-Analysis-
CAIRO — After 470 days of daily Israeli killings of Palestinians in retaliation for Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, there’s little point in engaging with the absurd debate about whether the resistance managed to win the war and defeat Israel, or it lost the battle and must now accept disappearing from the scene.
The main reason for postponing this question is that the war is not yet over. Even though the truce went into effect and the complex prisoner exchange started, the path is still long.
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Israel’s extremist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has continued his bombastic statements and threats to resume the war especially with the arrival of the new U.S. administration.
Indeed, President Donald Trump‘s new Middle East team is making matters worse. It includes Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, both of whom are major supporters of the Israeli far-right, as well as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who stated in his recent Senate confirmation hearing that as a “Christian” he feels it is his duty to support Israel and supports the goal of eliminating every member of the Hamas.
There is also the U.S. Ambassador to Tel Aviv, Mike Huckabee, who denies the existence of the Palestinian people and supports the expansion of settlements in the West Bank. And there is U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Elise Stefanik, who led the campaign to pressure American universities to restrict pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and pushed three presidents of those universities to resign. Stefanik also sees the UN as a “swamp of anti-Semitism.”
At her confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Stefanik said, “I was interested in this position because if you look at the antisemitic rot within the United Nations, there are more resolutions targeting Israel than any other country, any other crisis combined.” She said that Israel had a “biblical right” to the occupied territory including the West Bank which the Palestinians say it’s part of their future state along with Gaza and East Jerusalem.
Certainly, this new American team of hardline Zionists who support Israel on religious grounds will not pressure Netanyahu or impose sanctions on him if he returned and killed dozens of Palestinians, claiming that they posed a security threat to Israel. Trump and his team will not raise hell if the occupation army delays its withdrawal from Gaza according to the scheduled timetable, for whatever reasons Netanyahu and his extremist government members will invent.
The Trump card
Hours before the beginning of the ceasefire, Netanyahu started his plan to violate the deal. On Saturday, he said that he would not only maintain the current number of Israeli forces on the Philadelphi corridor, between Egypt and Gaza, but would increase their numbers. That violates the ceasefire deal, which clearly stipulates that Israel must withdraw its forces from the Rafah crossing and complete its withdrawal from the corridor within 50 days.
Although Israeli reports indicated that Trump’s new Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, pressured Netanyahu to accept the deal, that was required was to allow Trump to be celebrated as the dealmaker.
Keep doing what you have to do.
Trump wanted to be viewed as the one who managed to stop the war in Gaza and achieve what his predecessor, Joe Biden, and his team had failed to achieve for more than a year. It should be noted that Witkoff is Netanyahu’s personal friend and a major Jewish-American real estate developer in New York with financial interests in Qatar and several Gulf states.
Trump had previously said that stopping the Israel-Hamas war appeared to be the easiest task for him upon his arrival at the White House — compared to the more difficult task of ending the war in Ukraine and reaching understandings with Russia. In an interview with NBC television on Saturday, Trump said he told Netanyahu, “Just keep doing what you have to do. We want it to end, but to keep doing what has to be done.”
A long road
If the ultimate goal is a complete withdrawal of the Israeli occupation forces from Gaza and the beginning of a true reconstruction process, it will be the beginning of efforts to find a final solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It appears to be an ideal time for such a solution, which should include the establishment of an independent Palestinian state that includes the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
In any case, the road is still too long before it is possible to discuss who is the victor and who is the vanquished.
It seems difficult and painful to talk about victory when more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed, at least 70% of whom are children and women.
Palestinians now have the luxury of staying alive.
How can there be celebrations after all this blood and bodies, images of burning hospitals, stripping doctors and nurses and taking them prisoners, bombing UN refugee schools and tents for the displaced in areas declared “safe” by the occupation army, the death of infants from the severe cold, and a child burning after falling into a boiling pot of food for thousands of needy people due to overcrowding?
The daily tragedies — and getting used to numbers that average no less than 40, 50 and perhaps 80 martyrs per day — have killed our humanity amid the existing state of helplessness.
Palestinians expressed overwhelming and deserved joy immediately after the ceasefire agreement was announced, simply because they now have the luxury of staying alive without being surprised by the bombing and destruction. But once the agreement enters into force, they will wake up to the nightmare of total destruction that Israeli forces have inflicted on all aspects of life in the Strip — almost leveling it to the ground.
The eagerness expressed by Palestinians crowded in displacement camps in the southern Gaza Strip to return to their original cities will be incomplete. They will find themselves forced to set up new displacement camps next to the rubble of their homes, which will take three to five years to remove from the Strip, according to UN experts.
Palestinian divisions
The path to reconstruction will certainly be extremely difficult — especially if Palestinian divisions over management of the Strip is prolonged. So far, there have been no signs of agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority on this point, which will be decided not only by the Palestinians, but also by many Arab and international donor parties.
Some Hamas supporters are trying to boost their propaganda by claiming victory in the Israeli war of extermination, and by claiming that the movement still rules Gaza and is still capable of delivering painful blows to enemy soldiers.
Hamas leaders have been forced to reconsider their calculations.
Hamas leaders, however, are often the first to know that this is just propaganda for locals, and that this situation may not last long and that it will often be forced to make concessions in light of the American-backed Israeli insistence on not allowing the group to continue ruling Gaza.
Everyone also knows that Hamas leaders have been forced to reconsider their calculations and be more keen on continuing the truce and stopping the fighting as much as possible after the painful Israeli strikes that targeted the movement and its support fronts in Lebanon and Syria.
It is certain that there will always be Hamas fighters capable of delivering painful blows to the enemy if the Israeli occupation of Gaza continues. But the movement’s leaders must also consider whether the Palestinian people can continue to endure the indiscriminate and criminal Israeli killing and destruction machine.
Israel’s calculations
Finally, the complex internal calculations in Israel will determine the fate of the ceasefire, as well as who is the victorious party in the prolonged liberation war that the Palestinians are waging to obtain their homeland.
Holding the ceasefire for a reasonable period of time could ignite Israeli domestic politics and bring back to the forefront the demand to hold accountable those responsible for the Hamas attack, including Netanyahu.
It will also spark debate inside Israel about whether there was a need to prolong the war, and whether Israel actually achieved its goals. All of this could lead to new elections that could destroy Netanyahu’s dream of remaining in office for as long as possible, and preserving his fallen status as the “King of Israel.”
For all these reasons, it is still too early to talk about a winner and a loser in the Gaza war — a war that has not ended and will not end soon.
