Israel And Hamas Agree To First Phase Of Peace Deal

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Hey there.

It's the NPR Politics Podcast.

I'm Miles Parks.

I cover voting.

I'm Greg Myri.

I cover national security.

I'm Tam Rakith.

I cover the White House.

And today on the podcast, Israel and Hamas have agreed to the first stage of a ceasefire that could end the war in Gaza.

So, Greg, you're talking to us from Tel Aviv, and there are a lot of moving parts about this deal.

Can you just explain them for us?

Yeah, the Israeli government is discussing this.

Now, they're supposed to approve it.

There's a majority.

There's some against it in the cabinet.

But when it gets approved, then there's supposed to be a formal announcement, which means the ceasefire will take effect.

And then the clock starts ticking for both the Israelis and for Hamas in Gaza.

Israel will have 24 hours, so perhaps from Thursday night to Friday night, to pull back its troops somewhat in Gaza.

Not all the way.

In fact, they'll still have about half of Gaza sort of following the contours of Gaza's borders and will over time move further back if things go well.

Now, the clock will also be ticking for Habas, which has supposedly three days to release all the Israeli hostages.

20 of them are believed to be living.

28 are believed to be dead at this point.

So we're expecting them to at least start getting released over the weekend, perhaps Sunday, we're hearing.

President Trump spoke recently.

He talked about Monday or Tuesday, but sometime in this time period, we should see the Israeli hostages come out.

When that starts, Israel will begin releasing up to 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.

And there's more.

Hundreds of aid trucks are supposed to start flowing into Gaza to deal with this critical humanitarian shortage that has carried on throughout the war.

So we've got all of these moving parts.

It will be very positive if they all happen as expected, but certainly there's the possibility some things could get delayed or even go wrong.

Right.

So lots to watch in the next couple of days.

Tam, I know President Trump had a pretty big role in making this potential peace deal happen.

Can you explain his role?

Absolutely.

He has been pushing for this for a long time, but it really ramped up around the time of the UN General Assembly last month in New York, where he held a meeting with a number of Arab leaders.

He also has been applying intense pressure to Israeli Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu also visited the White House last month.

Trump met with him.

He specifically said that he did not think Israel should be allowed to occupy Gaza in a lot of ways.

You know, if there's a good cop, bad cop, he played the bad cop with Netanyahu, really pushing him to make this deal happen.

And now the president is taking a huge amount of credit.

He had this cabinet meeting today where members of his cabinet went around praising him, and there was a lot of praise for this deal.

Well, yeah, let's listen to a little bit of President Trump talking about the deal today.

Last night we reached a momentous breakthrough in the Middle East, something that people said was never going to be done.

We ended the war in Gaza and really, on a much bigger basis, created peace.

And I think it's going to be a lasting peace, hopefully an everlasting peace.

Peace in the Middle East.

Well, Greg, obviously this is just step one, as you've mentioned, in a multi-pronged process.

And peace in the Middle East is not something that just happens with a snap of a finger.

Can you explain the hurdles, I guess, as you look ahead to the next few days and weeks

to kind of potential difficult points that could still put this deal at risk?

Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of them.

There is probably a pretty good chance now that this initial stage, the shooting stops, the ceasefire takes hold, the Israeli hostages are released, the Palestinian prisoners and detainees are released.

Both societies really, really want this.

So there is momentum and interest in seeing that done.

But then you start to hit some things that are trickier and harder.

First, the Trump plan calls for Hamas to disarm and not play a role in governing Gaza.

Now, Hamas hasn't said it will do that.

It's been in Gaza for 40 years.

It's ruled the territory for nearly 20 years.

And Hamas is not committed to this really key point from the Israeli perspective.

Second, the Israeli troops are still in Gaza.

They're supposed to pull back, as I noted.

But Gaza is a small, cramped place.

And just having Israeli troops inside that territory really increases the possibility of a confrontation.

And there is no timeline for when they will leave.

So if things start to go wrong, they could escalate very, very quickly.

I will say that President Trump was asked, okay, this is phase one.

What about phase two?

And he's like, I don't want to talk about that.

But yeah, it'll include disarming.

It will include, you know, I've got a 20-point plan, which he does have a 20-point plan.

It's just that the parties haven't actually agreed to everything in that 20-point plan.

It includes the potential down the line for a two-state solution where the Palestinians would have

self-governance.

And it would create a board of peace, which would be chaired by President Trump.

It would basically be an international body meant to transition from this war state to a stable Gaza.

There are just a lot of things in the 20-point plan that it isn't clear have fully been agreed to yet.

But one thing that Trump pointed out, and I think this is probably important, is he says, we're getting all the hostages out at the beginning.

You know, this isn't like a few hostages here, a few hostages there, as has been in the past.

He's really emphasizing that all of the hostages will be released at the beginning of this ceasefire.

Greg, I did want to ask you, because there has been a ceasefire before.

There have been some fits and starts.

There was one back in January that looked like it had potential.

Is this time different?

It is different, but that doesn't mean it's going to work.

What is different is that there's a lot more pressure being exerted.

You mentioned the pressure that Trump had put on Netanyahu

in getting Netanyahu to accept the plan publicly.

And then they started to put the squeeze on Hamas, saying Hamas had to accept this.

And Arab countries really wanted to see this deal done.

Egypt and Qatar, the two countries that work most closely with Hamas, both clearly wanted this done.

They were participants in the negotiations in Egypt the past several days.

So that had a big impact as well.

They weren't going to let let Hamas come up with all sorts of reasons or negotiate endlessly.

Hamas was also beaten down.

The Israeli troops have just worn them down and really flattened Hamas over the past two years.

And above and beyond that, of course, we've seen this incredible punishment inflicted on civilians in Gaza where more than 67,000 people have been killed overall, many of them women and children.

And the Israeli troops were mounting another offensive, pushing into Gaza City, the main city in the territory.

So there was this real sense of exhaustion, certainly among the Palestinian public and Hamas, but Israelis too wanted this.

It just seemed there was momentum coming from lots of different places saying, we really want this to happen now.

And again, it's not just a ceasefire.

It's supposed to be part of a larger plan, ending the war, looking forward toward reconstruction.

Well, Greg, talk about that exhaustion again for a second.

Have you seen that play out like in the form of relief now?

I mean, in terms of in Israel and Gaza, have you been hearing at all

reaction to the first day of this deal potentially being done?

Yeah, Miles, people were just talking about the sense of relief, the sense of hope,

joy.

We saw people celebrating it in both places, in Gaza and in Israel.

So there's that, but also the emotions are still very, very raw for a lot of people.

We spoke to a Palestinian father down in Gaza, and he said, what should I be happy about?

I'm living in a tent with my children.

We don't have enough food.

We don't have clean water.

I've lost 150 of my extended family members in the war.

We talked to an Israeli man.

His father was one of those held hostage in Gaza.

He survived for quite some time, but then died in captivity.

This man really blamed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that deal could have been reached a long time ago when my father was still alive.

So he's very critical of Netanyahu, but very supportive of Trump.

He credits Trump with doing this deal.

So you've got a lot of very strong, conflicting emotions coursing through this place on both the Israeli and Palestinian side right now.

Yeah, I want to dig into all of that a little bit more.

Let's take a quick break and more in just a moment.

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And we're back, and we've been discussing the latest developments for the peace deal that could end the war in Gaza.

And Greg, I do want to talk a little bit about the future of Gaza.

What do we know about over the coming days and weeks and months, who is actually going to run Gaza?

Yeah, we've been asking that question since the war began because there was no real clear answer.

So the plan that's been outlined by Trump and endorsed by Israel calls for this committee of Palestinian technocrats to temporarily run the place.

We don't know who they're going to be, who's going to select them, how it will work.

And Habas is still going to be there.

It's not like they're just going to disappear.

And again, as Tam mentioned, there will be this board of peace overseeing it.

So it's a really kind of stitched together notion with no real substance to it at this point.

So we'll have to see how this will play out, how members of this body will do things, how they will handle enforcement if there's still armed Hamas members there, how will they deal with it?

And again, this is just an interim solution.

You'll still have to find a longer-term solution.

You know, one other possibility is the Palestinian Authority and the West Bank, which used to run the West Bank and Gaza, but they are in very low repute.

They're seen as corrupt and inept.

The head of it is Mahmoud Abbas, who turns 90 years old next month.

Netanyahu says they're not qualified to run it.

So that doesn't seem to be a strong option.

So there's no real clear group that has a strong political base or any track record who will be doing this.

Again, that's one of the problems down the road.

Yeah, this I'm looking at the 20-point plan that President Trump put out late last month, and the Board of Peace is described as a body that will set the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza until such time as the Palestinian Authority has completed its reform program and is able to take control.

And President Trump in this cabinet meeting talked about rebuilding Gaza and said, there's all these really wealthy Arab nations around.

They can pay for it.

And I feel like it's a very vague timeline.

I mean, that could be weeks, months, years.

Greg, how long are we talking here?

Yeah, and, you know, Trump has this history.

He likes to declare victory and then generally move on.

He's not a detail guy.

And yet, as we know, sorting out these Israeli-Palestinian issues is absolutely time-consuming and...

torturous and one step forward, two steps backward.

So these problems are going to come up and Trump has sort of taken ownership by naming himself head of this board.

You know, he likes the notion that he's brought peace to the region or at least ended the war apparently.

But we'll have to see how willing he is to get involved when you run into these problems as to who's going to run Gaza, who's going to patrol the streets, who has the enforcement power.

Well, it's interesting.

I feel like you guys have both mentioned the fact that the president is quick to declare a win.

But in this case, it does feel like much of the rest of the world seems to agree that he did play a pretty big role in this.

I mean, what is everyone else saying about his role in these negotiations?

Yeah, he did play a big role.

And I think he was instrumental, and he should be given credit for this.

And I think he helped bring this international effort together.

I think the Europeans were on board.

There was this

pressure that came from the Arab states as well.

And that's something we hadn't really seen in the past.

And so he he absolutely deserves some credit for that.

And really to the larger issue, Trump has had some real success in the Middle East, and a lot of people doubted him.

But in his first term, he helped work out the Abraham Accords, which were brokered by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, where Israel established relations with countries like the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

Now, a lot of people are very skeptical of that, but they've been stress-tested by this war the past two years, and they've held up.

And lo and behold, Trump sent Jared Kushner to the talks yesterday in Egypt, and he was there when this ceasefire deal was reached.

So very untraditional, not how it would normally be done diplomatically, but

it has worked.

You know, the interesting thing about Trump is that he is very pro-Israel.

He moved the U.S.

Embassy to Jerusalem during his first term.

He got these Abraham Accords through.

And in part, I think that gave gave him the ability to be tougher with Netanyahu.

Like President Biden, also very pro-Israel, but ultimately didn't really force Netanyahu's hand.

And Trump, on the other hand, used his political capital to try to push this through.

The thing is, he promised he'd have peace.

It didn't happen.

And so this is one of his big unfinished promises.

And now he is very close to keeping that promise.

It has been interesting to watch him be tougher on Netanyahu than other U.S.

presidents have been in the past.

You know, seeing this through the lens of this being a potentially massive accomplishment for the president, coming at the same time that his approval ratings domestically are at an all-time low, at least for the second term, how much is this going to matter, I guess, to voters, Tam, do you think?

I mean, is this something that could potentially move that approval rating in a meaningful way?

Generally speaking, unless foreign policy is going very badly, it doesn't actually drag down a president's approval because the reality is for most Americans, it's pocketbook issues, it's what's happening at home, it's how they feel about their lives, and not so much about what's happening on the global stage.

But for Trump, it is a win, and it's a win at a moment when the government is shut down, when his approval rating is at its low point.

And so, for him, why not drop everything and fly to the Middle East?

Because, hey, let's take the W.

Craig, what else are you going to be watching over the next week?

Well, we've got so many things happening, Miles.

You know, obviously the exchange of hostages and prisoners, a Trump visit, aid going into Gaza, and just seeing

with all of these different dynamics, if the ceasefire looks to be taking hold and can stabilize the region.

You know, you have the long-term issue of solving the Palestinian political problem and the Palestinians' Palestinians' desire to have their own state.

But that's just something that's way over the horizon at this point.

You know, can you stabilize Gaza at this point?

That's a big deal.

And just the way the Middle East has been changed pretty dramatically in the past two years, Israel has really beaten back its main foes.

Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon.

They've hammered the Iranian nuclear sites and the longtime dictator of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, is gone.

So Israel Israel has really strengthened its position in terms of security, but is much more isolated because of the way it has handled the war in Gaza.

All right, well, we can leave it there for today.

I'm Miles Parks, I cover voting.

I'm Greg Myri, I cover national security, and I'm Tamer Keith.

I cover the White House.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

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