Following a deal to end more than a year of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, attention has swung back to the Gaza Strip, but any hopes of a rapid end to the war there look likely to be dashed.
Announcing the Lebanon accord on Tuesday, US President Joe Biden said he would now renew his push for an elusive agreement in Gaza, urging Israel and Hamas to seize the moment.
However, there was no sign that Israeli leaders wanted to ease up on Hamas, which triggered the conflagration last year by attacking southern Israel, with ministers making clear their war aims for Gaza were very different than those for Lebanon.
“Gaza will never be a threat to the State of Israel again… We will reach a decisive victory there. Lebanon is different,” said Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, a member of the security cabinet and a former head of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency).
“Are we at the beginning of the end [of the Gaza campaign]? Definitely not. We still have a lot to do,” he told a group of foreign correspondents this week.
There remain 101 hostages in Gaza, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed both to bring them all home and to eradicate Hamas.
Military pressure on Hamas
Negotiations between the two sides have long stalled, with each side blaming the other for the impasse. Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri on Wednesday accused Israel of being inflexible, saying his group still wanted a deal.“We are committed to cooperating with any effort to reach a ceasefire in Gaza, and we are interested in ending the aggression against our people,” the terrorist group said.
“We have informed mediators in Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey that Hamas is ready for a ceasefire agreement and a serious deal to exchange prisoners,” a Hamas official told AFP.
Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said on Wednesday the group appreciates Lebanon’s right to reach an agreement that protects its people and it hopes for a deal to end the war in Gaza, adding that he hoped it would pave the way to reaching an agreement that ends the Israel-Hamas War.
The Biden administration on Wednesday said it was pushing ahead with a $680 million arms sales package to Israel, according to a US official familiar with the plan.
The package, which was first reported by the Financial Times, includes thousands of joint direct attack munition kits and hundreds of small-diameter bombs, according to the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.The ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah came into effect on Wednesday after both sides accepted the agreement brokered by the United States and France, but international efforts to halt the 14-month-old war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza have stalled.
Earlier Wednesday, Hamas said it was open to efforts to secure a deal in Gaza, reiterating its outstanding conditions.An agreement must end the war, pull Israeli forces out of Gaza, return displaced Gazans to their homes, and achieve a hostages-for-prisoners swap deal.
In an unexpected twist, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday that Turkey was ready to help in any way possible to establish a lasting ceasefire in Gaza and expressed satisfaction with the ceasefire agreement that has come into effect in Lebanon.
Turkey, which has fiercely criticized Israel’s offensives in Gaza and Lebanon, has previously said it discussed a potential truce in Gaza with Hamas and gave the group recommendations on how to proceed with the negotiations.“We are stating that, as Turkey, we are ready to provide any contribution for the massacre in Gaza to end and for a lasting ceasefire to be achieved,” Erdogan told members of his ruling AK Party in parliament.
Asked about Biden’s remarks, a Turkish official told Reuters that a ceasefire in Lebanon without a truce in Gaza was not enough to achieve regional stability, adding Ankara was ready to help reach a deal in Gaza, just as it had supported previous efforts.
“We are again ready to help achieve a permanent ceasefire and a lasting solution in Gaza,” the official said.While Ankara has repeatedly traded insults with Israel since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas War, it has not officially severed ties with it. Unlike Israel and its Western partners, Turkey does not consider Hamas a terrorist organization and regularly hosts some of its senior members.
Welfare and Social Affairs Minister Ya’acov Margi told residents of the Gaza border area on Wednesday that “returning the hostages is a mission of the highest ethical order. There will be no healing for western Negev residents and for Israeli society as a whole until they are home.”
Biden said on Tuesday night that his administration was also pushing for an elusive ceasefire in Gaza and that it was possible that Saudi Arabia and Israel could normalize relations.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said from Jerusalem on Wednesday, “This ceasefire will protect Israel from another October 7 and will give the people of Lebanon a break from the fighting. My hope is that we can soon achieve a ceasefire in Gaza and allow peaceful solutions to replace endless conflict.”
Egypt and Qatar, which, along with the United States, have tried unsuccessfully to mediate a ceasefire in Gaza, welcomed the Lebanon truce. Qatar’s Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday it hoped the ceasefire would lead to a similar agreement to end the Gaza war.
News that Hezbollah had decided to stop fighting was met with gloom by many Gazans, who felt abandoned and forgotten, although some held hopes that their luck might change.
Months of attempts to negotiate a ceasefire have yielded scant progress, and negotiations are now on hold, with mediator Qatar saying it has told the two warring parties it would suspend its efforts until the sides are prepared to make concessions.
Faint optimism also surfaced in Egypt, which plays a central role in mediating between Israel and Hamas. Two Egyptian security sources said Israel had informed Cairo that if the Lebanese ceasefire held, they would work again on a Gaza deal.
The main schism lies in Hamas’s insistence on a full IDF withdrawal from the territory, which Israel has deemed a security risk, while it cannot guarantee Hamas’s demise and lack of status as a military threat.
Both Israeli and US officials have hailed the Lebanese accord because it had forced Hezbollah, which, like Hamas, is backed by Iran, to decouple itself from the Gaza conflict.
However, Ofer Shelah, a senior researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies think tank, said this de-linking might ultimately make it harder to end the bloodshed in Gaza.
“There’ll be no real pressure now on Israel over Gaza,” Shelah told Reuters.
He added that it might not serve Netanyahu’s purposes to make peace with Hamas any time soon because it could tear apart his government, which is packed with war hawks – some of whom have denounced the Lebanon deal and want to take over Gaza.
“I think it’s in his political interest for the war to go on because the end of the war in Gaza could really threaten this coalition,” said Shelah.
In the West Bank, senior Palestinian Authority politician Hussein al-Sheikh welcomed the agreement in Lebanon.
“We welcome the decision to cease fire in Lebanon, and we call on the international community to pressure Israel to stop its criminal war in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and to stop all its escalatory measures against the Palestinian people,” Sheikh, a confidant of President Mahmoud Abbas, posted on X/Twitter.