Israel-Hamas negotiation: peace finally possible

It will take more days or weeks, but the outcome is now in sight. Under pressure from Donald Trump, resolved to impose peace, Hamas is forced to finally accept his defeat. Pilled by the Israeli army, the terrorist movement, which has ruled the Gaza Strip since its electoral victory in 2006, will have to fade, although it costs it. He consents to the rapid release of his 48 Israeli hostages still captive, the first phase of the Trump plan. The American ultimatum which provides for the disarmament and the withdrawal of the affairs of the Islamist organization leaves, it is true, to it no escape, except, as threatened by the tenant of the White House, to undergo “hell”.

The American bombings in Iran last June proved that it was not vain speech. Beheaded by the death of almost all its military executives, short of heavy arms and missiles, now without allies after the collapse of Lebanese Hezbollah and the Syrian regime, and forced to negotiate by the Arab states, Hamas has no other choice.

As the Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs summed up, Badr Abdelatty, the Islamist movement will have “no role” in the future of Gaza. You have to go back to the negotiated initially negotiated from the Palestine Liberation Organization, directed by Yasser Arafat, expelled from Lebanon by TSAhal, in August 1982, to Tunisia, to find a similar rout of armed Palestinian nationalism. Two years after the attack launched, on October 7, 2023, against Israeli civilians and soldiers (nearly 1,200 dead), and Israeli reprisals that caused tens of thousands of deaths (more than 67,610, according to Hamas), weapons must be silent on this close bunch of sand long for forty kilometers.

A “decisive challenge”

Donald Trump’s plan – supported by Europeans, most of the Arab capitals, Pope Leo XIV (who described him as “very interesting” and “realistic”) – provides, in exchange for the erasure of Hamas, an amnesty or exile for his activists, a progressive Israeli withdrawal and the release by the Jewish state of nearly 1,700 Palestinian prisoners. So many conditions to which Benyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, had to comply.

The hypothesis, a time suggested by the American president himself, of a massive displacement of the Gazan population, claimed by the Israeli far right, is explicitly dismissed. The territory administration, once disarmed, would be entrusted to “a commission of Palestinian technocrats”, undoubtedly chosen in the diaspora, supervised by an international “an international council”, chaired by Donald Trump and managed, according to the English press, by the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. It could ultimately lead to a form of Palestinian state. A prospect, however, refused by the government of Benyamin Netanyahu.

“The balance between its ambition and its ability to be implemented is the decisive challenge of the plan proposed by Donald Trump,” analyzes Amr Hamzawy, director of the Middle East program at the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace.

Because, if it opens, the site of this protectorate of the international community, which signs in passing the undisputed supremacy of Washington in the Middle East, will be titanic and dizzying. According to a UN estimate, 92 % of Gaza’s residential buildings are destroyed. And who will pay? Rebuilding Gaza will take generations.