DC Edit | Silver Lining Spotted In Gaza
A ceasefire will come into effect as Israel has agreed to pause the fighting until things become clearer in the big push for peace envisaged by US President Donald Trump, a peace that could conceivably come to rule over the whole region
The release of 20 of the last surviving hostages from those captured by Hamas on October 7, 2023, may come as early as Saturday. This will represent the first real silver lining amid the Stygian darkness that had enveloped the Gaza Strip for two years and two days. A ceasefire will come into effect as Israel has agreed to pause the fighting until things become clearer in the big push for peace envisaged by US President Donald Trump, a peace that could conceivably come to rule over the whole region.
There can be no equivalence in what the hostages have suffered in Gaza tunnels in the time since the conflict flared, but their plight is not to be dismissed altogether while considering how much damage Israel has wreaked in two years, killing at least 67,000 Palestinians and making uninhabitable four out of every five buildings in Gaza City.
A couple of global organisations have termed Israel’s treatment of Palestinians ‘genocide’ but What is in the air now is a move out of what was a terrible conflict for the Palestinians and the Israelis in which several other proxies of Iran also got involved. This is, however, only the first phase of a grandiloquent Trump peace plan which could potentially change the very landscape of the region, besides global geopolitics, if durable peace can be achieved.
Israel’s Netanyahu can present the return of hostages, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, as a win he has achieved for his people. It would be rum irony if peace has an opposite and deleterious effect on his tenuous political career. But the destruction of Gaza and the deprivation and death of its people had to stop as, over two years; it was vastly disproportionate even to the senseless attack on Israel carried out by the militant wing of Hamas.
The way forward is not going to be easy as Hamas may have to give up a lot more than hostages. The governance of Gaza under international oversight and the presence of a regional peace-keeping force appear to be hugely ambitious conditions to be fulfilled if a fuller peace is to be guaranteed for a region that has never been at peace since the creation of Israel. And yet there is no going back to war if the Palestinians, the greater sufferers in history, are to find peaceful coexistence.