A Fragile Hope As A New Ceasefire Deal for Gaza Is Agreed
An
Al Jazeera screenshot shows Palestinians in Gaza celebrating the
announcement of a ceasefire deal on October 9, 2025, two years and two
days since Israel’s genocide began.
Is it real? Dare we hope? Is there really going to be a ceasefire in Gaza? Will hostages be exchanged, will humanitarian aid be allowed to flood into Gaza, staving off mass starvation, and additional widespread deaths through the destruction of the healthcare sector and a rigid siege on vital medical equipment and supplies, and will there really be a durable end to Israel’s genocidal hostilities?
To secure the return of its remaining hostages, and to fulfil Donald Trump’s desire for a Nobel Peace Prize, will Israel really end its hostilities, and wean itself off what, for the last two years, has been its remorseless addiction to killing Palestinian civilians? On average, every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day for the last 731 days, Israel has been killing civilians — babies, children, women and men — all while falsely claiming that it is “defending itself”, seeking to “eliminate Hamas” and secure the return of all the hostages seized on October 7, 2023.
Will Israel really abandon its true aims — the steady, relentless extermination of the Palestinian people (behind a mirage of “voluntary migration”), and the complete destruction of the Gaza Strip to make it unliveable, so that its vile, long-cherished dream of colonizing the whole of Gaza — and then doing the same in the West Bank — can finally be fulfilled?
Is it credible that Trump, whose country has been the biggest supplier of arms enabling Israel to engage in two years of genocide, and who has just announced his intention to provide another $5.7 billion of arms sales to Israel, will enforce Israeli compliance?
As a startling report by the Quincy Institute and the Costs of War Project at Brown University confirmed just two days ago, the US has supplied $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel over the last two years, with no let-up in this funding under Trump. On March 1, for example, Secretary of State Marco Rubio bragged that, since taking office, the Trump Administration had approved nearly $12 billion in arms sales to Israel.
As I explained in a brief analysis of the new report on X, “Let’s say Israel has killed 50,000 innocent civilians in Gaza. The US has given Israel $21,700,000,000. That’s $400,000 for EACH innocent civilian — babies, children, women, men — killed for no justifiable military reason. [This is] the sordid, unforgivable cost of US-backed Israeli genocide.”
According to Drop Site News, however, negotiators with Hamas and other Palestinian factions have concluded that Trump must be trusted, and that only his leverage can prevent what, otherwise, will be an unending bloodbath.
The release of hostages and the promise of peace
A key focus of the negotiations, for the US, has been on securing the immediate release of all the remaining hostages, thought to be 48 in total, of whom 20 are still alive. This insistence has been a nightmare for Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who, to be blunt, don’t really care about the hostages, because prioritizing their release interferes with their fundamental aims of extermination and colonization.
For Hamas, too, however, the immediate release of all the remaining hostages also poses a problem — one that, as I described it when Trump’s “Peace Plan” was first floated eleven days ago, “would instantly remove Hamas’ sole bargaining chip, allowing Netanyahu to resume hostilities having placated his fiercest internal critics — the families of the remaining hostages, who have waged an incessant campaign against him and his government, rightly accusing them of sacrificing their loved ones through an obsession with perpetual war.”
In January, when the only significant ceasefire deal to date took effect, lasting for six weeks until it was deliberately and unjustifiably abandoned by Israel, Hamas took care to only free hostages in phased releases, in an effort to prevent the scenario above. Now, however, the Palestinian negotiators seem to have accepted that this is no longer negotiable, although, according to one of Drop Site News’ sources, “an agreement will be made” that will “provide more time to recover the bodies of deceased Israeli captives.”
This is because, as Hamas officials have explained, “some of these bodies are buried under the rubble of buildings or tunnels bombed by Israel or in areas currently under Israeli military control”, and “it will take time to retrieve them.” The situation is further complicated by the fact that Hamas isn’t holding all the hostages, with “an undisclosed number” being held by Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s resistance fighters, the second largest armed resistance faction in Gaza after Hamas’s Qassam Brigades.
As Drop Site News explained, regarding the “bargaining chip” aspect of the hostages, multiple sources from Hamas and other Palestinian factions confirmed that “their central concern was that handing over all Israeli captives would remove nearly all of their leverage if it did not include a complete Israeli withdrawal.”
The negotiators accepted that they “were engaging in a high-stakes gamble”, but as Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas leader, said in an interview with Drop Site News on Monday, “This is a risk, but we trusted President Trump to be the guarantor of all the commitments made. Had there been no commitment from the American president, we would never have agreed to take the risk, because we do not trust Netanyahu or his extremist right‑wing team in the current Israeli government.”
Ideally, the release of all the hostages would have involved the complete withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces, but over the last several months of talks, the Palestinian negotiators concluded that this was also non-negotiable. A source told Drop Site News, “This is something they were not able to move.”
A map by Al Jazeera
showing the initial line of the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza
under the first phase of the new ceasefire agreement, showing them still
retaining control of 58% of the Gaza Strip.
As a result, “While the exact lines that Israeli forces will redeploy to as part of the exchange of captives are still being worked out, Israeli forces will remain entrenched in Gaza.” As the source added, “Trusting Trump’s word is the gamble they are taking. If it works, they will be considered geniuses. If it fails, they will be considered fools. It’s as simple as that.”
Drop Site News also explained that Hamas sources made clear to them their belief that “the only path to a brokered agreement to end the genocide rests with Trump”, with the only alternative being “an indefinite continuation of the armed struggle against a US-backed Israeli military.” As their source said, “There is no other deal to be taken. Either this or return to fight with full American support coupled with Arab and Islamic passivity and let-down.”
A senior Hamas official also told Drop Site News that the Palestinian negotiators had “faced unprecedented pressure from Arab and Islamic mediators” over the previous 48 hours “to make significant concessions and to quickly reach an agreement on the aspects of Trump’s plan that address the exchange of captives, a ceasefire, and the resumption of aid.”
Announcing its agreement with the deal, Hamas called on Trump and Arab countries to guarantee its terms and “to hold the occupation government accountable for fully implementing the obligations of the agreement, and not to allow it to evade or delay the application of what has been agreed upon”, adding, “We affirm that our people’s sacrifices will not be in vain, and that we remain committed to our pledge. We will never abandon our people’s national rights until freedom, independence, and self-determination are achieved.”
The resumption of deliveries of humanitarian aid
While everyone waits with bated breath to see if Israel can actually constrain its voracious genocidal lust by ceasing its military attacks, which have continued even after Trump giddily announced the success of the negotiations on his Truth Social account, one signifier of progress will be the resumption of deliveries of humanitarian aid at a scale necessary to avoid an ever-increasing mortality crisis deliberately engineered and sustained by Israel.
As Drop Site News explained, “The source close to the negotiators said that as part of the agreement, aid deliveries will resume at levels consistent with the January 2025 ceasefire deal”, before it was “unilaterally abandoned” in March, when Israel “imposed a full spectrum blockade on Gaza, resumed its campaign of terror bombings and subsequently unleashed a ground invasion of Gaza City in August.”
The source said that “600 trucks of aid per day would enter Gaza under the agreement”, which, as Drop Site News added, was what “the United Nations has said in the past is the minimum amount needed in Gaza.” Mediators also assured the Palestinians that the Rafah border crossing with Egypt — the only route in and out of Gaza that doesn’t pass through Israel — “would be reopened in both directions.”
Releasing Palestinian hostages
Negotiations appear to be still ongoing regarding the release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the Israeli hostages, or, to be more accurate, the release of Palestinian hostages, as that, for the most part, is the only accurate description of the status of the majority of the more than 11,000 Palestinians currently held in Israeli prisons — vast numbers held arbitrarily without charge or trial, and over 3,500 also held indefinitely without charge or trial under Israel’s foul policy of “administrative detention.”
According to the agreement, around 2,000 Palestinians will be released in exchange for the hostages. While negotiations are ongoing regarding the release (or not) of “high-profile Palestinian resistance figures” serving life sentences, often unjustifiably, including Marwan Barghouti, who is the single most popular Palestinian political leader, and whose release has apparently been ruled out by Netanyahu in a concession to Ben-Gvir, the most startling facts about the planned releases are, firstly, that the majority of them will “consist of Palestinians taken from Gaza after October 7” — in other words, explicitly seized and held as hostages.
The second startling fact is Israel’s agreement to release “all the women and children being held” — because, although the western media shies away from reporting it, Israel, in one of its many policies that refute its claim to be “the only democracy in the Middle East”, routinely holds children indefinitely without charge or trial.
Deferring thorny discussions regarding Gaza’s future
Beyond the emerging hopes of an end to Israel’s military actions, the freeing of hostages and the resumption of humanitarian aid, everything else in Trump’s “Peace Plan” — the elusive future for Gaza’s post-genocide governance and reconstruction — remains speculative.
In a rare video address on Wednesday, Ziyad Al-Nakhaleh, the secretary general of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, warned that “we must be prepared to confront the enemy’s possible attempts to turn the negotiations into an entry point for the surrender of our people and our resistance. The enemy and its allies must know that we cannot submit to their terms and dictates after all the price in sacrifices that our heroic people have paid.”
As the source close to the negotiators told Drop Site News, “while the deal is problematic, it contains some terms that Hamas and other Palestinian factions pushed for in their response to Trump, including deferring major issues that would alter the future of Gaza and Palestine itself.”
As he described it, the Palestinian negotiators’ position is, “No surrender, no disarming, no mass exile, but most of all a permanent end to the war to be announced by Trump.”
Those “major issues” that have been deferred are, of course, the particularly thorny demand for total disarmament by the Palestinians, which is a non-starter while Israel maintains a military presence, and the disturbing neo-colonial proposal for westerners, including Trump and the unindicted war criminal Tony Blair, to oversee a non-specified “technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee”, which will, allegedly, “be made up of qualified Palestinians and international experts”, to provide “temporary transitional governance”, and to be “responsible for delivering the day-to-day running of public services and municipalities for the people in Gaza” until a more lasting solution is agreed upon.
For now, we are all, I’m sure, hoping that these first steps towards peace will not be sabotaged, and that Netanyahu has finally been trapped, unable to continue sacrificing the hostages as he did when he torpedoed the ceasefire deal in March, but also unable to defer to the outrageous demands of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, with the former responding to the announcement of the deal by declaring that he wants to “ensure that this is not, God forbid, a deal of hostages in exchange for stopping the war”, which is, of course, what it is, and also declaring his hope that, “Immediately after the hostages return home, the state of Israel will continue to strive with all its might for the true eradication of Hamas and the genuine disarmament of Gaza, so that it no longer poses a threat to Israel.”
Smotrich has a habit of saying out loud what Netanyahu more carefully packages for foreign consumption. This time he needs to be definitively silenced. The fragile hope in the air right now cannot be allowed to be undermined yet again by genocidal monsters driven by depraved dreams of God-ordained slaughter and ethnic cleansing.
Enough is enough. We’ve only reached this point because the global movement for justice for Palestine over the last two years has finally weakened the west’s previously unconditional support for Israel to such an extent that it has finally brought Israel to the point of being considered a pariah state. As Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada stated in a post on X, “Whatever happens, the global uprising in support of Palestine needs to continue and grow. That is the Palestinian people’s strategic depth and protection from these monsters. It is that global uprising that is making the evil of Zionism more and more untenable.”
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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.
In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.
Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.
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