The Daily - Can the Cease-Fire in Gaza Hold?

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Today, as the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas enters its most fragile phase, no one knows who will control the future of Gaza.Patrick Kingsley, the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times, talks through this delicate moment — as the first part of the deal nears its end — and the questions that hover over it.Guest: Patrick Kingsley, the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times.Background reading: Gaza’s truce could end in days, with no extension agreed. What happens next?Alarmed by President Trump’s Gaza plan, Arab leaders brainstormed about one of their own.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Saher Alghorra for The New York Times Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams. This is The Daily. Today, as the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas enters its final phase, no one knows who will control the future of Gaza. Israel, Hamas, or possibly President Trump. My colleague, Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley, walks us through this delicate moment and the questions hovering over the future of the war. It's Wednesday, February 26th. Patrick, we're in the final days of the first phase of the ceasefire deal between Israel

and Hamas, which was outlined very clearly in terms of what each side had to give to the other. And now we're entering into this next phase, which is not yet negotiated and could lead to more talks, but it could also end up leading just to more war, which we'll get to in a moment. But just to start, how in your estimation has this first part of the process actually gone? Several mini-crisis aside, it has gone roughly to plan.

And that plan was to exchange 33 hostages held in Gaza by Hamas and its allies for roughly 1,500 Palestinian prisoners and detainees held in Israeli jails. Just to recap, at the start of the war, Hamas and its allies raided Israel, captured roughly 250 hostages, both dead and alive, brought them back to Gaza. Some of them were exchanged in a previous hostage for prisoner deal in late 2023. A handful have been rescued in Israeli military operations, but roughly 100 were still in captivity in January when this ceasefire was sealed. And the deal allows for roughly a third of them, most of them alive, but some of them

dead to be swapped for Palestinian prisoners who variously had been jailed 20 years ago for their role in terrorist attacks on Israelis, but also hundreds of Palestinians who had been arrested without charge inside Gaza by the Israeli military and held in difficult conditions inside the Israeli prison archipelago. And as I say, the broad picture is that those have mostly gone as they were expected to, but there have been some immensely traumatic scenes for both Israelis and Palestinians that have led to constant fears that this initial ceasefire was about to collapse. Tell us about those.

Well, every Saturday, the choreography would go like this. The hostages would be released from Gaza, and then once they were free, the prisoners would be released from Israel. But the spectacles of both releases drew immense pain and anger on both sides. When the three or four hostages that were supposed to be released that day were freed, they were put up on stage in front of cheering crowds to bombastic music, often set against banners that attacked Israel and sought to humiliate the Israeli military. The hostages themselves often looked extremely gaunt, malnourished, starved, which sent shockwaves through Israeli society.

And sometimes they would be interviewed on stage, seemingly against their will, asked humiliating questions about their time in captivity or asked to send messages to the Israeli political leadership. On the Palestinian side, there were also some uncomfortable scenes of prisoners emerging from Israeli prisons in very bad shape. Some of them were forced to wear clothes that said words words the effect of

we will never forgive, we will never forget, a reference to the crimes that they were jailed for 20 years ago. And so there was anger among both societies about the way that these releases were being conducted. And that culminated in perhaps the most unsettling and disturbing hostage release ceremony of the Lot last week when the bodies of three Israeli civilians from the same family, two very young boys, Ariel Bebas and his brother Kefir Bebas, four years old and eight months old respectively at the time of their capture in October 2023, and their mother Shiri Bebas, a 32-year-old accountant. Those bodies were supposed to be released back to Israel last Thursday. And they were handed over to members of the Red Cross

in front of big crowds of Palestinians and against the visual backdrop of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, looking like a vampire dripping with blood. To imply that it's the Prime Minister's fault that these three people are dead. Exactly. The Hamas claim was that these two very young children and their mother were killed in Israeli airstrikes and that Netanyahu and the Israeli military was to blame for their

deaths along with the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians. And those images of a vampiric Netanyahu seemed to be stuck to not only the banner on the stage that was at the center of this handing over ceremony, but also on the coffins themselves. And this was seen in Israel as enormously disrespectful ghoulish, essentially. And that impression was taken to the nth degree once the bodies were examined back in Israel. The Israeli military said that the two boys were not killed in Israeli airstrikes and that an autopsy had revealed that they were killed by militants inside Gaza after their capture.

And then they revealed something even more shocking, that the body of their mother, Shiri Bebas, was not actually her body at all. It was the body of someone else completely, perhaps a Palestinian woman, who had been sent back either by mistake or by design to Israel. And this was a shocking piece of news for the Israeli public, this family had been one of the main emblems of Israeli trauma on October the 7th. And so to see the spectacle of these two young children and their mother being returned in this way, and then on top of that to learn that the mother, Shiri, was in fact still

in Gaza, was an immensely triggering and re-traumatizing event. And was the body of Shiri Bebus actually returned? It was, ultimately. Hamas said it searched again in the place where the Bebus family was buried alongside Palestinians killed during Israeli airstrikes at some point in the course of the war. And they quickly found the right body and returned it back to Israel and that family was finally able to have some degree of closure. But the fury of the Israeli government did not die down once Shiri Be'abass's body was

returned. The whole incident contributed to the Israeli decision to delay the release of the prisoners who were meant to be exchanged for the Bebas' bodies. I mean, all of this, as you said, sounds just so ghoulish, the parading of these emaciated people, this mix up with the body. Given the reaction to all of this within Israel and the fact that it has, as you mentioned, held up the return of these Palestinian prisoners, what is Hamas thinking here? What is the strategy?

Why are the hostages being treated this way? I think there's a few different reasons. In part, it's seen as a counterpoint to the way that Palestinian detainees and prisoners are being released in what Palestinians see as a very humiliating manner. But it's also a means of projecting power and authority. They want to remind both the Palestinians of Gaza and the people of Israel that despite 16 months of war that was meant to force them from power in Gaza, they are very much still in charge.

And are they actually in charge, given how much damage Israel has done to Gaza, the infrastructure, killing their leaders, destroying the tunnels? It's hard to know exactly what level of authority or capacity they have in Gaza because we're not allowed in. The Israeli government is still not letting journalists into Gaza. However, it does seem from these videos and what reporting we are able to do, that they are still the dominant force in Gaza. And if they want to organize a dramatic rally to send off the bodies of Israeli children

on their way back to Israel, they can very much do that. And the message is very clear. Whatever the Israeli government has said about killing thousands and thousands of Hamas militants, they still have some men left. They still have lots of vehicles. They still have lots of guns. And any discussion about the future of Gaza, any discussion about

end to the war has to take their presence into account. Given that Israel did not achieve its intended goal of eliminating Hamas in the war, where does that leave the war and the ceasefire in this next phase? It leaves us in a very uncertain place. All throughout this last six weeks, as the hostages were being exchanged for prisoners, Israel and Hamas were supposed to have been negotiating through mediators about a more wholesale agreement to end the war and about the future governance of Gaza. Because they have such completely different visions for how that should look,

the two sides have not been able to even start negotiations. And that means we're approaching the end of these 42 days that constitute the first phase of the ceasefire and that end at midnight on Saturday night without a clear sense of what's going to happen next. So what are the possible outcomes here after Saturday night? Can you just walk us through them?

The first and most likely outcome is that the truce continues in a very informal, unstructured way at least for a few days. The wording of the current deal allows for the truce to continue, even if there is no agreement about how the truce should continue, as long as there are negotiations still taking place. Another option, and this is something that has been proposed in recent days by Steve Whitcoff, President Trump's Middle East envoy, is that there could be a brief formal extension of the ceasefire, more or less on the same terms that the ceasefire has been observed

thus far. And that would involve an exchange of a few more hostages for several hundred more prisoners and it wouldn't solve the fundamental disagreement about whether the war should end entirely or who should govern Gaza after the war, but it would keep the arrangement going for another week, two weeks, maybe even three weeks. The third option, and it's extremely unlikely that they'll reach this point, is that there might be a deal about

who should govern Gaza next, should the war end entirely, but that's something that is almost impossible to reach right now, just because the two sides are so far apart about what that would look like. So if both sides cannot come to a deal by the weekend or an extension as you described, is it possible that the war is just going to start again? And if so, what is that going to look like? It's very possible.

Whether that happens on Sunday morning, I'm not sure. It's probably more likely that the ceasefire would stutter on for a little bit longer. But it is possible that the war could resume. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said as much earlier this week, he said that Israel is ready to go back to war. And we understand from our own reporting that there are very extensive plans in place to return to fighting. So basically the options here are go back to war or make some sort of short-term extension of the ceasefire. But are there any longer term options on the table for a durable peace deal? There are plenty of longer term options that have been suggested by governments, analysts, politicians, diplomats, Arabs, Israelis, Westerners.

None of them are particularly viable because they all require a degree of compromise from the two main actors. Perhaps the most dramatic and consequential has been the one proposed in recent weeks by President Trump himself. You have to learn from history. History has, you know, just can't let it keep repeating itself. We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal.

And I don't want to be cute. I don't want to be a wise guy, but the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so bad. This could be so magnificent. But more importantly than that is the people that... We'll be right back. So, Patrick, how has President Trump's quote unquote Riviera vision of the Gaza Strip affected the negotiations over the ceasefire and what comes next for Gaza? Well, let's just start with what the plan actually was.

Today I'm delighted to welcome Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu back to the White House. This was a proposal put forth by President Trump in the White House in a seemingly impromptu way as he stood at a lectern beside the Israeli Prime Minister a few weeks ago. The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. And in this proposal, President Trump suggested depopulating Gaza. Because they're living in hell,

and those people will now be able to live in peace. We'll make sure that it's done world-class. It'll be wonderful for the people. Palestinians, Palestinians, mostly we're talking about. Essentially forcing its two million residents to leave their homes and live for years in mainly Egypt and also Jordan. And people can live in harmony and in peace. Thank you all very much.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. And this was such an outlandish proposal that no one really knew what to do with it. Did the President of the United States really think it would be possible to move two million people from one part of the world to another? Right. So this is actually a more extreme proposal than any American president, I think, has proposed in modern times, if not ever. So what has the reaction to it been? In Israel, there's been a mixture of enthusiasm and caution.

Enthusiasm from the Israeli right. For years, the Israeli right wing has wanted Israel to return to Gaza, which it occupied wholly between 1967 and 2005, and reestablish Israeli settlements throughout the territory. Then there's the Israeli center that's more cautious, that sees this as a pie in the sky kind of plan that could cause more disruption than it's worth. And then from the Palestinians, you have a feeling of abject horror that 75 years after hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to leave their homes or fled their

homes during the wars surrounding Israel's creation. Now, another generation of Palestinians would in turn themselves be forced to leave their homes for the second time in two or three generations. Yes, and I can imagine to those Palestinians, it would feel a lot like a second expulsion. Exactly. In 1948, in the wars surrounding Israel's creation, somewhere north of 700,000 Palestinians fled or were forced to flee their homes in what has become the kind of foundational trauma of Palestinian history, referred to by Palestinians and indeed across the Arab world as the Nakba

or an English catastrophe. And the sense that two million Palestinians in 2025 could be forced to leave their homes, however much this has been portrayed as a humanitarian gesture by the Trump administration, feels very much like a second Nakba. And where are the Arab countries in all of this, the ones that Trump talks about in his plan, Jordan and Egypt and others, because Trump is basically suggesting that they would have to take in millions of Palestinian refugees. So what have they said in response to that idea? Well, at first, they displayed the same kind of horror and anger that we saw from Palestinians,

partly out of solidarity for the Palestinian cause, but also the need to care for and provide for such a large number of people was considered an immensely destabilizing idea that could have both created social and political chaos for the Egyptian and Jordanian governments. So they rejected this plan. And then gradually, out of that horror and rejection came a slightly different response, which was not acceptance, but it was the realization that the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Saudis, other leading Arab countries that are allied with the US needed to come up with their own response, their own proposal for the governance

of post-war Gaza. And that's exactly what we see happening in the capitals of the Arab world today. What's really striking here is that basically, to put it another way, even if all these Arab countries hated this idea that Trump floated out there, it does actually light a fire under them to meet and start discussing other options.

That's one way of putting it. And it is also now what the Trump administration and its top envoys are saying was the intention of President Trump when he made this proposal in the first place. Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy, said last week that President Trump didn't mean this literally. He meant to get the Arab world talking and proposing their own ideas to help try to break this deadlock about Gaza's future

that has been hanging over the region for the last 16 months, if not the last 75 years. What kind of plan are they talking about exactly? And more importantly, how would it actually work? It's not yet clear. The leaders of the Arab world, or most of them, What kind of plan are they talking about exactly? And more importantly, how would it actually work? It's not yet clear. The leaders of the Arab world, or most of them, met last week in Riyadh to try and thrash out a proposal.

They're meant to meet again next week in Cairo to talk more. From what we understand about what's being discussed at these meetings, the main proposals are for the leaders of the Arab world to have some kind of oversight over a local Palestinian governing authority that does not include Hamas in exchange for Israel promising that at some point in the future, Gaza and the West Bank, the other main territory where Palestinians live under Israeli occupation, will be able to become their own sovereign Palestinian state. The problem with this proposal is that it requires both Hamas to give up power and Israel to promise Palestinian sovereignty.

Neither of those two things seem very likely at the moment. Right. Cause basically each side wants something that the other side, at least at this point, is absolutely unwilling to give up. Exactly. That was the case before President Trump made his proposal and it remains the case now, and the whole thing is reminiscent of trying to solve a Rubik's cube. You turn the cube in one direction and you bring two squares slightly closer

to where you want them to be. But at the same time, you dislodge another square, bringing yourself back to where you were a moment ago. where bringing yourself back to where you were a moment ago. In the negotiations to try and solve the Rubik's Cube of the Gaza war, all sides, including some of the people trying to mediate, have got their own preconditions and own desired end goals that are completely incompatible with those of the others. And to be specific, Israel wants a post-war Gaza that does not involve Hamas governing it or exerting any kind of military power. Hamas wants a post-war Gaza in which it still plays a significant political role and it still gets to keep its military wing intact,

posing a threat, conceivably, to Israel. Meanwhile, you also have the Arab leaders from Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere now trying to produce their own halfway house that would involve Hamas stepping down. But also in exchange for their involvement, Israel would need to promise to give the Palestinians a state. Israel would be happy with the first bit, getting rid of Hamas. They would not be happy with the second bit,

giving the Palestinians a state. This actually sounds harder than a Rubik's cube. People have actually solved a Rubik's cube. Exactly. And the riddle of Gaza has not been solved in the last 16 months of war, but also not really over the last 75 years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ever since Israel was established in 1948, the future of Gaza has been a conundrum that no one has been able to really solve, least of all now.

On the one hand, Patrick, it feels like we are exactly where we were before the war started, except obviously now there are tens of thousands of people who are dead. There are more people who are traumatized and radicalized. But on the other hand, we do have some of these leaders in the Arab world at the negotiating table. And so it feels like maybe there's this slight possibility that Trump may have thrown a big enough curveball into the mix, that the logjam could actually be broken, solve the riddle of Gaza, as you called it.

So can you just kind of help put this all into perspective for us? One of the implicit consequences of President Trump proposing such a dramatic plan is it really underscored the idea that Trump is acting in lockstep with Israeli interests even more than President Biden was perceived to be. The supporters of that approach say that it is likely to place more pressure on Hamas to compromise because it believes that there is no daylight between Israel and its biggest benefactor, the United States.

The critics of that approach say that rather than making Hamas more likely to compromise, it'll in fact make Israel less likely to compromise because it believes that it can return to war, return to the kinds of deadly and bloody fighting that we saw until January with the United States' full support. And that raises the specter of the ceasefire breaking down, if not in days, then at least in weeks, and a return to the devastating destruction

that we've seen over the last 16 months. Patrick, thank you very much. Thank you, Rachel. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, a group of federal tech workers resigned rather than help Elon Musk and his allies with their agenda to dramatically reshape the federal government. In a scathing letter to the White House, the 21 employees of the U.S. Digital Service said they would not support what they described as the breaking of critical systems and the

mishandling of sensitive data. The resignations come after Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, in just over one month, has ended contracts, laid off workers, and shuttered entire federal agencies. And, in a major concession to President Trump, Ukraine has agreed to give the United States money from its mineral resources. The deal follows an intense pressure campaign that included threats and insults as Trump increasingly pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for a quote-unquote payback in exchange for continued support in Ukraine's war with Russia.

The details of the deal aren't clear yet, including whether President Trump has committed any specific security support at all. Today's episode was produced by Rachelle Bonja, Caitlin O'Keefe, Michael Simon Johnson, and Jessica Chung. It was edited by Patricia Willans with help from Paige Cowitt. Special thanks to Adam Razzgun. Contains original music by Diane Wong, Rowan Nemisto, and Marian Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for the daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.