Israel and Hamas Take a Big Step Towards Peace

0:05Last night we reached a momentous breakthrough in the Middle East, something that people said was never going to be done. Today, speaking to the press at a cabinet meeting, President Donald Trump shared details of a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. We secured the release of all of the remaining hostages, and they should be released on Monday or Tuesday. And he said he hoped the peace would be permanent. We ended the war in Gaza and really, on a much bigger basis, created peace. I talked to my colleague Shane D. Race, who covers the Middle East.

0:45And how significant is this moment? It's huge. I never thought that all the hostages would come out. So it's massive. And it certainly ends one part of the horrific chapter that began on October 7th, 2023. But there's obviously a whole other part of the deal that's going to be a lot more complex and difficult to get over into the final stages.

1:17Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Thursday, October 9th.

1:30Coming up on the show, after two years of fighting, an end is in sight for the war in Gaza.

1:52We've just marked the second anniversary of this war. Going into October 7th of this year, what was the state of the conflict? So going into October 7th of this year, Israel was on the cusp or had just begun an offensive on Gaza City, which it had described as the final Hamas stronghold. In reality, there really wasn't that much fighting left for Israel to do against Hamas. You know, they had largely very early on in the war destroyed most of Hamas's military capabilities. I mean, there have been lots of airstrikes. And for the people of Gaza, this has been a living nightmare for two full years.

2:32But in large part, honestly, there was not a lot of fighting left to do. And so it was really just both sides refusing to say, I'm willing to surrender. Right. There was this feeling of like limbo, it sounds like. Limbo is a really good way of describing it. It was really just this game of waiting to see who's gonna, you know, cry uncle first, who's gonna say that's it, it's over. That limbo was broken last month after Israel launched an airstrike in Qatar. Qatar is an important U.S. ally, but has also allowed senior members of Hamas to live inside its borders. At the time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he believed the strike could help end the war.

3:15When Israel struck a Hamas office in Doha a couple weeks ago in an attempt to kill the Hamas leadership, Qatar and many other countries in the Arab world sort of had this fear that Israel was becoming too strong and too unpredictable in its willingness to use force against its enemies. And it really showed that, you know, none of these countries were safe as long as this war went on. And I think it became clear to Qatar that, you know, the war needed to end. So for Hamas, I think one of the big things that changed is that their patrons in the Arab world told them, this is it, you don't have any other options.

3:58Qatar and Turkey were both really key to this because they host Hamas. And so the threat that they could say to Hamas, listen, you are going to have to leave. And once you leave, we have no way of protecting you anymore. Israel will probably come after you and kill you. Trump was particularly unhappy about the strike as well. Can you talk about why? Yes. I mean, he was unhappy about the strike because the Qataris were very unhappy about the strike. And Qatar is a very important U.S. ally. And so it put the United States in a very difficult spot because it was, you know, their closest ally in the Middle East attacking Hamas on the sovereign territory of another one of their most important allies.

4:42The Qataris obviously host a major U.S. base. And so this was really problematic for President Trump because it put him between these two allies. According to Shandy's reporting, President Trump told Qatar that if they helped with a ceasefire deal, Trump would get Netanyahu to apologize for the bombing and promise not to target their country again, which Netanyahu did do. And the other thing that President Trump gave them was he signed an executive order that, you know, assured that if Qatar is attacked again, the United States would respond and come to its defense. So President Trump was able to really leverage that moment to pressure Israel and to entice the Qataris to do what he wanted them to do when it came to pressuring Hamas.

5:28Trump also worked to get Turkey, another important regional player, on board. The Turks have a lot of things that they want from the Americans. They want F-35s from the Americans. They want American support for Syria, for the new administration in Syria. whom they back. And so that was another relationship that I think President Trump was able to leverage to get on board. And, you know, it really can't be overstated just how important it is that Qatar and Turkey got on board with pressuring Hamas and then the rest of the Muslim and Arab world. And really, once Hamas had no allies left, they really had no place else to go.

6:05So Arab countries put the pressure on Hamas. What about Israel and Netanyahu? What changed on their side? So there is a widespread belief in Israel, polls show this, that most Israelis think that Netanyahu has extended the war for his own political purposes. They believe that because Netanyahu has some very far-right ministers in his government who have very much opposed ending the war. And so the conventional thinking was that Netanyahu couldn't end the war because those two ministers would leave his coalition and topple the government and he would have to face elections. And what President Trump gave Netanyahu with this deal is he gave him a deal that is enough of a win for Netanyahu to be able to face voters and potentially win.

6:53The basis of the deal comes from a 20-point peace plan that Trump and Netanyahu unveiled early last week. This afternoon, after extensive consultation with our friends and partners throughout the region, I'm formally releasing our principles for peace, which people have really liked, I must say. After that announcement, top U.S. representatives flew to Sharm el-Sheikh, the Egyptian beach resort where ceasefire talks were being held. They joined delegations from Qatar, Egypt, and Israel for the final stretch of discussions. After three days of negotiations, the party said late yesterday that an agreement had been reached.

7:31As news of the deal spread, Palestinians came out into the streets to celebrate a possible end to the fighting.

7:41People are thrilled. I'm obviously not in Gaza. Journalists are not allowed to be there, but I've seen the videos and we've been speaking to people all day. And Gazans are just completely and totally exhausted. from two years of war. I'm sure that there are people who, you know, are in Hamas or support Hamas who feel shame at this deal, you know, that it doesn't recognize what they believe to be a legitimate Palestinian right of resistance. But your average Gazan who has suffered through two years of hell is ecstatic that this is over. In Israel, you know, polls have shown for almost eight months now that the vast majority of Israelis, upwards of 60 percent, want this war to end and they want the hostages home.

8:30And I think the fact that the hostages are going to be coming home is just unexpected and an incredibly joyful moment for Israelis. And then, of course, there's also just all the troops that will be coming home and people have been fighting for two years. and so people are exhausted. Today, Netanyahu said, quote, this is a diplomatic success and a national and moral victory for the state of Israel. But even as people celebrate, there are still some big unanswered questions. That's next.

9:16At the time of recording, the full Israeli cabinet had convened to approve the ceasefire and hostage release deal with Hamas. The Israeli parliament will also have to vote on the agreement. 72 hours from when that deal is signed, Hamas is supposed to release living hostages as well as bodies. Now, there is a recognition that they may not be able to release all of those bodies because the dead have been moved around a lot during the war. and they don't know where they are. So the war should be ending very, very soon, within the next day or so, and the hostages will be coming home within the next three days or so.

9:57Arab mediators said that as part of the deal, Hamas wants Israel to pull out from around 70 % of Gaza. Israel wants to withdraw from less territory, and the two sides are still negotiating this point, according to people briefed on the talks. The ceasefire will also immediately allow for more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza? As soon as the ceasefire goes into effect, the gates will open and humanitarian aid will be flooded into Gaza. So that situation of hunger in Gaza, people not having enough tents, shelter, fuel, medicine, that should be alleviated fairly quickly. However, the biggest problem is that Gaza is in absolute ruins.

10:40It is decimated. there is not a place for most people to go home to. The United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees estimates that as much as 80 percent of the structures in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. Most of Gaza's two million residents have had to leave their homes. And Palestinian health authorities say 67 ,000 people have died in the conflict. We don't know how many of those people were combatants. And so the question is, will people want to leave? Will they be allowed to leave? if they stay, what kinds of conditions are they going to be staying in? Will they be much better than they are now?

11:16Yes, they'll have food, but will they still be living in tents? You know, the people of Gaza, their journey is far from finished. They are not going home, you know, they're not going back to their houses. They're not going back to their lives. They're not going back to their jobs right away. It's going to be a slow, painful process to rebuild Gaza. And so, you know, some suffering will be alleviated right away, but there's still going to be a long road ahead of them. And there are many other big issues that this first phase of the ceasefire doesn't cover. The biggest unanswered question that nobody knows the answer to is to what degree will Hamas actually demilitarize, give up its weapons, give up control of all governance of the Gaza Strip?

12:05what role will they play in the future and will they continue to exist and remain an important part of Palestinian politics. And Israel's goal was to destroy Hamas, to make sure that it was no longer an armed group, that it did not play a role in Palestinian politics. And it looks pretty bad for Hamas right now. But we don't know what is actually going to happen and how far that demilitarization will go to the point where they really will be gone forever or come back in some completely different form. What do we know about the governance of Gaza in the absence of Hamas? So what we know from President Trump's proposal is that there's supposed to be a committee of Palestinian technocrats.

12:52Most of them will be made up from the rival Fatah party, so meaning rival to Hamas. There's this other party called Fatah, which is the party that is in power in the West Bank. They run what's called the Palestinian Authority. Along with this committee of technocrats will be some sort of international board of advisors that would potentially include former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. And at the head of this board will be President Trump himself, if it goes through. It's a bit open-ended. But one of the things that President Trump's plan does state is that the Palestinian people have a right to sovereignty and statehood.

13:35But it doesn't give any sort of timeline or process for how that happens. We've been somewhere similar before, right? There was a ceasefire and a multi-phase peace plan earlier this year. That fell apart. Why should this time be different? Why are people so hopeful that this is the end of the war? I think that if all the hostages come out, there's really very little leverage left for Hamas. And, you know, in Netanyahu's mind, he believed that the only way to do this was through military pressure. You know, other people would argue he could have done it through diplomacy. But the bottom line is he couldn't end things until he got those hostages out.

14:11And Hamas had a massive bargaining chip. Without those people, without the support of Turkey, Qatar, the entire Arab world, you know, they don't have a patron in Iran anymore. I mean, it's just going to be very, very difficult for them to really pose much of a threat in the short term. All of that's still ahead, but is the war over? Well, sort of, yeah. I mean, it's not over just yet, but like, I think within the next 24 hours, it will essentially be over. I think at the end of the day, it's super interesting that it's almost two years to the day from when this war started. You know, watching horror unfold in Gaza, watching Israeli society being torn apart, watching, you know, the streets of Europe being torn apart, a rise in anti-Semitism globally.

15:02It's just been kind of a earth shattering time. And so to think that that's coming to an end is very exciting. But also there's just so much, so much damage that's been left, so much scorched earth. And I just wonder now what the process towards healing is going to look like.

15:40That's all for today, Thursday, October 9th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode from Michael R. Gordon, Jared Melson, Anat Pellett, and Summer Saeed. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.