

The first challenge is to work out conditions for the release of the Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinians serving life sentences in Israeli jails and Gazans who have been detained without trial since the war started. That is not a simple task.

President Trump wants results, fast. He wants to revive his ambition to broker a grand bargain in the Middle East, at the centre of which would be a rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. That cannot happen when Israel is killing huge numbers of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and imposing restrictions on humanitarian aid that are causing great suffering, and when Hamas is holding Israeli hostages. The Saudis have also made it very clear in a series of public statements that it also cannot happen without a clear and irreversible path to an independent Palestinian state.

Trump forced Netanyahu to sign up to a document that includes an admittedly vague and indeterminate reference to the possibility of Palestinian independence. In a statement afterwards Netanyahu chose to ignore that by repeating his pledge that Palestinians would never get a state. There is a lot in the Trump document that Israel wants in terms of ending the power of Hamas and the future governance of Gaza.

But Netanyahu has been used to getting his own way in the Oval Office. Instead, Trump forced him to read out a formal apology to Qatar's prime minister for the air strike that failed to wipe out the Hamas leadership. Trump needs Qatar on board to move ahead with his ambitions to remake the Middle East.

One question is why Hamas is prepared to give up the hostages without a strict timetable for Israel to leave Gaza and end the war. One possibility is that the Qataris have persuaded them that Trump will make sure that happens if they give him the chance to claim victory by repatriating all Israel's hostages, living and dead.

Even so Trump is still using language that Netanyahu needs Israelis to hear, like his threat to Hamas if they rejected the deal, promising "my full backing" for Israel to go ahead to destroy Hamas.

The US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said it will take only a few days to work out if Hamas is serious. It will take longer to thrash out the nuts and bolts that would need to underpin a complex agreement. So far all they have is Trump's framework.

Two years after the long and unresolved conflict between Israelis and Palestinians exploded into the Gaza war it is a major challenge to end the killing and secure the immediate future for Palestinians and Israelis. It will take skilful diplomacy and prolonged engagement with detail, of which there is precious little in the Trump 20-point plan. Trying to find precise language that will fill in the gaps will provide plenty of potential stumbling blocks.

No one has a higher opinion than Trump himself of his ability to make deals. In foreign policy, the delivery so far has not matched his boasts. He hasn't settled a slew of wars; the exact count of how many he claims to have ended varies depending how he tells it. Most notoriously Trump did not end the Russia-Ukraine war within a single day of taking office, as he had predicted. But one skill Trump does have, after a lifetime in real estate, is an innate instinct about how to apply pressure to get what he wants.

The indirect talks in Egypt are happening because Donald Trump was able to put pressure on both sides. Threatening Hamas with extinction if they refused to engage with his plan was the easy part. US presidents have led international pressure on Hamas since the group won a Palestinian election in 2006 and used force to take over Gaza from its Palestinian rivals Fatah the following year.

A big difference between Donald Trump and Presidents Clinton, Obama and Biden is that he is hitting back harder and more decisively at Benjamin Netanyahu's attempts to manipulate him than his Democratic predecessors were either willing or able to do.

Trump took Hamas's qualified "yes but" to his proposal as a solid yes for peace. It was enough for him to charge ahead. The news service Axios reported that when Netanyahu tried to persuade him that Hamas was playing for time Trump's response was "why are you so f***ing negative".

Israel is dependent on the United States. The US has been a full partner in the war. Without American help Israel could not have attacked Gaza with such ruthless and prolonged force. Most of its weapons are supplied by the US, which also provides political and diplomatic protection, vetoing multiple resolutions in the UN Security Council that were intended to pressure Israel to stop.

Joe Biden, who called himself an Irish Zionist, never used the leverage that comes from Israel's dependence on the US. Donald Trump puts his plans for America first, and used America's latent power over Israel to get Netanyahu to bend to his will, at least when it came to joining the talks. It remains to be seen whether that pressure continues. Trump changes his mind.

Both the Hamas and Israeli delegations have powerful critics at home who want the war to continue. Hamas sources told the BBC that the military commanders still in Gaza were prepared to fight it out until the end and take as many Israelis as possible with them. Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition relies on the support of ultra nationalist extremists who thought they were close to their dream of expelling Gaza's Palestinians and replacing them with Jewish settlers.

If the talks in Egypt fail, both endgames become possible.

Source: BBC
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