Israel-Hamas truce: 'everyone is tired of the same old, same old', but what happens next?

A fragile four-day truce between Israel and Hamas that began this afternoon in Gaza to facilitate a hostages-for-prisoners exchange could be the "first tentative step" towards ending the conflict.

But long-time observers believe more intense fighting between them is likely yet to come and neither side has a strategic plan for how it wants the war to end.

Instead, their next steps are being determined on a "wait and see" basis, as Israeli ground forces face the prospect of a bloody war of attrition with Hamas fighters entrenched in yet-to-be approached areas of Gaza City where the militant Palestinian group's forces remain intact, hidden from sight in a maze of underground tunnels, analysts told This Week In Asia.

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Meanwhile, Israel's government appears determined to prosecute the next phase of its military campaign in the southern half of Gaza, where it believes the strip's Hamas leadership has relocated to.

This threatens mass casualties among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians who have moved to southern Gaza since being ordered to do so on Sunday by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

In recent days, its closest ally the United States has expressed increasing "concern" about this gruesome prospect, and has cautioned Israel not to go ahead "absent a cohesive plan" to prevent a repeat of the "indiscriminate" bombings of the initial weeks of the war.

But Israel "seems intent on going forward with its war and the US is not calling for a generalised ceasefire yet", said Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

Instead, "what we are seeing happening is Washington very gently and slowly moving the needle on Israel's conflict and ceasefires".

Before it starts leaning on Israel for a real and prolonged ceasefire, the US' "instinct is to give Israel a complete opportunity to really smash Hamas and reduce its ability to repeat the October 7 massacres to virtually zero in the foreseeable future", Ibish said.

Eventually, Washington will - as it always has in Israel's previous wars with Hamas and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah - conclude that the "amount of Arab suffering and death being inflicted by Israel crosses a point where real damage is being done to US interests in the Arab world and at that point the pressure gets heavy and public, even though it begins as light pressure behind closed doors".

"But we're not even at the 'light pressure behind closed doors' phase yet. It's hard to overestimate how outraged the Biden administration was at the October 7 attacks on Israel," Ibish said.

Nonetheless, the truce agreement mediated by the US, Qatar and Egypt would be the right "first step" and would help in "building trust, showing that both sides can be trusted, and do what they agreed to do," said Andreas Krieg, an associate professor of defence studies at King's College London.

But the short truce "could create a momentum" whereby mediators, especially the US, put pressure on Israel, saying "we need to think about the day after, we need to create an off-ramp for the IDF to get out of this quagmire that they're in", according to Krieg.

However, even if the warring parties honour the terms of their deal, the pause in the fighting "will likely be limited to a few days only", said Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a fellow for the Middle East of the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston.

Whether "the fighting starts up again straight away thereafter" remained unclear, but he expected Israel was "likely to resume its war" in Gaza to dismantle Hamas and "end its ability to threaten Israel".

On the other hand, Hamas was "likely to use the pause to work diplomatic backchannels" to make the case for a longer ceasefire, in the belief that the longer the fighting paused, "the more damaging it may be for Israel's international image to be the one seen as wanting to resume the war", Ulrichsen said.

Krieg, who has previously advised the Qatar Armed Forces on security sector reforms, said the current state of affairs suited Hamas more than Israel because it had achieved "probably more of its objectives".

Hamas wanted to create havoc and lure Israel into a costly military confrontation and Israel "militarily cannot win without making a political concession or strategic concession to the Palestinians," he said, adding: "Whether to Hamas or to the Palestinian Authority, it doesn't really matter."

In doing so, Krieg said Hamas had "undermined" US-led normalisation talks between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Just as significantly, it had also "derailed the status quo" in Gaza of nearly 20 years under several Israeli administrations led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which had tried to "keep everyone in check in Gaza" while not making any fundamental changes to the status quos of "occupation and not giving the Palestinians land".

Meanwhile, the slaughter of thousands of Palestinian innocents has attracted "global public opinion and outrage, also triggering even the closest allies of Israel to comment and potentially put pressure on Israel to change its ways".

"We now have a revamped commitment by all European countries and the United States to the two-state solution" to the 75-year conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, Krieg said.

"For now it's just rhetoric, but overall this increases pressure" on Israel to make considerable concessions and potentially commit to peace talks again, and to a strategic framework - something which he said would require the departure of Netanyahu and his radical right-wing allies from power.

In stark contrast, Krieg said Israel had so far achieved "some minor military objectives, but the hard part of the fighting in Gaza City hasn't started yet".

The 30,000 IDF soldiers deployed in Gaza "haven't really moved into the areas that are most contentious and they haven't made a lot of progress on the tunnels, and militarily they haven't been able to free the hostages", he said.

While the hostage deal represents the achievement of a major objective for Israel, it "doesn't address the issue of eradicating and undermining Hamas", Krieg noted.

Ibish said the Israelis had put themselves in "an impossible situation by declaring an unachievable" war aim: the total destruction of Hamas.

Israel could just stop its Gaza campaign and, "in all likelihood, that's what will eventually happen".

It would let Hamas crawl out of the rubble and declare a "divine victory", but one that would be "pyrrhic and hollow and the whole experience could turn into a political disaster" for Hamas among the suffering Palestinians and others.

On the other hand, if Israel extended its occupation of Gaza, then Hamas "will get the opportunity it is hoping for" to build a prolonged and sustained insurgency against Israeli occupation troops on the ground, Ibish said.

"This is undoubtedly what they want, even though it will be difficult to put together and will take time."

As such, the analysts said both Israel and Hamas stood to emerge from the war as losers.

"The initial horror at the scale of the massacre perpetrated by Hamas has gradually given way to widespread international criticism of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, leaving neither side a winner," said Ulrichsen, who has authored three books on Middle East politics, including The Changing Security Dynamics of the Persian Gulf.

Similarly, Krieg said Hamas "needs an off-ramp... if survival is something they want", adding: "They need the de-escalation more than the Israelis in that respect."

For Israel, on the other hand, escalation will become "ever more costly" the longer its military operations continue in Gaza.

For a de-escalation to happen, he said the international community required a "clear strategic end-game from Israel" that committed it to a solution it was prepared to allow.

"The problem that Israel is facing in this respect is they don't want the Palestinian Authority to take over and they don't want Hamas to stay in power, but they also don't want to occupy the Gaza Strip or want the United Nations to be involved," Krieg said.

Similarly, he said the deployment of foreign peacekeepers in Gaza would not work because Israel would not trust them.

"Even if you build up a governance structure that is run by a multinational entity or the UN, it would have to have a security mechanism in place and it would have to be governed by Israel. Otherwise Israel would not agree to it," Krieg said.

Security governance has "always been a major obstacle" to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because Israel "doesn't trust anybody else with it".

Either way, Ulrichsen said the brutal Hamas attack on October 7 had shown that Gaza "cannot simply be contained as an issue to be ignored until the next explosion of pressure".

Palestinian issues "cannot sustainably be decoupled" from diplomatic initiatives to integrate Israel more closely with Arab states through the 2020 Abraham Accords or normalisation processes which "neither include nor provide any lasting solution to Palestinian issues", he said.

When the war ultimately ended, he said there was likely to be "some form of multinational or multilateral presence" to govern Gaza.

Whether this is under the auspices of the UN or neighbouring and regional states "remains to be seen, and will likely be the focus of intense dialogue over the 'day after' question", Ulrichsen said.

Likewise, responsibility for rebuilding Gaza would be the focus of negotiation with regional and international partners, and "it may be that a multilateral initiative will be needed in which Arab states play a leading role", he said.

Krieg said rich Gulf Arab monarchies - Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates - "might be willing to do this but only after there's a fundamental political solution".

"Everyone is tired of the same old, same old", he said.

The Israelis do not want to have business as usual and do not want to return to the status quo pre-war, while neither the Saudis, Qataris or the Emiratis are prepared to spend billions of dollars on rebuilding Gaza and see it destroyed in another war down the line, according to him.

First, the Gulf monarchies "want to see Israel making a commitment to the two-state solution", Krieg said. Reconstruction of Gaza "needs to have a mechanism that works and with a clear roadmap".

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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