This essay first appeared at Quillette. Read more by Benny Morris here → https://quillette.com/author/benny-morris/
On Monday morning, Israeli Jews rejoiced as Hamas released the last twenty Israeli hostages from tunnels in Gaza, allowing them to return to their families and girlfriends. A few hours later, almost 2,000 Palestinians who had been imprisoned in Israel were released. Most of them returned to Gaza and the West Bank, though several dozen are destined to live out their lives in exile abroad. Of the Arabs released, some 250 were serving life sentences for murdering Israelis over the past thirty years.
Alongside the live hostages, Hamas have also handed over seven or eight bodies of hostages who died either during Hamas’s invasion of Israel on 7 October 2023 or in their subsequent captivity. According to President Donald Trump’s twenty-point peace plan, published on 29 September, and the Israel–Hamas agreement that followed, Hamas was supposed to hand over the bodies of 28 dead hostages—and Israel and Washington are now demanding that Hamas fulfil its commitment. Hamas officials have said that they are having difficulties locating the twenty missing bodies, some of which are presumably buried under the rubble of houses destroyed by Israeli bombings of the Strip over the past two years. But Israeli officials suspect that Hamas is playing games and is either bent on psychologically torturing the families of the twenty, who wish to bury their dead in Israel, or wants to hold onto the “missing” bodies in order to trade them for a release of additional Palestinian prisoners at a later date. On Tuesday, Israel threatened to respond to what it regarded as Hamas’s violation of the agreement by imposing restrictions on humanitarian aid entering the Strip or even closing the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza—though it appears that neither penalty has actually been activated. On Wednesday, it appeared that Hamas intended to hand over four more bodies within hours. Egypt has announced that its agents are now working in the Strip, attempting to locate the missing bodies.
Monday’s hostage–prisoner exchange followed Saturday’s military withdrawal, as the IDF pulled its troops back eastward out of some twenty percent of the Gaza Strip, especially the outlying areas of Gaza City, the Strip’s main urban hub. The IDF continues to occupy about fifty percent of the Strip, areas it conquered during the counter-offensive that followed Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which around 1,200 Israelis—350 of them soldiers—were murdered and 251 taken hostage. According to Hamas figures, some 67,000 Gazans were killed over the following two years of warfare in the Strip, about one-third or one-quarter of whom—according to Israel—were Hamas fighters. The rest were civilians who died collaterally. The IDF has lost at least 900 soldiers in the war that began that day, around 550 of them in Gaza since 8 October.
Saturday’s partial IDF pullback, Monday’s hostage–prisoner exchange, and the entry into the Strip of hundreds of trucks loaded with humanitarian aid (food, water, medical supplies, etc.), together constitute the implementation of the first stage of Trump’s peace plan, which ultimately provides for a gradual but full Israeli withdrawal from the Strip alongside the disarmament of Hamas and the administration and reconstruction of the devastated Strip by an international “Board of Peace,” chaired either by Trump himself or by former United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair. This Board would supervise a “transitional” government, composed mainly of non-Hamas Palestinian technocrats, and an International Stabilisation Force (ISF) of soldiers and police, which would disarm Hamas and carry out the “demilitarisation” of the Strip, meaning the destruction of Hamas’s vast tunnel network and the supervision of the gradual IDF withdrawal back to the Israel–Gaza border. The plan allows for Israel, after the withdrawal, to maintain a 500–1,500-metre security “perimeter” on the Gaza side of the Israel–Gaza border for an indefinite period. In the long term, Point 19 of the Trump plan provides for the eventual takeover of the administration of the Strip by the “reformed” Palestinian Authority (PA) as a first step on the “pathway … to Palestinian statehood.”
