Few people will have been unmoved by the pictures of joy and anticipation which have been broadcast from Gaza in the past twenty-four hours. After fifteen months of horror at a scale that those of us in the rest of the world will mercifully never experience, there is the chance that the death and destruction may be coming to an end.
My own WhatsApp conversations with friends in Gaza have been similar. People know that they have been here before. Dawns have been promised but they have not arrived. The killing has continued. People have continued to live in tents, pushed from one place to another by the imminent threat of more bombs, shells and bullets. Strikes on hospitals have meant both those injured by war and those already chronically sick are denied the care and treatment they need. Food insecurity is everywhere and children go hungry, month in and month out. The onset of winter has made all of this still worse.
So, even though the people of Gaza know that the ceasefire deal may turn out to be no more than a temporary respite from the bombing, even that is better than the hell they have been going through. And they are right.

For the families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza, the daily reality of death and destruction may not surround them as it does the people of Gaza, but the pain of not knowing if and when they will ever see their loved ones again is no less acute.
As I write this on the morning of Thursday 16th January, there are already fears that this may be yet another false dawn. News has just come though that Israeli Prime Minister has postponed the meeting of his cabinet that was scheduled to endorse the ceasefire deal announced only yesterday. He is accusing Hamas of back-tracking on details of the deal that has been agreed. I don’t know what details are allegedly involved. What I do know is that Netanyahu has form in deliberately torpedoing potential ceasefire deals for his own political interests over the past year whilst trying to pin the blame on others.
By the time you read this we will probably know more about whether or not yet another deal has already been derailed. We do know that the nightmare continues in the meantime. According to Al Jazeera, Gaza’s Civil Defence has reported that at least seventy-three Palestinians have been killed by Israeli strikes since the ceasefire deal was announced in Qatar less than twenty-four hours ago.
So what is going on?
As Palestinians and hostages’ families pray that the first stage of the three-stage deal does go ahead with a ceasefire from Sunday 19th January, therefore, what are the chances of it holding beyond that? What can the rest of the world do to maximise the chances of their prayers being answered?
Outgoing US President Biden has been quick to claim credit for finally bringing months of negotiations to a successful conclusion just days before he leaves office. As this piece by Prem Thakker in the online media outlet Zeteo chronicles, however, the fact that that the Biden administration has consistently bank-rolled Israel’s assault on Gaza with many millions of dollars-worth of weapons fatally undermines President Biden’s claim to be the great peacemaker.
Others take a different view. Even before the deal was announced in Qatar, US President-elect Donald Trump had taken to social media to boast that it is the prospect of his taking office next week that finally brought Israel and Hamas to terms and that his own people had been actively involved in the negotiations alongside Biden’s team in recent days.
Trump’s team have indeed been closely involved in recent days and the timing of the deal does point to the fact that his imminent inauguration has concentrated minds and persuaded Netanyahu in particular to now accept a deal that in essence is the same as one which has been on the table since May last year and which he has resisted until now.
But why should Trump press Netanyahu to accept terms that he had rejected from Biden? In his first term of office before 2020, Trump had shown no appetite to block Israel’s territorial ambitions or uphold the rights of Palestinians. As Phyllis Starkey and I explained in Labour List on 16 November last year, the people Trump has appointed to lead his Middle East policy make his second term likely to be even more partisan. For example, Mike Huckabee, Trump’s appointee as US ambassador to Israel, has denied that Israel is in occupation of Palestinian lands, referring to the occupied West Bank as the Judea and Samaria regions of Israel and claiming that there are no such things as Israeli settlements there, despite rulings that those settlements both exist and are illegal under international law.
So what is going on? According to Israel analyst Zvi Bar’el, quoted by Prem Thakkar, the message Trump has sent to Netanyahu is that, following the release of over thirty of the hostages in the first stage of the deal, the USA will give the go-ahead for Israel to resume its attacks on Gaza thereafter, no doubt again blaming Hamas for the breakdown of the ceasefire. According to Israel’s Ynet news network, Trump’s assurances to Netanyahu have not stopped there, reportedly agreeing to remove far-right Israeli settlers and other extremists from US sanctions lists. Could all this be a precursor to at least tacit US approval for the construction of Israeli settlements in Northern Gaza and a full annexation of the occupied West Bank, as already being promoted by members of Netanyahu’s government such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich?
What should the UK and other governments do?
I hope this is too bleak a prospect but it is a plausible one for which other governments, including our own, must be prepared. Tail-ending US policy on Israel and Palestine has never been a good enough approach. The UK government and other governments must make clear that all three stages of the deal announced this week must be observed by all parties, to secure the release of all hostages, to permanently stop the bloodshed and to begin the reconstruction of the shattered remains of Gaza. Urgently, it means pressing Israel to reverse its ban on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the only body with the capacity and reach to deliver the humanitarian aid that is desperately needed by the people of Gaza at scale.
And it means acting to secure a future that will enable the peoples of both Palestine and of Israel to live in peace and security. Respect for international law must be the cornerstone of that future and of our actions now. It means real pressure to end the occupation and banning international trade with the settlements that sustain it. It means an end to arms exports that breach the International Arms Trade Treaty by the risk of their use against civilians. It means upholding the rulings of both the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.
And it means demonstrating in practice our belief that Palestinians’ and Israelis’ rights to self-determination must be upheld equally by the international community. Britain itself can take an important step in that direction by immediately recognizing the State of Palestine, as over seventy per cent of UN member states have already done.