What sounds simple and obvious rests on conditions that are almost impossible to meet.
Humanitarian pause or cease-fire: These two proposals for arresting the fighting in the Israel-Hamas war have gained traction in recent days. President Joe Biden continues to support Israel’s campaign against Hamas but favors a pause, so as to make time for more Palestinians to move out of harm’s way and for more food, water, fuel, and medical supplies to enter into Gaza. Others, both in the United States and abroad, argue for a cease-fire, saying that enough is enough with Israel’s bombing campaign and ground operations.
The approaches sound similar in name but are in fact very different. Both convey the cessation of hostilities. But a humanitarian pause is temporary, with the specific purpose of improving the humanitarian situation—in this case, to allow aid into Gaza; provide time for Palestinians to move south, away from Gaza City; and enable foreign citizens and those in need of special medical care to exit Gaza via the Rafah crossing into Egypt. A cease-fire can also be temporary but is usually meant to last for a more extended time, to encourage the start of peace talks or other arrangements that deal with an underlying conflict. Much more than a pause, a cease-fire cements the situation on the ground until it is violated.
Israel and Hamas have asymmetric goals in this war. Israel has said that it intends to destroy Hamas, but that objective is beyond reach. Hamas is an extreme religious resistance movement, not a defined army or an organization with identifiable members. But Israel’s stated goal signals its intention to decapitate Hamas’s leadership, demolish as much of its infrastructure as possible, blow up its arms depots and tunnels, and degrade its military capacities. To this end, Israel is planning for an extended military campaign that will prevent Hamas from reconstituting itself to engage in future terrorism against Israel.
Hamas, for its part, seeks to survive in order to fight another day. Because it is a movement, rather than a standing army, Hamas understands that for every fighter killed and for every civilian killed, it will be able to recruit new militant adherents. Since 2007, it has ruled Gaza with an iron fist, caring little for the welfare of the population. Its approach to the question of a pause or a cease-fire has everything to do with its own survival, and nothing to do with the impact this war has had on Palestinian civilians. Both a pause and a cease-fire play into Hamas’s hands.
Franklin Foer: Tell me how this ends
Hamas will therefore support both options, because either will reduce pressure on its fighters and allow them to regroup and dig in further. Israel will greet both options with opposition or skepticism, refusing a cease-fire because it would give Hamas a temporary victory, and considering a humanitarian pause only if it can be demonstrated to confer significant benefits.
Neither proposal is likely to find a hearing among the warring parties unless it takes seriously concerns that could lead to the worsening of an already bad situation on the ground. For example, a pause suggests that fighting will resume at some point after some humanitarian objectives are achieved. But in the absence of metrics to determine when this point has been reached, either Israel or Hamas could decide unilaterally when to end the pause. Neither side is likely to agree to such uncertainty—or to agree to allow an outside party to determine and enforce a framework for the pause.
A cease-fire, meanwhile, suggests that the fighting will end and postwar planning and reconstruction can begin. For Hamas, the attractions are obvious: A cease-fire now will reinforce the success it claims to have achieved on October 7. The bulk of its manpower and arsenal remain functional, as does its leadership. Conversely, a cease-fire now would be a strategic failure for Israel, a recognition of defeat that leaves a brutal enemy intact to continue to threaten not only the Gaza periphery but also beyond. Any expectation that this idea should be attractive for Israel is unrealistic.
Either option requires agreement from all of the warring parties. But whom, exactly, does that entail? Israel has a government that can decide and implement a policy—but who speaks for Hamas? Colleagues familiar with Hamas’s decision making have suggested that an internal debate preceded the October 7 onslaught; the military-wing leader, Mohammed Deif, is said to have pushed for the kind of attack that took place, and the political leader, Yahya Sinwar, argued for a more limited action to take military hostages to trade for Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. So a pause or a cease-fire would require Deif’s approval, as well as Sinwar’s. Israel could not be expected to take at face value an intermediary’s assurance about Hamas’s position, and Hamas leaders would be highly unlikely to speak directly in a manner that might reveal information about their hiding places.
Hamas is also not the only party fighting Israel in Gaza. Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) reportedly joined the savagery on October 7. PIJ apparently took and still holds some of the Israeli and foreign hostages. A pause or a cease-fire would require agreement from all of these elements to be credible. And how realistic is it to assume that it would be possible or even credible to gain such wide agreement?
Several operational hurdles also stand in the way of either a pause or a cease-fire. Both would demand that the parties remain in place, that the positions when the pause or cease-fire takes effect can be documented, and that all sides commit to not taking advantage of the situation to improve their tactical positions. These goals are unrealistic, because stopping the Israeli offensive would give Hamas and others the opportunity to regroup, rearm, move around, and enhance their positions. Similarly, Israel could improve its positions on the ground in Gaza, while giving its frontline troops a brief respite. Weeks of Israeli reconnaissance trying to locate Hamas fighters and the hostages would go to waste. Under such circumstances, a resumption of fighting after a pause or after a cease-fire breaks down could be even more intense than what we’ve seen until now.
To remedy this problem, an effective pause or cease-fire arrangement would need to include a monitoring capability on the ground and an accountability mechanism sufficient to impose consequences on those who violated its terms. No outside party is going to volunteer to monitor a pause or a cease-fire in Gaza, nor would one have the credibility or means to enforce compliance. Students of the 1973 war know this problem well. A 1970 cease-fire had ended an earlier war of attrition, but it established no baseline for where the parties were at the moment of truce, let alone a mechanism to ensure that they did not advance from that point. Egypt violated the cease-fire with apparent impunity, moving mobile surface-to-air missiles to the west bank of the Suez Canal—a gambit that would have an incredible impact on the early days of the Yom Kippur War three years later.
With these concerns in mind, Israel will not likely agree to a cease-fire until it believes that it has achieved most of its war aims. And Israel’s opposition is not the only obstacle. Perhaps more important are the near impossibility of securing a credible agreement from all of the Palestinians involved in the war and the difficulty of creating a mechanism for monitoring and accountability. Israel and the United States will also oppose delivering a victory to Hamas that would allow the movement to believe that the world will defend it whenever it decides to attack Israel.
A humanitarian pause presents almost as many barriers to overcome as a cease-fire, but with a modicum more promise. Israel could conceivably be brought on board if, for example, the pause were accompanied by a steady release of hostages for every day of the pause. A short pause in the fighting early on allowed for the release of two hostages. Perhaps that arrangement can be a model to build on.
Neither a pause nor a cease-fire is imaginable without solutions for the basic problems outlined above. And the conditions are daunting—almost impossible—to meet, which is why, despite the public fervor both inspire, neither proposal has advanced more than it has.
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