Gaza ceasefire indications grow — but obstacles remain

There are increasing indications that a long-term ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is imminent. But political pressure on both sides is preventing any agreement being reached.

On the Israeli side, a special security cabinet meeting was held on Sunday to discuss possible terms.

At the same time, senior Hamas leaders based in other countries entered Gaza for a series of meetings.

Visits of this level do not happen without both Egypt and Israel being aware and tacitly allowing it.

Another sign of the sides being eager to pressure each other in to signing an agreement is the short series of escalations, which are happening nearly on a weekly basis, and end within hours, with both sides making it clear they do not want to escalate further.

Four weeks ago, exchanges which saw several deaths led to brief but intensive salvoes of rockets from Gaza toward Israeli towns and villages.

Three weeks ago, a similar incident resulted in three rockets. In both cases Israel retaliated with air-strikes against carefully selected Hamas targets, giving the Islamist movement time to evacuate its members and there were no casualties.

On Tuesday, in an incident where Israeli troops detected what they originally believed was sniper-fire in their direction, two Hamas fighters were killed when an Israeli tank shelled their position.

Hamas claimed that its men had been on “a training exercise,” a claim the IDF eventually conceded was probably true. On Wednesday evening Hamas launched a salvo of rockets towards Sderot, in which six people were lightly wounded. Israel once again responded with air-strikes against unmanned Hamas targets. Once again, senior sources on both sides anonymously briefed the media that they were not looking to escalate further.

But so far, even though Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu cancelled a visit to Colombia for meetings on the agreement, nothing more resulted from the special cabinet than the laconic statement that “the IDF chief of staff updated the security cabinet on the situation regarding Gaza. The IDF is prepared for any scenario.”

The basic framework of an agreement is pretty clear. Hamas will undertake to prevent any firing from Gaza towards Israel and agree to a gradual return of the Palestinian Authority to the Strip. Israel and Egypt will re-open the crossings to Gaza and coordinate major infrastructure work there. A complete disarmament by Hamas, as Israel has demanded in public, is un likely to be in the deal. But the Hamas leadership, for domestic purposes at least, is demanding an immediate return to the situation before it took control of the Strip in a bloody coup in 2007. Israel is offering a more gradual process and is demanding that Hamas first return two Israeli citizens and the bodies of two IDF soldiers held in Gaza. But Hamas insists that can only be part of a separate agreement under which Palestinian prisoners will be released as well.

Sources close to the negotiations believe that an agreement is in reach. However the Netanyahu government, looking at elections on the horizon, cannot afford to look weak against Hamas, whose leaders are in a generational power-struggle of their own and. isolated in the Arab world, need to present any agreement as a victory.

If Nickolay Mladenov, the former Bulgarian foreign minister who is now the United Nation’s Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process succeeds in delivering an agreement that both sides feel they can deliver to their public, it will be a Nobel-Prize-worthy achievement.