Agreement on a ceasefire in Gaza after 15 months of war

(Keystone-ATS) Indirect negotiations which had stalled for months had accelerated in recent days with a view to a truce associated with the release of hostages held in the Gaza Strip since the bloody Hamas attack against Israel on October 7, 2023.

This attack triggered an Israeli offensive in response which reduced a large part of the territory to rubble and caused a major humanitarian crisis.

At the announcement of the ceasefire, thousands of Palestinians exulted across the Gaza Strip, almost all of whose 2.4 million inhabitants fled their homes in an attempt to escape the fighting and violence. bombings.

The agreement fiercely negotiated by international mediators, Qatar, United States and Egypt, and concluded a few days before Donald Trump’s return to the White House, provides for an exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

“We have an agreement on the hostages” in Gaza, said the American president-elect, while an American official confirmed that an agreement had been reached.

“A ceasefire agreement in Gaza and the release of hostages was reached following the meeting of the Qatari Prime Minister (Mohammed bin Abdelrahmane Al-Thani), with Hamas negotiators and, separately, with the Israeli negotiators,” a source close to the discussions told AFP.

In a first phase, 33 hostages should be released, starting with women and children, in exchange for a thousand Palestinians detained by Israel, according to two sources close to the negotiations.

The second phase will concern the release of the last hostages, “soldiers and men of draft age”, as well as the return of the bodies of the dead hostages, according to the Times of Israel.

An Israeli official, however, warned Tuesday that Israel would “not leave Gaza until all the hostages have returned, the living and the dead.”

“Ready to rebuild”

As negotiations progressed, Israel increased deadly strikes on the Gaza Strip, claiming to target Hamas fighters.

On Wednesday, 27 people were killed again, according to emergency services, notably in Deir el-Balah, in the center of the territory, and in Gaza City, in the north, where a strike hit a school sheltering displaced people.

In Deir el-Balah, Nadia Madi, a displaced person, prayed for “a truce to be declared”.

“I am ready to rebuild my life in the middle of the rubble,” assured this woman who fled her home like almost all of the 2.4 million inhabitants of the besieged territory, and has not seen her family “since more than a year.”

Only one week-long truce was observed at the end of November 2023 and the negotiations carried out since then have been met with intransigence from both camps.

But the talks intensified in the run-up to the return of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, Israel’s main ally, on January 20, in a climate of increased international pressure on the different parties.

Donald Trump recently promised “hell” to the region if the hostages were not released before his return.

Of 251 people kidnapped on October 7, 2023, 94 are still held hostage in Gaza, 34 of whom are dead according to the Israeli army.

The future on hold

Already undermined before the war by an Israeli blockade imposed since 2007, poverty and unemployment, the Gaza Strip emerged from the war plunged into chaos.

The United Nations has estimated that the reconstruction of the territory, more than half of which has been destroyed, would take up to 15 years and cost more than 50 billion euros.

Infrastructure, particularly the water distribution network, was heavily damaged.

Famine, cold, and despair surround the makeshift installations where the population is sheltering en masse. Most children have been out of school for more than a year. Only a handful of hospitals are still partially functioning.

If it silences the guns, the ceasefire leaves in suspense the political future of the territory where Hamas, now very weakened, seized power in 2007, ousting the Palestinian Authority of President Mahmoud Abbas .

The war in Gaza has relaunched the idea of ​​a two-state solution, Israeli and Palestinian, to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, defended by a large part of the international community but to which Israel is firmly opposed.

Israel, which had promised to destroy Hamas after the attack on October 7, 2023, says it refuses a total withdrawal of its army, and refuses that Gaza be administered in the future by Hamas or the Palestinian Authority.

The Palestinians, for their part, say that the future of Gaza belongs to them and that they will not tolerate any foreign interference.

Outgoing US Secretary of State Antony Blinken proposed on Tuesday sending an international security force to Gaza and placing the territory under the responsibility of the UN.

He said the Palestinian Authority, which has partial administrative authority in the occupied West Bank, should regain control of the territory.