The Gaza Cease-Fire, With Steven Cook

LINDSAY:
Welcome to the President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boies, distinguished senior fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is the Gaza Cease-Fire. With me to discuss how the Israel-Hamas cease-fire and Gaza came together and its prospects for holding is Steven Cook. Stephen is the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies here at the Council in Foreign Relations. He has written four books on Middle East politics, the latest being the End of Ambition, America's Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East. He recently wrote an expert brief for CFR.org titled Israel and Hamas Reach Cease-Fire, but Will the War End?, and an article for Foreign Policy titled Israelis and Palestinians Both Lost their Futures. Steven, thank you for coming back on the President's Inbox.

COOK:
Thanks for having me, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Well, Steven, let's begin with the basic question. What did Israel and Hamas agree to?

COOK:
Well, they agreed to a three-phased framework agreement that brings the fighting in the Gaza Strip to an end. The first phase is six weeks long, and that will result in the release of thirty-three Israeli hostages and somewhere in the neighborhood of nineteen hundred Palestinians in Israeli prisons. On the sixteenth day of the first phase of the cease-fire, negotiations will begin over the second phase of the cease-fire, which will cover more hostage releases as well as Israeli withdrawals from the Gaza Strip. Then that will lead to negotiations for the third phase, which will be reconstruction, governance, and potentially negotiations that will ultimately end the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Of course, there's a tremendous amount of skepticism, skepticism that I share, that Israel and Hamas will get past even the first phase of the cease-fire.

LINDSAY:
Okay, let's hold off on the skepticism for a moment, Steven, and just sort of lay it all out. When you say the cease-fire brings violence to a halt, do we know how long it will bring it to a halt for, and do we have an agreement on what constitutes violence? Have the Israelis pledged, for example, not to launch any military attacks or raids in Gaza? Likewise, has Hamas agreed not to attack Israeli troops or forces who may be in Gaza.

COOK:
This is supposed to be a period of quiet, so there is not supposed to be Israeli airstrikes or Israeli operations to target leadership, and Hamas is not to fire rockets into Israel or fire on Israeli forces. So far, this situation is holding. There hasn't been violence in the Gaza Strip. Israelis have released Palestinian prisoners, and Hamas has released hostages. This has not been easy. There have been hiccups at each moment when these releases were to begin, and there's only been two so far, but the Qataris have stepped in when necessary to apply pressure on Hamas and the United States has done similarly with Israel.

LINDSAY:
Help me understand the hostage release and the prisoner release, Steven. Why is it happening in stages rather than simply letting the hostages go and then Israelis let the Palestinians out of Israeli jails? Why this sort of slow piece-by-piece, drip-by-drip release?

COOK:
It's a really important question, and in fact, Hamas had hoped for a one-shot deal that they release hostages and the Israelis release Palestinian prisoners. But the Israelis didn't want to do that. I think for an important reason is that they wanted to test Hamas' willingness on a number of issues, including not firing rockets into Israel. So the negotiations for the second phase are based on performance. As long as the parties perform, there is an expectation that there would move into a second phase, and that's Israeli military withdrawal. Remember, there's a lot of political pressure in Israel actually not to end the conflict. That the strategic goal of Israel's military operations, which have been going on since October 2023, is the destruction of Hamas and to change the security situation for Israel and making sure that Hamas could not threaten Israel once again.

LINDSAY:
Well, Steve, let me draw you out on that though. What does that mean in practice and where is this pressure coming from? What part of the political spectrum and how broad is this view?

COOK:
Well, first in practice, although Israeli leaders use the term destruction of Hamas, I think in practice what they have meant is to ensure that Hamas could not threaten Israel's security in the same way that it did on October 7th, 2023 when there was an invasion of Southern Israel that took the lives of twelve hundred Israelis, most of them civilians, and which Hamas was able to occupy for more than twenty-four hours parts of sovereign Israel before the IDF and Israeli security services could reclaim that territory. So that was the kind of strategic goals, one to destroy Hamas, make sure to the extent that it can't do what it has done, which was to essentially change the security situation for Israel, which had previously relied on deterrence, which quite obviously broke down on October 7th. The second part of your question, which I absolutely, totally forgot, I have no idea what it was.

LINDSAY:
Oh, the second is what part of the Israeli political spectrum is calling for the war to be continued to reach this broader goal, and what percentage of the overall Israeli body politics do they represent? Is this a small group or a large group?

COOK:
Right. Well, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was forced to come to an agreement with Israel's finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who represents the far-right wing of the Israeli political spectrum, but it's nevertheless a coalition partner of the Israeli government, that Israel reserve the right and that it would continue military operations after winning the release of these hostages after the first phase of the cease-fire. And that's a reason why there's so much skepticism that will get further into phase two because of the political pressure from Netanyahu's own coalition partners. If you speak to Israelis across the political spectrum, they are thrilled and relieved that hostages are coming home. I watched the hostages returning live on the most recent release. I watched it live, and the crowds both in what's called Hostage Square in Tel Aviv, as well as those gathered around where the IDF helicopters delivered these poor hostages was extraordinary.
People not even connected to these families were in tears and just overwhelmed with joy that these people were coming home. At the same time, everybody recognizes from Hamas's propaganda and what's actually happening in the Gaza Strip that Hamas remains the most influential well-armed faction in the Gaza Strip, and this is enraging a lot of Israelis across the political spectrum. So I suspect that while Bezalel Smotrich and the former minister of public security Itamar Ben-Gvir who's now left the government over this ceasefire agreement, beyond them and the people that they represent, there is a broader group within the Israeli public that have serious qualms about the ceasefire and very much want to change the security situation around them. And that's why they're convinced that Hamas is never actually going to give up the last hostage because that's their last pit of leverage with the Israelis. The Israelis have pursued...

LINDSAY:
So let's talk about that, Steven. And I should note that Palestinians in Gaza were particularly joyous about the release of Palestinians from Israeli jail. So the celebration is on I think both sides of this conflict. But how many hostages are there? Are we certain they are all alive, and how many are likely to be released by the end of this week, do we think?

COOK:
So prior to the cease-fire deal being formalized, there were ninety-eight hostages who were in the Gaza Strip. Some unknown number of those are alive. Not all of them are Israelis. There are some who are dual Israeli-American citizens, and there's some number of foreign workers, Thai workers who worked in fields down in Southern Israel. We've now seen the release of seven Israeli hostages. Another seven will be released in the coming days. Hamas has given a list to the Israeli government of the remaining, I believe it's twenty-six of whom eight are not alive. So when first phase is over, thirty-three Israeli hostages, both alive and dead will be returned. Now, all of the civilian women were supposed to have been released prior to the release of soldiers including female soldiers. The three young women who were most recently released were spotters, unarmed spotters on the border with Israel, and that is something that caused a bit of confusion and holdup in the ceasefire, which required external intervention, notably the Qataris because there are civilian women who remain in the Gaza Strip. Allegedly, those will be among in the next batch of hostages to be released.

LINDSAY:
So looking at this from the vantage point of the leadership of Hamas, don't they have an incentive to drag this out or to be reluctant to give up the last remaining hostages given your assessment of what the mood is in Israel, particularly among members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition? Because once the hostages are all released, isn't Gaza once again vulnerable to Israeli attacks?

COOK:
That's exactly right, and it's not really just the right wing in Israel. As I said, you can look across the political spectrum.

LINDSAY:
But they're the most vocal.

COOK:
They're obviously the most vocal, and I think that your average Israelis, they're torn. Obviously, they'd like Israelis to come home. At the same time, they don't want to live under this threat. And so one interlocutor suggested to me, Hamas will never give up the last Israeli hostage because they know the second that they do, we will attack Hamas to change our security situation. And that's exactly what you're getting at here, is that Israelis have pursued basically two, I don't want to necessarily say contradictory, but difficult goals in this war, and that is to win the release of Israeli hostages and others as well as to destroy Hamas. But wanting to win the release of those hostages has made it somewhat more difficult for the Israelis, given all of the fire power they've used. It still made it more difficult for the Israelis to destroy Hamas. So the Israelis and Hamas are willing to play ball here. The Israelis will get back as many hostages as they can. Hamas is scoring a propaganda victory by one, playing along with this and releasing Israeli hostages. They still have...

LINDSAY:
Propaganda victory with whom, Steven?

COOK:
With Israel, with the world. They still have plenty of hostages that are leveraged for them, and they can demonstrate as they have through these releases that Hamas remains very much in charge and very well armed in the Gaza Strip.

LINDSAY:
I want to get to the question of what comes next, but before we do that, Steven, I'd like to draw you out on why we got this agreement now. My understanding and perhaps I'm wrong, is that versions of this agreement have been around since last May. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was reluctant to go along despite cajoling pressure, what have you, from the White House in particular, the Biden White House. Suddenly as Joe Biden's going out the door and Donald Trump is coming in, we get this deal. My sense is that the Trump people are claiming credit for it, and what is your sense of who deserves credit or blame for this deal?

COOK:
This is one of these inevitable things that's going to happen in these terrible circumstances is that people are going to want to claim credit and blame others. I think a number of things have happened that have led us to this moment where suddenly or seemingly suddenly, Hamas and the Israelis agreed. I think for the Israelis, they were able to demonstrate mostly through Lebanon and Iran that they had made significant progress in cutting the so-called axis of resistance down to size. In a very short time against all expectations, the Israelis greatly weakened Hezbollah, which had been amassing large amounts of weaponry and threatening Israel.

LINDSAY:
So the cavalry wasn't going to come to Hamas's rescue.

COOK:
Right, and I think Hamas was surprised that the cavalry hadn't come, and it's certainly now not going to come. Then of course, you had Israel's retaliatory attacks on Iran that did tremendous damage to their air defense system, their missile production facilities, and a variety of other things that have left the Iranians quite vulnerable. Add to that the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, and that has greatly weakened Iran. It has lost its western front and its access to the Mediterranean. That is good for Israel and made I think Israelis a little bit more amenable to making a deal. From the perspective of Hamas, they fought Israel essentially to a standstill. Hamas was recruiting new fighters at the same rate that the Israelis would kill them. It was diminishing returns for Israel, and Hamas of course had the leverage of getting the hostages, and there was continuing political pressure within Israel to strike a deal to get those people home.
And so in this kind of diminishing returns for the Israelis, there was more interest in a deal. And then finally, you had President Trump who actually gave them a deadline. He gave Hamas and he gave the Israelis a deadline that when he's inaugurated, he wanted there to be a ceasefire and hostages home. I think he meant all of the hostages, but nevertheless, he sent his new Middle East envoy to put pressure both on Prime Minister Netanyahu as well as the Qatari Emir. I think that's something that's lost in all of this is that the Qataris, as the kind of primary mediators here were continuing to mediate, but it almost seemed as if they were mediating for the sake of mediating. That was fine with them because they knew they were doing a service for the United States, which is very important to the leadership in Doha.
Well, now the president who doesn't have the same kind of relationship with the Qatari Emir, as did President Biden and others, has said to him, get this done, push it over the finish line, the same thing to Netanyahu, and they agreed. So I think it was a combination of all of these factors that led to the point where we are now. The question will be what happens going forward, and the skepticism about phase two is I think warranted, but the question will be how will the Trump administration respond to a breakdown? The President's special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, over the weekend said that it was very important to fulfill all aspects of this three-phase cease-fire.

LINDSAY:
I want to get to that question how these things are going to play out, Steven. Before we do, I'd like you to dive a little bit deeper into what you think Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's calculations were in agreeing to this deal. I've seen it suggested that perhaps there was something the administration promised him that he valued or that Bibi, as he's often referred to, is a very astute player of the game of geopolitics, and he realizes that by giving in now to President Trump's demand, he's pocketing a favor he can call on in the months to come. How do you make sense of those kind of conversations?

COOK:
I mean, I think it's entirely possible that the administration promised Netanyahu something, but I think it's more likely that Netanyahu who has a reputation for being the smartest guy in the room and sometimes is the smartest guy in the room, tends to be five or six steps ahead of whoever he's negotiating with or managing. And he's managing the new president and his advisors at the moment, and it strikes me that by agreeing to this deal, he starts off in a good place with the new president. The new president who harbored a certain amount of unhappiness with the prime minister, who in 2020 was very quick to congratulate President Joe Biden when he was elected. So he can agree, he can look like the agreeable party.
And then down the road with Hamas in the streets, fully uniformed guys carrying weaponry can make the argument that Hamas remains a threat to the state of Israel. And it remains very unclear whether the president himself, even if his advisors may be interested in it, it is very unclear whether the President will be interested in delving into this issue and trying to solve this problem in the same way that the Biden administration wants.
My suspicion is that Prime Minister Netanyahu is betting that President Trump will not and will accept the argument that Hamas, which has recruited thousands of fighters, remains a threat to Israel.

LINDSAY:
Well, let's talk about Trump's position on all this, Steven, because the new American president made news every the weekend when he told reporters aboard Air Force One that he wants a million and a half Palestinians to relocate from Gaza to Jordan in Egypt. He added that, let me quote him here. "We just clean out that whole thing." My sense is those remarks have not gone down well in the Arab world. There are some people in Israel who applauded the remarks. Help me make sense of what it is that President Trump has said and why it has elicited such strong reactions in the region.

COOK:
Indeed, last week it was the Israeli right to have remorse about President Trump's election because they feel that the cease-fire agreement is not a good one. And this week is the turn of Arabs who were supportive of Trump's election to have remorse about the President. The President was suggesting, as you point out, a million and a half Palestinians be transferred to the Sinai Peninsula or to Jordan while the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip takes place. He said it could be permanent or it could be temporary. And of course, this raised a tremendous, tremendous concern in Arab capitals while leading members of the Israeli right applauded and have said, it is about time for a President of the United States to recognize reality and that there are other Arab countries for these people to move to, and we applaud it, and we believe that the United States will overcome the opposition of the Egyptians and the Jordanians just as he did in facing down the Colombian president who had rejected flights of deported Colombians. This is a rather extraordinary moment.

LINDSAY:
Well, let me just stop you right there, Steven, if I may, just ask you a question. For people who have heard President Trump's remarks and their initial reaction is, well, that makes sense. We should just have them relocate and that will alleviate the source of the conflict and we can have peace. What in your view is either right or wrong about that approach?

COOK:
Well, I mean what it amounts to is the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, and it is consistent with some on the Israeli right, who would like to see that happen so that Israel can resettle the Gaza Strip and claim Israeli sovereignty over the Gaza Strip, leaving again one and a half million Palestinians to be in either the Sinai Peninsula or Jordan. This will have tremendous effects on stability in Jordan, which is a country that has sixty-five plus percent of their population is Palestinian.

LINDSAY:
But the government isn't. The monarchy isn't.

COOK:
The monarchy is not, but the majority of people in Jordan are Palestinian people who are already inflamed over the war in the Gaza Strip. It will certainly have a destabilizing effect. It would undermine the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan at a time when the Iranians are trying to destabilize Jordan and rebuild its Western front by funneling arms and money into the West Bank through Jordan. It would undermine the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty of 1979.

LINDSAY:
But why would Egypt be opposed to having Palestinians come and settle in Sinai? What is the objection from Cairo?

COOK:
A number of issues for the Egyptians, one is principle. The Egyptians believe that the Gaza Strip is the responsibility of Israel as the occupying power and does not want to suddenly be responsible for a million or so Palestinians. It is also a security problem for the Egyptians. We know that Hamas is linked up with Egyptian extremist organizations, and there would be likely resistance coming from Sinai to Israel, which raises the prospect of a conflict between Israel and Egypt, so a massively destabilizing move that would undermine pillars of American policy over the course of the last four decades. It would end the Abraham Accords. It would set the region back and potentially create multiple fronts of conflict around Israel just at a moment when Israel's strategic position in the region has improved as a result of what it has done to Hezbollah and Iran. It certainly would empower what remains of the axis of resistance and undermine America's partners in the region.

LINDSAY:
Steven, would it be fair to say that national identities also play a role here? My sense is that people living in Gaza, the Palestinians living there, do not want to be displaced to Egypt or to Jordan, even if they were to go to those countries that speak the same language because they don't see themselves as Jordanian or as Egyptian. They see themselves as Palestinians.

COOK:
Well, there's that. Of course, there is the question of national identity, but this would seem to be, if this were played out, would be a frightening, horrifying replay of the Nakba. The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 created massive refugee flows into the Gaza Strip in the West Bank and subsequently to surrounding countries. History would repeat itself. The United States, of course, if the president's policies were to be enacted would be an enabler of this, which would certainly inflame the Palestinians and other Arabs, and like I said, have a dramatic impact on the U.S. position in the region. It would be, I think, a terrible policy for the United States to pursue. The president has said, or advisors have said subsequently, well, there would be guarantees that the Palestinians could return. No one in the Arab world is going to buy that. No one in the Arab world is going to buy that argument.

LINDSAY:
On that score, Steven, does the United States have the leverage over Jordan and Egypt to force the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza? You made the reference to the dispute over the weekend between Washington and Bogota over the repatriation of Colombians back to Colombia. Egypt receives a substantial amount of aid from the United States. Could you see this administration threatening to withhold that aid to force the hand of General Sisi?

COOK:
Certainly, the United States holds a lot of cards when it comes to both Jordan and Egypt. Egypt is the beneficiary of $1.3 billion in U.S. military assistance on an annual basis. The United States holds an influential seat at the IMF in which Egypt has become dependent on over the course of the last decade. My sense is however, that this is such a radical departure and the consequences are so dire that despite the fact that Saudis, Emirates and others are frustrated with Egypt and are often reluctant to pour more money into Egypt, Egypt would enjoy significant support from its Arab allies in resisting an American effort to enable the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. I think the same thing goes for Jordan as well. It's not like they could weather the storm unharmed, but certainly there are resources available to the Egyptians and Jordanians that are not available to the Colombian government over the repatriation of Colombians and the Colombians had to quickly back down.

LINDSAY:
You mentioned, Steven, that this would amount to ethnic cleansing, which as I understand is illegal under international law, and indeed U.S. policy for a number of decades has sought to prevent ethnic cleansing in places like the Balkans. If we were to go down this road, how do you see it playing out with U.S. relations outside of the Middle East? Is there a cost to Washington of this sort of policy?

COOK:
Undoubtedly, the case there would be a cost to the United States enabling the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. I think European allies in particular would be aghast at this. We have been quite strong in other parts of the world opposed to ethnic cleansing, and hypocrisy obviously would be too obvious for people to ignore or for American power to paper over. The president makes an argument that at the service looks reasonable, that Palestinians and Israelis haven't known a moment of peace. The Gaza Strip is destroyed. It is a very, very difficult problem, a very, very difficult problem to resolve. And the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip will take decades, even if some way forward is found to reconstruct it. But the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip in the service of this rebuilding on the promise that Palestinians can come back is too much for I think governments both in the region and outside of it to take, and it might very well have an impact on our relations elsewhere, particularly in Europe as I said.

LINDSAY:
Yeah, it's easy to see the Chinese talking points and the Russian talking points writing themselves. But I want to ask you, Steven, then where are we going to go? Because as I listened to you and this conversation, others we have had, my takeaways are, one, Israel cannot live with the threat of Hamas, that it is an existential threat, that October 7th showed how vulnerable Israel and Israelis are. Number two, Hamas isn't going anywhere. Despite the heavy application of military force in Gaza, the immense destruction, the tremendous loss of life, Hamas is still able to recruit fighters. It is not going away. How do you square that circle?

COOK:
Well, what I've been saying from the very beginning of the war in the Gaza Strip is that you don't square that circle. That the most likely outcome of this terrible conflict is not renewed negotiations for two-state solution, not some new governance formula for the Gaza Strip, but some really ugly version of the status quo that existed before October 7th. And in the news recently, the Israelis are adding more forces around the perimeter of the Gaza Strip that there is no formula. There is no governance structure that everybody can agree to here. Everybody keeps looking to the Gulf States. The Gulf States want to see significant changes before they get to the Palestinian authority. They want to be protected from Hamas. They want to know that the money that they would put in and potentially even the forces that they would put in would be doing something constructive, and there's no guarantee of that.
So what is likely to happen is the Israelis continue to blockade the Gaza Strip, reserve for themselves the right to conduct military operations against Hamas while the population in Gaza lives off of the handouts of the international community through the UN system, World Food Program, which is part of it and others, I think that's a more likely reality for the Gaza Strip than any kind of new arrangement there.

LINDSAY:
On that depressing note, we're going to close up the President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Steven Cook, the Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations. Steven, thank you for the conversation.

COOK:
Thanks, Jim.

LINDSAY:
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