Ten days into a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, relief is giving way to grim acknowledgments of the truce’s tenuousness, and of the need for continued outside intervention to keep it alive, let alone to make further progress.
A new round of violence on Sunday showed just how arduous the road to a broader agreement in Gaza will be between two sides, which have repeatedly accused each other of violating the truce.
The Israeli military said on Monday that it resumed enforcing the ceasefire, and an official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that aid deliveries would resume Monday, reported The Associated Press. But the short-lived, if intense, Israeli military response, and the walk-back of the threat to shut off the flow of aid into Gaza, suggested the restraining influence of US officials, analysts said.
After all, both Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, who have teamed up as President Donald Trump’s top envoys to the Middle East, are expected in Israel this week to try to push ahead with Trump’s peace plan. Vice-President J.D. Vance told reporters late on Sunday that he might also travel to Israel in the coming days. Reuters reported that he is to visit Israel on Tuesday, the country’s airport authority said in a statement on Monday.
Even Netanyahu’s Right-wing allies accused him of wilting under pressure from the Trump administration, and not for the first time. “Enough with the folding,” Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-Right minister, wrote on X.
“Israelis are really outraged about the killing of two soldiers, but it’s not like there haven’t been deaths of civilians in Gaza in the past week,” said Shira Efron, an Israeli analyst at RAND. “Both sides have pretexts to argue that the ceasefire has been violated. What keeps the negotiation going is the power that is brought by Trump and the mediators.”
Pressure is not only being applied on the Israeli government. After Hamas turned over the bodies of just four hostages last Monday — out of 28 believed to still be in Gaza — mediators from Egypt, Qatar and Turkey passed along Israeli intelligence about the whereabouts of some of the others, prodding the militant group to recover more, according to US officials. As of Sunday, Hamas had turned over the remains of 12 captives.
As Hamas distanced itself from the Rafah attack, the group’s military wing reaffirmed its “full commitment” to putting the ceasefire into effect, even divulging that it had lost contact with its fighters in Rafah in March and did not know whether any of them were still alive.
That admission was one of several aspects of Sunday’s exchange of blows that laid bare the ceasefire’s fragility: If Hamas is indeed unable to control one of its fighting units, it may be unable to fully enforce its side of the ceasefire, making it less likely that Israel will fully withdraw.
The return of all the living hostages has also freed the Israeli military to retaliate against Hamas harder, whenever and wherever it chooses to strike, with no more fear of harming its own citizens, said Tamir Hayman, a former head of Israeli military intelligence.
Still, Israeli analysts said the challenge of sustaining the ceasefire paled next to the challenge of advancing the Trump peace plan, particularly given that its call for Hamas to disarm effectively would require the group to renounce its entire ideology of armed resistance.
And Hayman said that Hamas was trying to sow fear and reestablish its dominance in Gaza, pointing to the executions by Hamas militants of eight rivals on a crowded Gaza City street last week.
“By doing that, they’re stronger, and it creates much more difficulties when you’re trying to demilitarise them,” Hayman said.
“Hamas wants to come down the tree, but in a dignified way,” said Mohammed al-Astal, an analyst in Gaza. “It needs an honourable exit ramp.”
New York Times News Service, AP and Reuters