Netanyahu’s war isn’t over Israel must now deal with Iran

After the horrors of October 7 and 15 gruelling months of war, we finally have a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. But the pause in fighting may cause more problems than it solves. It breaks new ground in conflict resolution: never before has a country agreed to trade strategic territory for hostages. And yet, this is what Israel has promised. Under a new agreement with Hamas, the IDF will withdraw from the Netzarim Corridor bisecting the Gaza Strip, relinquishing much of its ability to protect the border communities ravaged 15 months ago.

If, moreover, the agreement proceeds to its anticipated second phase, the IDF will leave the Gaza-Egypt frontier, abandoning the Strip’s invaluable smuggling routes to Hamas, at the same time that hundreds of Hamas terrorists will be freed from Israeli jails. In return, Israel will receive an unknown number of living hostages. Thirty-three of the roughly 100 remaining hostages are set to be freed in the deal’s first phase, including women, the elderly, and very young children, but Hamas hasn’t told Israel which of the captives are still alive.

There was no military need for a ceasefire. The frontlines in Gaza are stable. Though it has lost roughly 400 soldiers in Gaza, Israel has made casualties of perhaps half of Hamas’s army, estimated at 30,000 to 40,000 strong, and was under no battlefield pressure to withdraw.

The specifics of the deal are only where the problems begin for Israel. By the end of phase one, 50 days into the ceasefire, the IDF will have abandoned every critical point inside heavily populated areas of the Strip without having recovered the bodies of the remaining dead hostages, a matter which is reserved for phase three. If, during the negotiations planned between the deal’s phases, Israel cannot convince Hamas to cede control of the Strip, it will have to re-invade Gaza, likely at great diplomatic and reputational cost. It must otherwise accept the stinging reality that the war will have ended with Hamas’s terrorists, rapists and kidnappers gazing into Israel from more or less the same positions they occupied on 6 October 2023.

The return of Donald Trump adds to the agreement’s downsides. The President-elect apparently deputised Steve Witkoff, his incoming Middle East peace envoy, to cajole Benjamin Netanyahu into accepting the Biden Administration’s ceasefire framework. By creating the illusion of a foreign policy win, Witkoff has validated a key Biden policy and undermined a popular US ally for what might be inevitably petty reasons. After all, in early 2021, Netanyahu drew Trump’s ire for stating that Biden had won the 2020 election.

The ceasefire heralds short-term domestic problems for Netanyahu, with the seven-seat Religious Zionist party threatening to leave the government if fighting doesn’t resume after phase one, an eventuality which would leave the Prime Minister with a slim one-seat majority in the Knesset. Other divisions loom too. Overall, some 800 security personnel have been killed since October 7, meaning there is now a considerable number of Israelis who see decisive victory as the only acceptable return for the sacrifice of hundreds of young men. There have already been small protests against the ceasefire, including near West Bank settlements that have contributed a disproportionate number of war dead.

But accepting this deal is hardly an act of insanity. Aside from freeing the hostages from a living hell, the goal of this agreement, as with many of Netanyahu’s decisions over the past year, has been to create the freedom of action needed to keep fighting. Since October 7, Netanyahu has correctly gambled that a long war would ultimately advantage Israel, a socially cohesive modern state with a strong military and a robust belief in its own survival. The costs of a long war have proven more than bearable. Over a year of fighting, the Israeli economy surpassed $10 billion in foreign technological investment and set records for defence exports. Births increased by 10%, a sign that the society is far from demoralised. Relations with countries like Ireland and South Africa have foundered, but these aren’t exactly major powers. As for the International Criminal Court indictments of Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant: they now seem likelier to hurt the ICC than Israel. Italy, France and Poland have all said they won’t comply with the court’s arrest warrants, while sanctioning the court is one of the top legislative priorities of the incoming Republican-led Congress.

Netanyahu perhaps anticipated that an extended conflict, punctuated by timely concessions, might create its own unpredictable logic, leaving opportunities for the IDF to seize when the time was right.

If that really was Netanyahu’s intention, it seems to have worked. Israel didn’t invade Gaza until late October 2023, waiting until senior US advisers arrived to help plan the operation. The next month, a ceasefire agreement freed roughly half the Hamas hostages and bought Netanyahu enough credit with both Biden and liberal critics at home to keep the war going deep into the following year. By mid-2024, Netanyahu’s constant threats to invade the Gazan border city of Rafah had the effect of creating leverage over the US, which opposed the move. The US spent months bargaining with the Prime Minister in the hope of delaying him — and while waiting to invade Rafah, the IDF built up the Netzarim Corridor and escalated its attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon.

When Israel did finally take Gaza’s border with Egypt, in the spring of 2024, it secured a strategic asset for future negotiations and completed the total encirclement of Hamas forces, creating opportunities to fight other, more threatening enemies. Israel teased a ground operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon for much of the summer, seizing the strategic initiative and creating another long and inevitably fruitful series of negotiations with Israel’s allies in Washington. When an invasion finally came, Hezbollah lost almost all its senior commanders, most of its elite Radwan force, and many of its missiles, alongside a plethora of subterranean fortresses and almost as many fighters as died during 13 years of civil war in Syria. Nor was Syria itself immune to this approach. The fall of the Assad regime, and Israel’s subsequent destruction of the country’s air defences and most of its conventional military capacity, was a downstream consequence of Netanyahu’s success at keeping the fighting going.

In other words, Netanyahu has gained much by biding his time, even as he proved that both Israelis and their army can sustain a once-unimaginable blend of high-tempo operations across seven different fronts. That, indeed, is ultimately why the ceasefire might help his country: buying time both domestically and in Washington, it gives the premier space to plan and execute his next move.

In the first place, the ceasefire agreement helps resolve discontent among Israelis. Many blame Netanyahu for the suffering of the hostages, out of a misguided but understandable belief that he could have responsibly agreed to a prisoner swap much earlier. At the same time, the social strain caused by the repeated mobilisation of IDF reserve units has stoked an increasingly bitter debate over the forced conscription of ultra-orthodox Israelis, largely exempt from military service. Six weeks of ceasefire will mark the first time in 14 months that Israel hasn’t been waging any large-scale ground operations, giving both army and society a much-needed rest.

The deal also fosters good will with the Trump Administration, whose Middle East policies are increasingly difficult to peg. Witkoff is a real estate developer and unknown diplomatic quantity whose company sold the Park Lane Hotel to the Qatar Investment Authority for some $623 million in 2023. Pro-Trump ideologue Tucker Carlson is no fan of the Jewish State, and for the first time in decades an influential current of grassroots Right-wingers are sceptical of the US alliance with Israel. Then there’s Elon Musk. The billionaire reportedly intervened to free Cecilia Sala, an Italian journalist imprisoned in Iran. Certainly, the world’s richest man, ever unpredictable, could shake up the global order if he advises Trump to reach his own nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic. As for Trump himself, the ceasefire came about in a way that suggests he prioritises his own deal-making prowess above supporting Israel. That’s hardly ideal, but a pause does give Netanyahu crucial time to assess the confusing new terrain in Washington.

To understand why this matters, we must again return to Iran. Given that a near-nuclear Iran has been hurling ballistic missiles at his country for over a year, it seems possible that Netanyahu sees placating the Americans as an unpleasant yet necessary step on the way towards a strike on Iran’s nuclear programme.

Hamas’s reaction to the ceasefire agreement, with its leaders celebrating amid devastation, raises fundamental questions about the meaning of victory. Are wars still won by the usual measures of blood and territory, or is victory now more notional and slippery, a condition existing in the mind above all? Given the sheer scale of destruction over the past year, it seems crass for either side to claim victory. And as one Israeli official told me in early 2024: “You have won when no one has to ask whether you have won or not.” At this point, the event that would do most to turn Israel into an unambiguous winner is the destruction of Iran’s key assets, and the further devastation of the regime that theorised, planned, armed, and financed the slaughter on October 7 and everything that’s come after it.

Though Tehran’s proxies and allies have been whipped on the battlefield, this is a temporary accomplishment as long as the regime can continue to arm and finance them, and Israel’s gains are especially reversible so long as Iran’s nuclear infrastructure remains intact. It is possible that Netanyahu just signed away all of Israel’s achievements in Gaza. Or it could also be that, in freeing the hostages, mollifying his internal critics, and keeping Trump on his side, he’s lengthening the war enough to gain the support, the capacity, and the strategic initiative to finally pull off something truly history-changing.

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