Israel-Hamas Draft Ceasefire Deal

Syllabus: GS2/IR

Context

Hamas has accepted a draft agreement for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and the release of dozens of hostages.

The United States, Egypt and Qatar have spent the past year trying to mediate an end to the 15-month war.
The plan would need to be submitted to the Israeli Cabinet for final approval.

Hamas is the largest Palestinian militant Islamist group and one of the two major political parties in the region.
- Currently, it governs more than two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Foundation: The group was founded in the late 1980s, after the beginning of the first Palestinian uprising against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Hamas is designated a terrorist group by Israel, the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and other countries.

It is a decades long dispute between Israel and Palestine that began in the middle of the twentieth century when the Jews from various parts of the world were granted the homeland in present-day Israel by Britain.
It is one of the world’s longest conflicts where Israel has occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip which the Palestine state claims.
With time, the countries around have normalized the ties with Israel through the Abraham Accord, Oslo Accord, etc.
But the deadlock still persists and the world community is persistent in its effort to attain the two-state solution.

It is a three-phase agreement — based on a framework laid out by US President Joe Biden and endorsed by the UN Security Council.
First Phase: It would begin with the gradual release of 33 hostages over a six-week period in exchange for Palestinian women and children imprisoned by Israel.
- It will be a 42-day phase, Israeli forces would withdraw from population centers.
In the second phase, Hamas would release the remaining living captives, mainly male soldiers, in exchange for more prisoners and the “complete withdrawal” of Israeli forces from Gaza.
In a third phase, the bodies of remaining hostages would be returned in exchange for a three- to five-year reconstruction plan to be carried out in Gaza under international supervision.

The current round of talks has not even addressed the issue of governance due to its complexity.
Israel has said Hamas can play no role at all and it has rejected the involvement of the Palestinian Authority.
- Palestinian Authority is the body set up under the Oslo interim peace accords three decades ago that exercises limited sovereignty in the occupied West Bank.
The international community has said that Gaza must be run by Palestinians but efforts to find alternatives to the main factions among civil society or clan leaders have proved largely fruitless.

Source: TH

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