The Israel–Hamas ceasefire in Gaza went into effect on Jan. 19, but there are still plenty of questions about how each part of the three-phase deal will play out. Additionally, world leaders like President Donald Trump aren’t confident the ceasefire will hold.
Each of the three stages of the deal is supposed to last six weeks. Phase one calls for a complete ceasefire between Israel and Gaza, as well as the exchange of 33 hostages for 1,900 Palestinian prisoners being held in Israel. The 33 hostages to be released are mostly women and children, but there are some older men included on that list as well.
Civilians can also return to their homes in Gaza under the first phase. Additionally, Israel said it will allow more aid into the beleaguered region.
Phase two would see Israel and Gaza establish a permanent ceasefire, the return of all remaining living hostages, and more Palestinian prisoners being released. The exact terms for phase two would be negotiated while phase one is being carried out.
Phase three deals with returning the bodies of the dead hostages to Israel, and the reconstruction of Gaza. Like the details for phase two, the exact details of Phase Three would be ironed out during the previous phase of the ceasefire.
Less than 48 hours after the leaders of Israel and Gaza started enforcing the ceasefire, Straight Arrow News spoke with Avi Melamed. He’s a former Israeli intelligence officer and hostage negotiator. He now heads the organization Inside the Middle East.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Ryan Robertson: Avi Melamed, we’ve been talking with you over the course of the war. You used to be a negotiator. When you heard of the deal being reached, when you heard of the conditions, what were some of your immediate thoughts?
Avi Melamed: Well, first and foremost, of course, I was happy for the families of those that their loved one had been freed and released. I’m happy for the people of Gaza who have been living in a terrible condition for the last 15 months. At the same time, obviously, there is a deep concern about the rest of the hostages that are still in Gaza Strip and their families, of course, who are longing for them to come back.
So it’s a mixed feeling, of course, as you could understand. And above that, there is, I would say, substantial concern that we will be heading to a very turbulent process ahead, a convoluted one, in the context of releasing the hostages.
Robertson: The deal is, you know, precarious at best. And there could be a lot of opportunities for both sides to, to back out of the deal. Do you feel confident that phase one – which is, you know, supposed to be a weeks-long ordeal – do you feel confident that phase one will eventually go into phase two? Do you feel confidence that this deal will lead to all of the hostages being released?
Melamed: I put it this way, I feel more confident that we will complete phase one. I’m much less confident about the success odds of phase two at this point.
As a matter of fact, I would even say it’s 60-40, meaning that I unfortunately think it’s more likely not to be successful in the second phase. The meaning of that is that we will probably witness a prolonging and continuing and convoluted process way beyond what I think and hope it should be. So this is the way I view things right now.
Robertson: What parts of phase two do you think will fail?
Melamed: Look, Hamas launched the Oct. 7 attack for different reasons. One of the major reasons, which always has been Hamas’ major card, was that Hamas told the Palestinians, ‘Look, I will release all the Palestinians that are imprisoned in Israel.’ And that has always been something that Hamas marketed, particularly after the episode of the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, which provided Hamas with a lot of political credibility and popularity within the Palestinians.
Comes Oct. 7, Hamas is attacking Israel, doing what it’s doing. It results in an enormous war. Gaza is destroyed. Dozens of thousands of fatalities. It will take years to rehabilitate Gaza. Billions and billions of dollars. Nobody knows exactly where those dollars are going to come from. And so Hamas, potentially only card in the end of the day to present to his brothers, the Palestinians, as an achievement is the release of the Palestinian prisoners.
Now, here is the difficult thing because Hamas could come and say, “I want to release all the Palestinian prisoners,” let’s say 4,000, 5,000, whatever the number is. And Israel may insist that it’s not willing to release all of the prisoners, but some of the prisoners must remain, and in addition, Israel may say, “No, some prisoners will not go back to Palestinian territories; they will be expelled elsewhere.” In other words, any kind of Israeli refusal, any kind of Israeli counter demand is kind of like grading Hamas’ potential, one and only potential achievement, to put it this way. And so we are looking here at a situation where there is friction, a collision between these two things.
Hamas is in a position that it basically could say to itself, “Look, I have nothing to lose. You know, I have nothing to lose. I must insist to get this card and exhaust this card to the maximum,” which is maybe not the case. Maybe Israel will refuse to do that. Maybe there will be counter pressure on Hamas to be flexible on it.
And so the bottom line of this whole convoluted situation is that it, unfortunately, fuels further, I would say, odds that the whole process will be stumbling and falling apart time and again. And so that’s one of the major reasons for the concern about the continuation and success odds of this process.
Robertson: You used to be a negotiator. Would you have made this deal? Would you have agreed to this deal?
Melamed: There are many things involved here. I was, more than once, often, asked by people, “If you were the prime minister, what would you have done? Or if you were in a policymaking decision, what would you have done?”
It’s a very, very complex situation. I think that, in the end of the day, for the sake of the people, and I’m talking about both Israelis and Palestinians, there is no going back to Oct. 6. Meaning, in the sense that Hamas is continuing to dictate as it was able to dictate the trajectory of the conflict for the last 40 years.
Oct. 7, for me, was not a surprise in the sense that I, on many occasions, including in my recent book, “Inside the Middle East: Entering the New Era,” that was published in 2022, I wrote very specifically, and I said as long as Hamas is going to be exempted from governmental accountability, as long as the Palestinians are going to be exempted from holding their leadership accountable, the outcome of that is only, one and only one, and that is more death and suffering and destruction for both people.
This is exactly what happened. And so that’s what I mean when I say no going back to Oct. 6. How do you do that? What does it take to get there?
These are part of the many questions involved, bearing in mind that I’ve been saying all along the way, and I will say it very clearly: Hamas is not going to disappear. It’s going to be part and parcel of the Palestinian people.
It goes back to the big question: What are the Palestinian people going to do internally following Oct. 7? And what happened following Oct. 7 to Gaza Strip?
This is a question that is enormously significant. Particularly for Western audiences. In our Western mindset, if our leadership, for example, would have done something like Oct. 7 and everything that comes after, we would hold our leadership accountable.
We would say, “You have caused us enormous destruction. You have to pay for it. You have to step down. You have to go away.”
I don’t know. This is terrible, but I will tell you that within the Palestinians and in the Arab world there are those today who say Hamas is marketing victory, and there are Palestinians and Arabs who buy that, who subscribe to that. We could, later on, maybe in some other occasion, elaborate about the psyche involving that, but I think it’s important for Western audiences to understand it because it has a lot of ramifications, unfortunately, negative ones.
In other words, if you don’t hold your leadership accountable, if you always blame somebody else for your leadership’s failure, for your misjudgment, you basically doom yourself to be locked in a tragic loop.
And you know, as it happens, particularly today as we are talking, the Israeli chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi resigned. He resigned basically saying, “I have failed on Oct. 7. This was my mission, and I failed to protect the people of Israel.”
And the interesting thing is that despite the fact that following Oct. 7, he was able to lead the IDF to very, very impressive achievements in many different arenas, in the end of the day, that did not exempt him from responsibility.
He basically said, “Yes, I’m responsible for what happened on Oct. 7, the failure to protect the people of Israel, and I’m resigning,” as he should, because it’s about taking responsibility for your own failure. And that’s the reason why I bring that issue to the discussion, particularly for Western audiences, who should be aware that we are dealing with quite different mindsets.
Reuters contributed to this report.
