As the dust settles on the Gaza ceasefire agreement on Wednesday, it’s a good moment to look at the gap between the rhetoric of both sides over the past 15 months and reality as it now stands.
Top of the list is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s repeated promise, to the chagrin of some of his top advisers, that fighting would not end until Hamas had been completely defeated.
“Israel under my leadership will not compromise on less than total victory over Hamas, and we will win,” Netanyahu said 100 days into the war.
Hamas has lost all of its top leaders in a series of dramatic assassination attacks and has clearly been weakened militarily. But has it been defeated?
Its forces are still firing rockets and killing Israeli soldiers, including 16 last week in northern Gaza. The attack led the Israeli army to acknowledge that the Palestinian group’s local command network remains operational and that its commanders can still issue attack orders.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this week that the group had recruited as many followers as they had lost over the course of the war.
“Today, we prove that the occupation will never defeat our people and their resistance,” senior Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya said on Wednesday.
Still, who will govern Gaza after the war remains an open question, slated to be tackled in the next phase of negotiations and one of the diciest – if not the diciest – issues still to be resolved.
Israeli troop withdrawal
There was also the “General’s Plan”, which since October has left Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza with three stark choices: to be killed by Israeli bombardment, starved to death or forcibly displaced.
Despite warnings from legal experts and international aid organisations that the strategy was genocidal, the plan was rolled out without pause.
Wednesday’s agreement looks set to be its death knell. Palestinians will be allowed to return to their homes in the north and Israeli troops are set to withdraw from the Netzarim Corridor, which cuts across Gaza and whose control was key to enforcing the plan.
Along with Netzarim, Netanyahu had also said an Israeli troop withdrawal from the Philadelphi Corridor, the buffer zone between Gaza and Egypt, was non-negotiable.
That, too, is now out the window.
Within hours of the agreement, an Egyptian source told Al-Arabiya TV that the majority of Israeli troops had left the 14-km-long demilitarised zone, even though they were not required to begin their withdrawal for several weeks.
Prisoner exchange
Hamas, for its part, vowed early on in the conflict that it aimed to “empty Israeli prisons” of Palestinians, allowing the return of all Palestinian and Israeli prisoners.
The first phase of the agreement stipulates that at least 1,157 detained Palestinians will be released in exchange for 33 Israeli hostages captured on 7 October and two Israeli men held in Hamas custody for years before then.
The Palestinian prisoners to be released include many who were taken into custody after the 7 October attacks, but not involved in them, 110 with life sentences and 47 individuals who were part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange.
The 47 were released in the 2011 deal under the condition that they would not be arrested again, but they were and have remained in prison.
These figures fall well short – only a little over 12 percent – of all Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, which Israeli organisation B’Tselem put at 9,440 as of last September.
They also do not cover all of the Israeli hostages still held in Gaza, with men under the age of 50 excluded from exchange in the first stage of the ceasefire.
Hamas has, in comparison to previous negotiating rounds, also reduced the number of prisoners they have demanded in exchange for each Israeli hostage.
Both sides will be left to wonder exactly which individuals will be released on either side.
Palestinians will be looking to see if Marwan Barghouti, the popular Palestinian leader serving multiple life sentences and tipped by some to be the successor to longtime Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, is among them.
