A Fragile Cease-Fire in Gaza (2025)

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From “The New York Times,” I’m Sabrina Tavernise, and this is “The Daily.” After more than a year of war, Israel and Hamas have agreed to a temporary ceasefire.

It prompted hope that the War could soon end —

— but also worry that the tentative terms could easily fall apart.

Today, my colleague, Patrick Kingsley, on why the agreement finally happened and what it means for Gaza, Israel, and the broader Middle East.

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It’s Thursday, January 16.

Patrick, you’ve been covering this war since the very start. In fact, we’ve had on so many times to explain to us the developments, to really educate us about what’s going on there.

And after many failed attempts at a ceasefire, one has finally been agreed on. We’re speaking on Wednesday afternoon. So far, what do we know about what it says?

In essence, it’s a three-stage ceasefire, that could, if all goes well, end up being a permanent truce. The first phase is the only part of the deal that is really nailed down.

That’s a six-week phase during which 33 hostages, mostly alive, but some of them dead, are set to be released by Hamas and its allies, who captured those hostages right at the start of the War On October 7, 2023.

And in exchange, Israel is supposed to release several hundred Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. And during that six weeks, we also expect Israeli troops to gradually withdraw, allowing several hundred thousand Palestinians who were displaced from their homes in Northern Gaza to tents and makeshift camps in the south of the Strip to return to their homes, to move back northward to a decimated Gaza City.

During all of that movement and exchanges of captives, there will be more negotiations to see if they can extend this initial six-week phase into another six-week phase, during which the deal is supposed to become permanent and more hostages are supposed to be released for more prisoners. The problem is there is still much to be negotiated about that second phase.

And Patrick, what still remains to be negotiated, exactly?

There seems to be still some disagreement about where exactly Israel will withdraw from. And there’s enough ambiguity in there that the deal could collapse after six weeks, if not before.

And that ambiguity is intentional. Israel, and first and foremost, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, did not want to agree to a deal that would definitively end the War.

Hamas had the opposite perspective. They wanted a deal that would end the War for certain. And so the mediators between the two sides came up with ambiguous wording that would allow each side to feel like they were getting more or less what they want.

The wording allows Israel to say that they can break the arrangement after six weeks. And it provides the possibility for Hamas that the ceasefire will extend beyond 42 days into something permanent, and that they will be able to survive the War intact as a group and in power as the governing force over Gaza.

Patrick, you’ve talked through two phases. What’s the third phase?

The third phase would not be significantly different from the second phase. But there would be final exchanges of dead bodies and other human remains, as well as the start of a massive reconstruction project to rebuild the Gaza Strip over several years.

So why, after all these months, is this ceasefire finally happening now?

I think there’s several factors here. One, Israel is stronger. Two, Hamas is weaker. And three, the Trump administration is about to come into power and has put pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli leader.

Yeah, so let’s dig into each of those points, then. Why don’t you start with “Israel’s stronger.”

Since last summer. Israel has had a series of military successes. It has most obviously weakened Hamas, taken over more of the Gaza Strip, destroyed more of Hamas’s infrastructure, killed more Hamas leaders, including Yahya Sinwar, the man who did more than anyone to mastermind the October 7 attack on Israel at the start of the War.

Further afield, Israel has substantially weakened Hezbollah, a key ally of Hamas in Lebanon. It has weakened Hamas’s main benefactor, Iran, destroying much of its air defenses.

And another member of the Iran-led alliance, the Syrian government, has collapsed. So prime Minister Netanyahu can present more or less the same deal to the Israeli public, and in particular, to his far right allies as being less of a capitulation as it was once seen by parts of his coalition government because he and Israel are coming from a position of greater military strength.

And the flip side is that Hamas is, therefore, weaker. Gaza is decimated. Hamas’s goal of setting off a broader regional conflict that would substantially weaken Israel, or perhaps even destroy it, has come to nothing. And the going analysis is that this has made Hamas more willing to come to the table and agree to a deal that was on that table already for several months.

And the third factor is the Trump factor. It’s the Biden administration, in tandem with the Qatari government and the Egyptian government, that has done most of the running in the negotiations, helping to draft the details of this agreement that has just been signed and cajoling the Israeli government for more than a year towards this agreement.

But it seems to be the incoming Trump administration, President-elect Trump himself and his incoming Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, that have applied the pressure that has been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Steve Witkoff came to Israel last week, met with Netanyahu. Since that meeting, the negotiations have gone from advancing fairly slowly to suddenly getting to the point of a deal being reached.

And it seems to be that Trump, who has said for months that he wants to see a deal by the time of his inauguration early next week, may have been the decisive factor in getting this deal over the line.

And what exactly did witkoff say? How did he put pressure on Netanyahu that may have really moved it for the Israelis here?

We weren’t inside the room, so we can’t say for sure. But it’s possible that it was some combination of carrot and stick, the stick being that Trump, who is an unpredictable actor, would be very angry if a deal wasn’t reached.

The carrot may be that the Trump administration will back Netanyahu if he decides to resume the War after six weeks. That was less likely under President Biden, but it’s seen as being potentially more likely under a Trump administration, who might grant greater leeway to Israel in Gaza than President Biden.

The reverse could also be true. Having helped to author this deal, the Trump administration may see its reputation as being tied to its success and may place more pressure on Netanyahu in several weeks. And we await to see which of those two outcomes will be the case.

So is the Trump envoy working directly with the Biden people on this?

That’s been one of the more remarkable aspects of the recent days of negotiations. You’ve had representatives of two administrations that really don’t see eye to eye, and have very different visions of American democracy, joining forces to get this deal over the line.

The Biden administration that has led the way in drafting and wrangling over many of the details over so many months in these negotiations. It’s Trump’s Middle East envoy who appears to have played a major role in getting this deal suddenly over the line in recent days.

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So those are the mechanics of the deal, and we are left with questions about how exactly those mechanics will play out. And we’re also left with questions about what all this means in the long term for Israelis, for Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank, and also for the region, the Middle East, as a whole.

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We’ll be right back.

So Patrick, how should we understand this deal and what it means for Gazans, for Hamas, for Israel, and really, for the world?

For Gazans, it is, at least for a few weeks, respite from one of the most intense aerial campaigns and ground invasions certainly in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also in 21st-century warfare.

And even if this deal collapses after six weeks, it gives them the opportunity to have a night’s sleep without bombardment. It gives people a chance to find their loved ones whose corpses have been trapped under rubble for months, in some cases over a year.

It gives hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in southern Gaza the ability to finally, after more than a year of displacement, return home to northern Gaza. Scores of universities, hospitals, medical centers have been destroyed during this war, and it could even take decades to repair some of that damage.

And Patrick, who will do all of that rebuilding?

So Hamas is a movement, and the Hamas-controlled Gazan authorities don’t really have the ability to do much of this on their own. They’re going to rely on massive overseas help from the rest of the Arab world, from the United Nations. And exactly how that is going to work has not yet been decided.

And Patrick, what about Hamas — in the context of this deal, what does the deal mean for that group?

The deal gives them the chance of survival. As the War went on, they were losing more troops, more operatives, more leaders. Their top leader, Yahya Sinwar, was killed, if you recall, in October. Sinwar’s predecessor, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed also in the summer.

Now that the war has stopped, at least for now, and that there is a possibility that the initial six-week ceasefire will extend into something longer, they may be able to survive the War, both intact as a movement and in power as a governing force in the Gaza Strip.

Which is pretty remarkable, given where we started, which was Israel saying that Hamas would be eliminated from the Gaza Strip.

They said words to that effect. After the October 7 raid by Hamas and its allies, Israel basically said its two goals of the War would be to return the hostages captured by Hamas and its allies on October 7 and to destroy Hamas’s military capabilities and its governing capabilities.

If they are still able to govern the Gaza Strip after the War ends, or if the ceasefire becomes a permanent one, then that would represent something of a victory for the group, even if their actions have resulted in the decimation of the territory that they controlled before the War began.

So to that point, what about Israel? What does this deal mean for Israel?

In the short term, it brings also some respite, also some joy to an Israeli society that has been traumatized, both by the October 7 attacks, which were the deadliest attacks on Israel in its history, but also by the 466 days since, in which Israelis have been torn by guilt and sadness over the continued incarceration of their friends and relatives in Gaza.

And if at least some of those hostages can be released, it counts as a redemption not only for the hostages themselves, but for Israelis across the political spectrum.

Longer term, if the deal holds and Netanyahu decides to continue it and to nudge it towards something permanent, then it could severely destabilize his own coalition government.

He is in power in part through the support of several far-right ministers and lawmakers who deeply oppose ending the war with Hamas still in power, even if that means leaving some hostages inside Gaza.

So if he does agree to take this from a six-week deal into a longer arrangement, they could leave his coalition, potentially destabilizing it, or maybe even collapsing it, which could lead to early elections and, perhaps depending on the results of those elections, a transition of power within Israeli society.

So short term, this brings relief and joy for Israelis, as well as people in Gaza. In the long term, it could deepen some of the divides that we’ve seen split Israeli society for many different reasons in recent years.

You said that one of the reasons we’re here in this moment talking about a ceasefire now is because Israel is actually in a stronger position today.

And it makes you wonder about its position in the broader region. As you said, a lot of Hamas’s allies have been weakened. So do you think that through this war, Israel is ultimately in a more powerful position now in the region?

Yes and no. In reputational terms, Israel has dealt itself damage by the way it has been perceived to conduct this war. It is accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, as well as his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, are wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court. There has been criticism of Israel, almost like never before, as a result of the way it’s conducted its war in Gaza. And in that sense, you could argue it has lost, or it has at least lost, ground in a diplomatic war, a war for legitimacy and a war for reputation.

But is that important to Israel at all? The diplomacy, OK, there’s the reputation, but it’s not fundamentally related to its power in the region and winning, right?

So Israel depends on international support for at least some of its actions. It depends on American Funds and American military resources, ammunition, fighter jets in order to wage its wars. And within the Middle East, it depends on good relations with the Arab world in order to cement its long-term status within the region.

Before the War, Israel was close to forging a landmark diplomatic deal between itself and Saudi Arabia, the most influential country in the Arab world. The War put those negotiations on ice and, in fact, made it much harder for Saudi Arabia to be seen, to be doing a deal with a country that many people in the Arab world believe is committing a genocide against Palestinians. And if the War ends, Israelis will hope that they can get those negotiations back on track.

But militarily, yes, as you say, Israel has weakened Hamas. They’ve weakened Hezbollah. They have weakened Iran. And all of those battles contributed, at least in some part, to the collapse of Iran’s ally, the Syrian government. And so Israel, despite all its internal divisions, has proved itself as the region’s strongest military power.

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It means, or at least Israelis will hope it means, whatever reputational loss Israel has suffered because of the conduct of its war in Gaza, both in the Middle East and across the world, it is simply too powerful, militarily, to be wished away.

And whatever the anger many people within the Middle East feel towards Israel, their leaders will feel that Israel is a country that they have to work with, precisely because it is such a military force.

[OMINOUS MUSIC]

Patrick, thank you.

Thank you, Sabrina.

On Thursday, last-minute disputes delayed a vote by Israel’s cabinet that would ratify the ceasefire. Netanyahu’s office accused Hamas of reneging on parts of it, a charge that Hamas denied.

Despite the last-minute wrangling, the agreement is expected to eventually take effect. It will begin on Sunday, with Hamas releasing some hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you should know today. On a busy day of confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s cabinet, his pick for Attorney General, Pam Bondi, faced tough questions from Democrats about whether she could stand up to the President elect and operate independently from him.

Bondi repeatedly dodged questions about whether she agreed with Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen and whether she would support his plan to pardon January 6 rioters.

Bondi is expected to be confirmed in the coming days. And —

Speaking to the American public for the final time before departing office on Monday, President Joe Biden described what he said were his gravest concerns before receding into life as a private citizen.

In a clear rebuke of Meta’s decision to end its fact-checking program, Biden warned of a, quote, “tech industrial complex” that he said is overwhelming Americans and called the country to, quote, “hold social media platforms accountable.”

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Today’s episode was produced by Stella Tan, Alex Stern, and Mooj Zadie with help from Rachelle Bonja. It was edited by Chris Haxell, Lisa Chow, and Paige Cowett, contains original music by Diane Wong and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Adam Raskin.

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That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. See you tomorrow.