Australia/Israel Review

By March 3, 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will likely be faced with a choice – move ahead with the next stage of the ceasefire-hostage release deal, and face the collapse of his coalition and an election that could potentially end his time in office, or go back to war and risk the lives of hostages and the wrath of the US President.

And the prime minister has a history of waiting until the last minute to make major decisions.

The hostages for ceasefire and prisoner release deal inked in Qatar in mid-January was ostensibly designed to end the gruelling 15-month war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza. Negotiations on the next stage are slated to start on day 16 of the truce – Feb. 5. 

Former US President Joe Biden said the second phase would bring “a permanent end to the war,” Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani said he hoped the deal would spell “the last page of the war,” and US President Donald Trump, called it “a first step toward lasting peace in the Middle East.”

In his public comments and behind-the-scenes promises, Netanyahu has expressed a fairly different sentiment.

Netanyahu has vowed, since the start of the war, that fighting will not end until Hamas no longer rules the Strip. If there was any doubt that the terror group still exercises power, video from the streets of Gaza on Jan. 20 – where armed and masked Hamas gunmen put on a show of force for war-weary Gazans as the first three hostages were released – put that to rest.

Netanyahu has also promised to bring every last hostage – the living and the dead – home to Israel, something most defence officials see as an impossible task without some sort of agreement.

In his first public comments on the deal, the Prime Minister termed it on Jan. 19 a “temporary ceasefire”, proclaiming that both Biden and Trump “have given full backing to Israel’s right to return to the fighting” if the negotiations do not advance.

“If we need to go back to the fighting,” said Netanyahu, “we will do so in new ways and with great force.”

Netanyahu has denied that the IDF will decrease the number of troops in the Philadelphi Corridor along the border with Egypt throughout the six-week ceasefire, though the text of the deal says Israel will “gradually reduce the forces in the corridor area during stage 1.”

The deal also states that the IDF must complete its withdrawal from the corridor by day 50, regardless of any future stages, but a “senior diplomatic official” – generally code for a representative of the Prime Minister’s Office – proclaimed that “If Hamas does not agree to Israeli demands to end the war, Israel will remain in the Philadelphi Corridor also on the 42nd day and also the 50th day,” effectively leaving the IDF there “until further notice”.

March 3, day 42 – on which the remaining 14 hostages of the 33 to be released are slated to be freed – could prove a particularly critical day for the deal. If the IDF shows no sign of leaving Philadelphi, Hamas could easily argue that this is a violation of the agreement and halt the release of the hostages.

Netanyahu also proclaimed in his statement that “terrorists who committed murder” will not be released to the West Bank or Jerusalem, but sent to Gaza or abroad. That is true of convicted Palestinian murderers, although a number of prisoners serving serious time for terror convictions who were not found guilty of murder will be released to the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

Between a rock and hard place

With the exit of Itamar Ben-Gvir and his far-right Otzma Yehudit party in protest over the deal, Netanyahu’s governing coalition is down to 62 seats, a razor-thin 2-seat majority in the 120-member Knesset. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has sworn that he will quit the Government if Israel does not return to fighting Hamas in Gaza, which would end the ceasefire and make the release of the remaining 64 hostages increasingly unlikely.

Both Ben-Gvir and Opposition Leader Yair Lapid have vowed to provide outside support to the Netanyahu Government, with very different motivations. Lapid – in the short term – to allow a hostage deal to go through, and Ben-Gvir to prevent toppling a right-wing government and causing an election.

Netanyahu is faced with a limited set of options. He can, of course, hope that during the next stages of talks, Hamas agrees to end its military and political rule of the Strip. That appears to be a pipe dream, however. And Netanyahu has adamantly refused to entertain the idea of the Palestinian Authority assuming control, which some had seen as the most likely and stable alternative.

The Prime Minister could also torpedo the second stage of talks, and return to full-scale fighting in the Gaza Strip after the end of the ceasefire’s six-week first stage, endangering the remaining hostages and returning Israel to a state of war, with an unknown outcome.

But Netanyahu is likely to be facing extraordinary pressure from Trump. The new US President is a man who likes to be known as a dealmaker, has boasted of managing to clinch the current deal “in less than three months, without being president,” and reportedly has his eyes on a Nobel Prize.

In an interview on Jan. 18, Trump said the deal “better hold… This has to end.” And in his inauguration speech two days later, he proclaimed, “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end and perhaps most importantly the wars we never get into. My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker.”

Though he clashed repeatedly with the Biden Administration, Netanyahu is less likely to want to annoy Trump – a man known for holding petty grudges and making politics as personal as possible, who also, as US President, could likely otherwise provide Netanyahu with many other things on his wish list.

Netanyahu has a lot of decisions to make in the next six weeks – and he might want to consider picking up a copy of Trump’s The Art of the Deal.

Amy Spiro is a reporter and writer with the Times of Israel. © Times of Israel (www.timesofisrael.com), reprinted by permission, all rights reserved.