Any measure that serve to stop the massacre that Israel is committing in Gaza should be welcomed. But immediately, unless one prefers to live in an unreal political dream, the feeling prevails that the truce agreed upon between Israel and Hamas, with the direct mediation of Qatar, the United States and Egypt, is hardly a punctual breathwhich the Israeli Government itself has openly announced will be followed by more violence.
This is deduced, in the first place, from the fact that what was agreed upon was not a cessation of hostilities that would allow the negotiation of a possible agreement to begin, but rather a mere pause of barely four days. A pause that politically serves Netanyahu to give Biden something that he can present as the result of the pressure exerted on Tel Avivand to calm the pressure from the hostages’ relatives into the hands of Hamas, letting them see that it has not forgotten them. But he still serves him more militarily, once he has already achieved the objectives that he had set for the first part of the Iron Swords operation: dividing the Strip in two and degrading Hamas’s ability to respond to do something similar to what happened on 7-O. During these days of pause, Israel can reorder its deployment, refresh and reinforce its front-line units and resupply them with the ammunition necessary to continue the punishment.
For its part, Hamas will be able to do little more than assess the extent of the punishment suffered so far, given that nor will it be able to move troops and material from the southern half of Gaza, nor will it be able to count on reinforcements from outsider, due to the tight control that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are currently exercising along its borders. And this assessment exercise is what can lead its leaders to maintain the fight against the IDF or to decide on a tactical withdrawal, trying to preserve troops and weapons for a future confrontation.
In parallel, little can be expected from the entry of humanitarian aid through the Rafah crossingassuming that in the best of cases only about 300 trucks will be allowed to crossabsolutely insufficient to meet the needs of the 2.2 million people who live poorly inside the Strip. It is enough to remember that before 2007, when Hamas began to manage that territory, at least 500 trucks a day were necessary just to keep its population afloat. And, as has always happened, it will be Tel Aviv that determines what can or cannot enter through said passage. Once again, it can only be said that something is better than nothing, but without falling into the mistake of thinking that what finally enters will serve to change the image of misery and devastation in which Gaza finds itself.
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Regarding the exchange of prisoners, the agreed ratio of one hostage for every three Palestinian prisoners in the hands of Israel already gives an idea of the weakness of Hamas., when compared to previous exchanges in which he had managed to free many more people for each captured Israeli. With the release of around fifty people (mainly women and children), Hamas gets rid of part of the loot – considering that it does not have enough means to simultaneously attend to their custody and the combats with the IDF -, without losing (with around 150 remaining) the possibility of using them as human shields and as a future negotiation asset.
In short, an advantageous truce for Tel Aviv that inevitably leads us to more violence.