The Gaza-Israel war isn't over yet

Israel withdrew all of its forces from the Gaza Strip on Tuesday morning, at the exact moment that the 72-hour Egyptian-brokered truce was scheduled to begin and just as Hamas finished firing its last punctuating barrage of rockets, at the second the clock ticked 8 A.M. The cease-fire has held for nearly 48 hours now, but the war is not quite over, and this never-ending conflict between neighbors in such close quarters is even further from being resolved.

Both Hamas and Israel want this fragile truce, hinging on the current talks in Cairo, to extend beyond the Friday morning deadline – neither is prepared to return to war at this moment, but rifts are clear in the negotiations. Aside from the demands posed by Hamas, toward which both Israel and the external mediators are willing to show flexibility, there is one post-truce outcome that Israel is not prepared to abandon and that Hamas refuses to accept: demilitarization.

Hamas and the Palestinian factions of Gaza knelt this week in unconditional surrender to the Egyptian cease-fire draft, stipulating a 3-day lull in fighting before resumption of negotiations on any future agreements. It was the same exact same offer they rejected three weeks ago, before Israel embarked on its ground operation, and that they nixed once again last Friday after accepting and then rescinding with attacks on Israeli forces 90 minutes into that truce. They finally realized that there is no alternative to this offer they could not refuse and had refused twice already. Israel, which declared unilateral withdrawal and boycotted the Cairo truce talks earlier this week, emerged the strategic victor: the outline it drafted with Egypt at the beginning of the war is nearly one in the same as that which Hamas agreed to, the failed interventions of Qatar, Turkey and the U.S. in the last weeks filed and forgotten.

Hamas presented a 10-point list of demands in Qatar last month, as that aspiring political power attempted to mediate, including inter alia a withdrawal of Israeli forces, a cessation of operation on the tunnels, the opening of border crossings, the establishment of sea and air ports, a 6-12 nautical mile fishing zone, a lifting of the blockade, and the release of prisoners. Save the first two demands – which Israel carried out unilaterally – the subsequent clauses were omitted from the Egyptian outline, which in its presentation to Hamas is nearly identical to its initial form. Each of the following demands is still up for negotiation, and proposals on how to meet them in a way amenable to Israel and the international community are under discussion.

Israel has already begun to repair the border fence with Gaza and has lifted both the roadblocks in southern communities and the Home Front guidelines on safety during wartime, calling on citizens to resume routine; residents are free to return home, though most are reticent, filled still with the fear of a monster emerging from a tunnel under their children's beds, a real and concrete threat while the tunnels remained unmonitored.

In Gaza, the devastation is extreme. Nearly 1880 people have been killed, almost 10,000 wounded, and a quarter of the population has been displaced. The damage is estimated at some $5 billion. Aid has already begun flowing in: international entities from the UN to member countries, including Italy, U.S., Turkey, and the International Red Cross have sent tons of assistance; Israeli electric teams are working to repair the destroyed power lines and hundreds of truckloads of aid have passed through the Israeli border to Gaza. This rehabilitation will take years to conclude.

A generation of Palestinians in Gaza will not forget this war. Like their neighbors on the Israeli side, there is no guarantee that a monster will not attack in the middle of the night. Their parents have been killed, they have been dismembered, and their homes have been destroyed. A generation of Israelis is filled with the same hatred, not just toward Gazans, but toward all Arabs and Palestinians: these are their monsters, not innocent children, nor women, nor civilians; monsters that must be destroyed. The hatred the world hoped had been eradicated in the 10 years since the second intifada is stronger than ever.

Israel's hidden agenda, unsaid amid the very real rhetoric of destroying tunnels and halting rocket attacks, was to imbue in Gazans the realization that Hamas was a political force capable only of devastation and self-destruction, and thus lead to a democratic choice to let the Palestinian Authority resume control of the territory.

"Israel is hoping that external pressure from the outside might be combined with the internal pressure of people from Gaza when they realize the devastation [the Hamas leadership causes]," a former Israeli security official told me. "They might resist or at least complain, and these two pressures might bring a regime change, political change that might guarantee no more attacks [against Israel]."

This hope is optimistic at best and catastrophically self-defeating at worse. Hamas' popularity, as a resistance army capable of standing its own against one of the great militaries in the world for nearly a month, is higher than it was before the war. Even if the PA assumes control of the border crossings, and even if the unity agreement is reworded with Hamas to enable a democratic realization of this security situation, most Gazans do not see Hamas as the enemy Israel had hoped they would – they are disillusioned by war, and eager to live in peace and quiet, but they do not embrace Israel's rhetoric of Hamas as their primary monster.

If this cease-fire indeed manages to hold for the three days stipulated and beyond, it will be very difficult for Hamas to return to war. Israel has publicly disengaged, on alert in the area, but not in war mode. Hamas has lost nearly 2/3 of its arsenal and its tunnel operations are under tight Israeli surveillance.

The first two days of cease-fire have left Israelis and Gazans alike unsettled: there is no guarantee that the other side won't attack or that this respite is anything more than just biding time until the next war. For many Israelis, the disappointment stems from a sentiment that the goal of wiping out Hamas' capabilities has not been achieved. Infiltrations and rocket attacks are still possible: Gaza militants have 3,000 rockets and 10,000 mortar shells and Israeli intelligence on the tunnels is better than ever, but still limited. The army announced that its operation on the tunnels had ended after 32 were located and destroyed – but it is well aware that more exist beyond their intelligence.
For both Israelis in the south and Gazans, the basic activities of sleep, shopping, and going about daily life still just a cautious dream; for Gazans, the world as they knew it is devastated beyond belief.

A third intifada will emerge quicker than its predecessors unless the negotiations in Egypt following this quick truce stamp it down. Gazans, mainstream Israelis, and West Bank Palestinians are war-worn and hateful of their enemies. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose calculated decisions over the last month have won him enormous ratings in Israel, must take this final and waning opportunity to negotiate a settlement with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the caretaker of not only the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but now also the Gaza Strip, as its unity agreement with Hamas unfolds in the most concrete terms amid the Islamist leadership's loss of functional control over its territory.

The stakes are higher than ever. The future of both Palestinian and Israeli security now rest in the hands of Egypt, which has sidestepped the U.S. as the strongest mediatory force in the region; months of negotiations, rehabilitation, and security arrangements are still ahead. Anyone quick enough to say this war is over will find themselves just as quickly back in battlefield again.