Will There Be A Phase Two Ceasefire?

Possibilities and Impossibilities

Few outside the ranks of the “anti-genocide” activists could deny feeling a profound sense of relief at the announcement of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Twenty-four months of relentless war, saturation coverage of atrocity, and waves of protests that unsettled Western cities had left the world exhausted. The war’s psychic toll, its disinformation, ideological polarization, and political opportunism have been immense. For Israelis and Gazans alike, the ceasefire brings an overdue reprieve. Families may finally see their loved ones, children in Gaza, again glimpse ordinary life. After such unremitting darkness, there are genuine reasons for relief, even gratitude.

Yet this relief should not turn into quick self-congratulation. Beneath the sudden calm, there is still left to be decided and to unfold. Israel emerges from the war with undeniable achievements: it shattered much of Iran’s regional infrastructure, decimated the so-called “axis of resistance,” and demonstrated to its adversaries the reach and precision of its deterrent power. It is likely the airstrike on the Hamas target in Doha that shattered the Qatari delusion of being the Gulf’s Switzerland and forced them to pressure Hamas to accept the ceasefire. These are historic gains, but they do not yet amount to a strategic resolution. The region remains suspended between war exhaustion and recalibration, and Israel faces a series of difficult choices as it seeks to translate its military success into durable security.

It is therefore necessary to clarify what has been achieved. The agreement signed is not a peace accord resolving a non-existing 3,000-year-old conflict; it is the first phase of a ceasefire, provisional and conditional. Its continuation into a second phase depends entirely on behavior, compliance, and—above all—the alignment of regional and international incentives in the months ahead, much of which is doubtful. The war may be over, but the struggle for what follows has only begun.

The first phase of the ceasefire agreement deals strictly with the third, fourth, and fifth points of the Trump twenty-point plan, which have to do with the actual ceasefire, withdrawal, hostage, and prisoner release. The first two points—stating that Gaza will be deradicalized and redeveloped for the benefit of its people—are aspirational principles rather than operational clauses. The third, fourth, and fifth, by contrast, constitute the actionable core: an immediate end to hostilities, Israeli withdrawal to agreed lines to prepare for hostage release, and a full suspension of military operations while battle lines remain frozen; the release of all hostages, alive and deceased, within seventy-two hours of Israel’s acceptance; and a reciprocal exchange in which Israel releases 250 life-sentence prisoners and 1,700 Gazans detained after October 7, including all women and children.

The sixth point, however, casts a long shadow over the entire plan. It demands that Hamas disarm, relinquish power, and commit to “peaceful coexistence” with Israel—terms that effectively require the movement’s self-abolition. In theory, such a condition represents the moral and political linchpin of the plan; in practice, it exposes its central issue at hand. Hamas’s identity, legitimacy, and cohesion all rest on resistance to achieve the eradication of Israel in its entirety. To disarm, for Hamas, is not to compromise but to cease to exist altogether. Thus, while the current arrangement buys time and much-needed relative quiet, it is built on the presumption that the militant organization will voluntarily dissolve into civic normality, become just another Muslim Brotherhood branch. That presumption may prove the most fragile foundation of all.

If Hamas refuses to comply with these terms, it is difficult to imagine any Arab state committing personnel for policing, peacekeeping, or administration, or investing significant capital in a situation that could unravel at any moment. No government in the region is likely to risk its own stability or prestige by entering a vacuum still defined by uncertainty, residual militancy, and a credible risk of relapse into conflict.

For many Arab states, a mission perceived at home as protecting Israel from a still-armed Hamas—or as policing Palestinians with a Hamas opposition—carries intolerable reputational costs. The domestic opposition this would invite will deter all governments. Egypt and Jordan cannot be seen as reoccupying or administering Gaza by proxy and will not assume operational risks that could reverberate across their own societies. Gulf states, meanwhile, prefer checkbook influence to risky deployments; they will fund only what looks bankable and politically defensible.

Force-protection and mandate design add further brakes. Without a definitive ceasefire, verifiable demilitarization benchmarks, and a robust legal mandate—status-of-forces agreements, clear rules of engagement, intelligence-sharing, and guaranteed logistical corridors—any stabilization contingent would face Iraq- and Lebanon-style threat profiles with none of the protections that made other missions (like the Sinai MFO) durable. Arab militaries will not insert into dense urban terrain dominated by armed non-state actors while Israel retains freedom of action and the right of hot pursuit; nor will they accept open-ended assignments vulnerable to mission creep, retaliatory attacks, or political scapegoating. Even a U.S.-backed International Stabilisation Force will struggle to attract Arab components absent host-nation consent from a legitimate Palestinian authority and a credible mechanism to neutralize spoilers beyond Hamas, and which have not been discussed nearly enough, like the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, clan networks, and freelance armed groups.

The economics point the same way. Gulf sovereign wealth funds and state-backed developers require a predictable horizon: insurable projects, enforceable contracts, protected logistics, and balance-of-payments support. None of this is available if Hamas remains armed, if borders are not reliably secure, or if reconstruction sites are exposed to interdiction. Without demilitarization and governance clarity, there are no bankable projects. Even generous donors will avoid underwriting assets that could be cratered in the next escalation or politically frozen by relapse into instability.

Finally, the politics of ownership are decisive. If Hamas refuses disarmament and exit, any technocratic committee or “Board of Peace” will be cast—by Hamas and by regional media—as an instrument of external control, a new corrupt Oslo’s “PA.” This will erode trust, expose Arab personnel to targeted intimidation, and deter the very civil servants and contractors such a mission would need. Necessarily, Arab capitals will default to a safer equilibrium: selective funding, diplomatic facilitation, and pressure on Washington to shoulder enforcement, without committing their own people to hold ground.

Most importantly, one of the central yet least acknowledged dynamics shaping regional politics over the past two decades is the inter-Gulf rivalry among the three most powerful Arab states today—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. This rivalry, though often obscured by shared rhetoric about Arab solidarity, intersects continuously with the broader competitions involving Turkey, Iran, and Israel. Any analysis of Gaza’s postwar trajectory that overlooks this triangular tension risks failing without warning.

The question is straightforward: why would Qatar—the state that has, for years, culturally, ideologically, financially, and symbolically owned the cause of the Islamic resistance and the Palestinian Cause—facilitate an arrangement that would inevitably empower its regional rivals? Why would it enable the UAE, for instance, to oversee Gaza’s education or reconstruction sectors, thereby extending Emirati soft power into an arena long monopolized by Doha’s networks? And the reverse is also questionable; if the stooges of Qatar remain in control of Gaza, why would the Emiratis participate in efforts that would add to Qatari power? Why would Turkey, another long-standing patron of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, acquiesce to an order in which Sisi’s Egypt or MBS’s Saudi Arabia would displace its ideological and operational influence over the rulers of Gaza?

And perhaps the most important question is this: why would Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey actively help Israel and the United States resolve one of their most intractable and politically charged problems—and do so at precisely the moment when the world is experiencing the largest wave of anti-Americanism and antisemitism in decades? From a purely strategic standpoint, it would be irrational for any of these states to expend capital, legitimacy, or manpower to stabilize a crisis that has long served as a pressure valve and a bargaining chip in their dealings with Washington. The Palestinians always have been a strategic instrument—a means of sustaining unique diplomatic relevance, a source of aid, or a place to be the indispensable mediator between Islamists and the West. The answers are clear to any sane person.

Such questions expose the structural flaw at the heart of Trump’s plan. The involvement of these rival powers is not a guarantee of success but, in fact, a guarantee of irresolution, a guarantee that the system of regional extraction would remain intact. Despite all of their rhetoric whether about Arab solidarity, Islam or humanity, each of these states views Gaza not as a humanitarian cause or a field for collective Arab responsibility, but as an arena through which to project influence and check competitors. (Arabs are truly the last liberals.) Their cooperation will extend only as far as their rivalries allow—and those rivalries are precisely what will make any unified governance framework inherently unstable.

It is not that none of these states would ever agree to help stabilize Gaza once and for all; rather, it is that each must be paid the right price to do so. The problem is that not all of them can be paid at once, because the price of one inevitably diminishes the value of the others. Thus, the post-ceasefire stabilization phase will not be a unified Arab project but a multi-layered contest of bargaining, a shifting chessboard where every concession to one player recalibrates the ambitions of the rest. In this sense, Gaza’s reconstruction, if it does actually start, will inaugurate a new phase—a seven-dimensional game of transactional diplomacy in which stabilization itself becomes the next arena of competition. Which, of course, may be much preferable to the former phase of open violence, but it will not be any perilous for Israel and the Palestinians.

For Israelis, the question of whether phase one of the ceasefire proceeds to further stages, or whether the Trump plan ultimately materializes, is secondary to a more fundamental realization: there can be no return to the prewar status quo. To attempt that would not simply be naive—it would be suicidal. Given current global conditions, Israel can no longer afford to behave as if the old arrangements of managed hostility and cyclical containment still suffice.

As I have argued elsewhere, the conflict operates today as a system of extraction, in which regional and international actors profit politically, financially, and ideologically by keeping Israel trapped in a permanent role: the villain in a global morality play. The strategy of movements like Hamas, elites such as those in Amman, and patrons such as Qatar is to lock Israel and the Palestinians in a loop where Israel’s defensive operations kill as many Palestinians as possible and supply the spectacle that sustains everyone else’s narrative and to reproduce the script. This is why the largest foreign investments of many of these states are not in factories but in media, education, and information networks, in the very machinery that shapes perception. To imagine that the solution lies in hiring more influencers or producing cleverer TikTok videos is an act of stupid self-delusion. Stupidity, when repeated long enough, ceases to be excusable and becomes self-immolation. Nor should Israelis be bribed into having another round of the same. Israelis remain imprisoned within a system that depends on their willing or unwilling participation, which is guaranteed by Palestinian violence. Their task is to determine whether liberation requires compelling the Palestinians to renounce their own role within it.

This shift cannot occur, however, without confronting the raison d’être of the Israeli right—its alpha and omega, its Shema and Lord’s Prayer: to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. For decades, this has been a creed, the organizing principle of right-wing Israeli politics and the lens through which everything has been read. Yet the time has come to recognize that the world has changed. It is not simply that a Palestinian state was a specter and never a viable proposition in the past; it is that it will remain an impossibility in the foreseeable future. But there are now graver dangers than the empty ritual of opposing an illusion. Continuing to define strategy by resisting a state that will never materialize risks blinding Israel to the far greater threats emerging from the new global environment—from the ideological, informational, and demographic shifts in the West that no longer even require the fiction of a Palestinian state to destroy Israel’s security and legitimacy.

We must look at what is unfolding in the United States with complete sobriety. In three years, there will be another presidential election, and both major candidates—regardless of party—will find one of their central political challenges to be balancing between the antisemitic and the philosemitic wings within their own coalitions. The polarization that once ran along party lines now runs through them both.

If J.D. Vance seeks the presidency, it would be naive to imagine that he could afford to alienate Tucker Carlson and the anti-Israel antisemitic right, whether now or in three years’ time. The same dynamic applies, in a different register, to the Democratic Party, where a progressive base is solidly team Hamas. This is the new America.

Israel’s strategic objective must therefore be to extricate itself from the structural dynamics of the conflict altogether—to end, or at least structurally revise, the system that sustains the conflict as a spectacle. That begins with the first and most difficult point of the Trump plan: the deradicalization of Gaza. It is placed first for a reason. It acknowledges what more people now recognize, however belatedly—that the ideological and educational environment of Palestinian society is the central and most difficult problem. Qatar knows this. Egypt knows this. Iran knows this. Turkey knows this. Jordan knows this. The Palestinian Authority knows this. Greta Thunberg knows this. So do Columbia University and MESA. Every actor who profits, directly or symbolically, from the perpetuation of Palestinian radicalism has a stake in obstructing its reform. Even those, such as the UAE or Saudi Arabia, whose policies are not animated by such misanthropy, will still demand to be paid well, very well, to participate in changing that environment—because to do so is costly, politically and ideologically.

Regardless, Israelis—and Jews more broadly, together with their friends—must come to understand that this is now the core mission: to alter the incentive and ideological structure that produces generations willing to sacrifice themselves and their children for the cameras.

We can continue to posture liberally, to insist that “it is not our responsibility to fix their problems,” that “they must lift themselves by their own bootstraps,” and so on from stupid and mindless banalities. But such moral detachment would be suicidal realism—a luxury that our times no longer allow. And we are running out of time.