After 15 months of unceasing destruction in Gaza following the October 7th attack on Isreal and the death of tens of thousands of Palestinians, Israel and Hamas have reached an agreement on a ceasefire deal.
The deal is complex. It depends on a phased release of Israeli hostages held within Gaza as Israeli forces draw back; 1,000 of the over 9,500 Palestinians currently held in Israeli prisons will also be released over a period of six weeks. After the first hostages are released, according to a draft of the deal shared with the Associated Press, Israel is obligated to begin withdrawing its troops from Gaza.
President-elect Donald Trump confirmed the ceasefire on Truth Social: “WE HAVE A DEAL.” US officials told the Associated Press mid-day Tuesday that the ceasefire would be implemented in the coming days.
The New York Times reports that the deal reached on Wednesday is highly similar to the one pushed by President Joe Biden in May. Donald Trump’s victory helped push Israel to accept the deal, according to the Washington Post. An unnamed diplomat told the paper that it was “the first time there has been real pressure on the Israeli side to accept a deal.”
Israel’s army has leveled two-thirds of the buildings in Gaza, rendered most of its infrastructure unusable, and killed a massive portion of the Palestinian population. The exact number of dead will be unknown for some time, as unrecorded deaths and those trapped under the rubble are added to the tally. Gaza’s health ministry puts the official death toll at 46,600; last week, the latest in a series of independent studies estimated that at least 64,000 people were killed in the first 9 months of the war alone. 90 percent of those left alive in Gaza have been displaced, most of whom are at risk of famine.
Meanwhile, the United States continued to send billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Israel, without meaningfully conditioning that aid.
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared a deal was “right on the brink.” Hamas accepted a deal that was near-identical to one proposed by President Joe Biden and endorsed by the UN Security Council—which Israel scuttled in July. This time, though, the threat of Trump’s inauguration served as something closer to a real deadline. (The President-elect repeatedly threatened that there would be “hell to pay” if the remaining hostages were not returned by January 20th.) His envoy, Steve Witkoff, joined this past week’s negotiations in Qatar, alongside Qatari mediators, US negotiators and representatives for Israel and Hamas.
While the bombs will stop, the question of aid remains: aid workers say famine has taken hold in Gaza. Nearly every hospital in the enclave has been destroyed or stripped of nearly all its capabilities, and infrastructure like plumbing and roadways have been rendered unusable.
It is also unclear how long the deal will hold, as Israel and Hamas begin the phased release of prisoners and draw back of the IDF from Gaza.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
