Inside the fragile first week of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire
Trump has touted the latest ceasefire as the beginning of peace in the Middle East. Few Israelis or Palestinians believe it will last.
David Schutz in Jerusalem
Mevaseret Zion, west of Jerusalem, ground to a halt on Monday morning. Cars idled on the side of the road, drivers smoking or scrolling through phones, as a reconnaissance helicopter circled low overhead. The town’s highway to he capital was sealed for United States President Donald Trump’s journey to address the Knesset – Israel’s parliament – in Givat Ram, Jerusalem.
Trump had announced the ceasefire the previous Wednesday after marathon talks that included Qatar, Egypt, and Türkiye. Israel’s security cabinet approved a phased truce and troop drawback, agreeing to release 250 Palestinians on death row in its prisons; 1,700 Palestinian captives (of 11,000 detained since October 2023); and hundreds of the bodies of those killed. Aid to Gaza would also resume. In exchange, Hamas would release all remaining Israeli captives – living and dead.
Addressing the Knesset, Trump said his 20-point peace plan is “a new architecture for peace”. The current truce is supposedly only a first phase. The plan foresees Israel eventually fully withdrawing from Gaza and Palestinian factions disarming – steps yet to be agreed to by either side.
That day, Hamas handed over the last 20 living Israeli captives to the Red Cross and Israel began bus transfers from the Megiddo and Damon prisons in the West Bank. Israeli soldiers fired gunshots and warned residents via loudspeakers not to hold public celebrations for released Palestinians, calling them “incitement”. At a checkpoint outside Ramallah, soldiers tore down posters of the newly released detainees.
Yellow lapel pins calling for the release of Israeli captives still dotted the streets as Israel shifted its wartime slogan from “Together we will win” to “The victory is thanks to you”. Yet a recent poll found only a minority of Israelis considered themselves victors against Hamas. Most said no one had won.
Outside the Knesset, the protest tent that has stood since November 2023 was filled with relatives of Israeli captives. Many celebrated – but not for the government.
“This wasn’t the government’s achievement. It was pressure – from the demonstrations, from the families – that forced them to act. That’s the only reason anyone is coming home,” said former lawmaker Anat Maor.
Maor, a “liberal Zionist”, said the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative remained the best path to lasting peace. Under that plan, Arab states would normalise ties with Israel if it withdrew from occupied territories and allowed land swaps for a viable Palestinian state.
From exile, Palestinian activist Naji El Khatib sees Trump’s truce as a performance – a tactical pause to let Netanyahu retreat from a war that is now hurting Israel’s image. Khatib, who co-founded the One Democratic State Initiative, rejects the two-state model and advocates for a single, secular administration over the entire area now legally and illegally occupied by Israel, under which all residents would have equal rights as citizens.
Meanwhile, regional leaders at Sharm el-Sheikh are going a third way, backing Trump’s plan to place Gaza under a Palestinian technocratic committee. The intention is to later transfer control of Gaza to the Palestinian Authority – which currently administers the West Bank – with Hamas excluded.
By Tuesday, the ceasefire was already fraying. Crowds in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv’s “hostage squares” kept celebrating, but Israel and Hamas were at odds over the bodies of Israeli captives presumed dead in Gaza. Hamas has said it couldn’t find them and Israel threatened to halt aid convoys until it did. Trump acknowledged that much of Gaza was now rubble, so locating every single body would be difficult. But he still threatened that the war would resume if Hamas failed to deliver.
Khatib believes the delay might even be deliberate – a way for Hamas to expose what he called “the racism at the heart of the settler-colonial mentality” – a state that halts aid convoys for a few missing Israeli bodies while tens of thousands of Palestinian bodies lie uncounted, unnamed, and unrecovered.
In Jenin in the West Bank, raids under the Iron Wall operation continue. A woman said that her nephew had been released four days earlier after two years in detention without charge. His release was unrelated to the ceasefire, but he too was warned against celebrating. “If they see even just a family celebration, they come back for all of us,” she said.