Why the hostage and ceasefire deal is both reassuring and terrifying
After 470 days, some hostages — and many Palestinians — will finally return home. But what really matters is what happens in the future.
People gather to take photos of hostages held in the Gaza Strip. Photo by Getty Images
By Jodi Rudoren January 15, 2025
The first, overwhelming and very clear emotion I felt with Wednesday’s news of the hostage and ceasefire deal was relief. Right behind that, equally overwhelming if less focused, was fear.
Relief: That as soon as Sunday we should see another three Israeli civilian hostages walk free, a horrifying 470 days after they were abducted by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7. Maybe we will soon see those precious redheaded Bibas babies we’ve been praying for. Maybe Sagui Dekel-Chen, one of three American citizens among the captives believed to be still alive.
Relief: That 600 trucks a day — 10 times the amount allowed during much of the war — will soon bring essential food, fuel and medical supplies into Gaza to mitigate the humanitarian crisis there. Fuel to bring bombed-out hospitals back online, to get bakeries churning out pita again, to begin the gargantuan task of removing rubble.
Relief: That the ceaseless, senseless fighting could finally stop. Fighting that should have ended months ago with Israel declaring victory after decimating Hamas leadership, arsenals and battalions. Fighting that, tragically — just on Monday — took the lives of five Israeli soldiers who were blown up in northern Gaza as well as 50 Palestinians slain in Israeli airstrikes on homes, a school and a Gaza City street.
Relief. But also fear. Fear that all this death and destruction and displacement will not lead to any lasting change in the underlying conflict.
Fear that Israel’s right-wing leadership, emboldened by President-elect Donald Trump, will move to annex the occupied West Bank and continue expanding illegal settlements there, making once-scurrilous accusations of apartheid into a fair description of reality.
Fear that the Palestinian Authority will — again — fail to provide the leadership essential to rule Gaza safely and humanely, and to galvanize an international coalition to rebuild its homes and schools and factories and mosques and hospitals.
Fear that Palestinians and Israeli Jews will continue to look past each other and pretend that their maximalist aspirations are possible rather than acknowledge the reality that nobody is going anywhere, and the only secure future in the Holy Land is two states for two indigenous peoples.
Fear that American Jews will remain either hopelessly divided by the war or disengaged with Israel altogether, both dangerous paths. That we will look away from the pain rather than grapple with all its complexity. That we will hide behind litmus tests of loyalty to “our side,” however we define that, rather than see the humanity of the “other side.”
In their statements about the ceasefire on Wednesday night, too many Jewish leaders spoke only about the release of the hostages, ignoring the suffering in Gaza. I fear they will continue to be jingoistic and divisive, stoking hysteria rather than understanding.
Past as prologue
I remember too well the ceasefires of prior Israel-Hamas wars: In 2012, I was on the ground in Gaza when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the truce that ended eight days of fighting in which 174 Palestinians and six Israelis were killed. Two years later, in 2014, I was in Jerusalem when the 51-day war came to an end, with a casualty count of 2,200 Palestinians and 72 Israelis.
In 2012, the agreement included an extension of the area in which Israel allowed Gaza fishermen to trawl from three miles to six. The next night, I went with some other journalists to the kind of fish restaurant where you pick your dinner from a case in front. The proprietor was pushing the “six-mile fish.” As I wrote once before, I couldn’t tell the difference, but for the Gazans at the table, the fish from the deeper waters had the taste of freedom.
There were still funerals going on in Gaza as that truce took hold, but the atmosphere had changed. I wrote in The New York Times of women crowding into hair salons, men waiting in lines at ATMs and teenagers eating ice cream cones.
It seems almost quaint to remember that truce, that war, given the scale of this one — nearly 60 times as long, 260 times as deadly. I fear there may be no ice cream left in Gaza.
But the prescient quotes from that old Times article are part of what makes me so scared.
“It could last nine months or it could last nine weeks,” said Israel’s defense minister at the time, Ehud Barak. “When it does not last, we will know what to do. We see clearheadedly the possibility that we will have to do this again.”
That possibility became a reality, of course, in the summer of 2014. What seems in retrospect like a skirmish was then considered shockingly lengthy and lethal.
When the ceasefire halted those hostilities, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it “a great military accomplishment and a great diplomatic achievement.” At the same time, the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh — whose home was among thousands destroyed in that war, and who was assassinated during the latest one — declared: “Words can’t describe this victory.”
Again, looking back, I am humbled and frightened by the quotations in those Times articles.
“I don’t think that any declaration here is important, who won what,” Yaakov Amidror, Mr. Netanyahu’s former national security adviser, told us reporters back then. “What’s important is what will happen in the future.”
‘What should my expectations be?’
More than a decade later, he remains exactly right — and Barak terrifyingly wrong. What’s important is what will happen in the future, and that cannot be Israeli leaders thinking they “have to do this again.”
If Israel is to remain a Jewish and democratic state and restore its respect around the world, it cannot do this ever again. What has to happen in the future is a complete military withdrawal from Gaza, and a revival of two-state talks as part of a broader regional peace. What has to happen in the future is independent, responsible Palestinian leadership and serious commitment from the entire Arab world.
American Jews awakened by the horrors of Oct. 7 — and the horrors in the months since — should not return to slumber. We can help build a stable future for Israelis and Palestinians by supporting the organizations and politicians who reflect our American and Jewish values, of human rights and democracy and tikkun olam — supporting everyone who is ready to repair this holy and broken place.
When my teenage daughter saw the ceasefire headlines Wednesday, she asked: What should my expectations be about whether it will actually work?
I’m afraid to answer honestly. I’m afraid to find out myself.
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