Israel and Hamas have reached a hostage-release and cease-fire agreement, offering a measure of relief and hope to the region. But the deal brings no certain closure to the catastrophic Gaza war. It does not guarantee an end to the fighting, a full release of the Israeli hostages, or a lasting political solution for Gaza.

For Israelis, joy at the return of some of the hostages is tempered by trepidation about the fate of the rest. The deal provides for a six-week cease-fire, during which 33 Israeli hostages will come home—some alive, some for burial—in exchange for the release of a much larger number of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. A second stage of negotiations will then begin, to include the return of the remaining 65 hostages in Gaza and a lasting cease-fire. The success of those talks is just one of the questions the current deal leaves open.

Another is why the agreement wasn’t reached months ago. The framework appears to be the same one—“but for a few small nuances,” the Israeli ex–cabinet minister and former general Gadi Eisenkot said in a radio interview yesterday—that President Joe Biden presented last spring. Had both parties agreed to these terms then, thousands of Gazans might still be alive, and the recent destruction in the northern Gaza Strip could have been averted. At least eight Israeli hostages—including Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the best-known—might have survived, along with more than 100 Israeli soldiers.

So why was the agreement reached only now? The most significant development in recent days appears to be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new urgency. This week, unlike in May, he pressed the leaders of his coalition’s two resistant, far-right parties to accept a hostage agreement. One new element is Donald Trump. The president-elect demanded a hostage deal before his inauguration, promising that there would be “hell to pay” otherwise. He sent his own envoy, Steven Witkoff, to Qatar, where the indirect negotiations were taking place. Witkoff went from Qatar to Israel on Saturday and insisted on having a meeting with the prime minister on the afternoon of the Jewish sabbath—a violation of Israeli protocol rudely designed to remind Netanyahu who was the vassal and who was the suzerain.

Israeli government and military sources have tried to explain the timing of the deal to national media outlets by pointing to the death of Hamas’s leader Yahya Sinwar in October; the defeats suffered by its Lebanese ally, Hezbollah; and the devastation of northern Gaza. But the purpose of this account largely appears to be presenting the agreement as the fruit of Israel’s military success—rather than a sharp change of course under pressure. In reality, Hamas managed to sustain its war of attrition despite being weakened.

[Read: Sinwar’s death changes nothing]

Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s willingness to pursue a deal is a major reversal. Last summer, he reportedly stymied progress toward a cease-fire by raising new conditions, which infuriated his then–defense minister, Yoav Gallant. (The dispute was one reason Netanyahu dismissed Gallant in November.)

The Israeli right, which assumed that Trump’s bluster was aimed only at Hamas, is in shock. One clue as to what Trump may have threatened—or promised—the prime minister has come from leaks about Netanyahu’s talks with his finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich. The leader of the far-right Religious Zionist Party, Smotrich is a prominent patron of West Bank settlement. In a meeting between the two on Sunday, Netanyahu reportedly told Smotrich that “we must not harm relations with the Trump administration,” and explained that Trump would help with the government’s designs for “Judea and Samaria”—apparently referring to plans to expand West Bank settlement construction.

That promise did not satisfy Smotrich’s party. After a meeting of its Knesset members today, the party demanded a commitment from Netanyahu that he resume the war “after completion of the first stage of the deal.” This, it said, was “a condition for the party remaining in the [ruling] coalition and the government.” As of this writing, Netanyahu has not responded.

While the ultimatum is unlikely to scuttle the deal immediately, it underlines a central question: whether the first stage will lead to an agreement on the next one and a lasting cease-fire. The previous agreement, in November 2023, furnished only a pause. This one could be similar—a six-week hiatus, after which the fighting and destruction resume, while the rest of the hostages remain in Gaza.

A more lasting settlement would require political arrangements in Gaza that Netanyahu has so far studiously avoided discussing. Gaza needs a new Palestinian governing authority, with its own forces or foreign troops capable of keeping the peace. Without that, Hamas will almost certainly resume control in the shattered territory after Israeli troops pull out—and this war will have been just one particularly destructive round of fighting, but not the last. Israel should have been working with the United States, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank to create the framework for a new government in Gaza from the very beginning of this conflict. Instead, by failing to define a policy for Gaza’s future, the Netanyahu government turned the war into a highway to nowhere.

[Yair Rosenberg: Trump made the Gaza cease-fire happen]

Netanyahu’s far-right partners have pledged to reverse the 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and resume Israeli settlement there. Netanyahu has not endorsed that goal, but he has opposed any governing role for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, despite the fact that foreign partners consider its inclusion essential. Outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken emphasized as much in a speech on Tuesday.

For the second stage of the deal to succeed—for the war to end and for the remaining hostages to come home—both Hamas and the Israeli government will have to face the complex problem of Gaza’s future. Anyone who wants an end to the agony of the past 15 months must conjure up at least a quarter measure of hope. But best to hold off on any celebrations until a final deal is reached.

A good deal is one in which everyone walks away happy or everyone walks away mad. The moods must match. By this standard, the deal between Israel and Hamas is good but not great: Both groups are relishing what they are getting, and choking a bit on what they have given up. Israel is choking more than Hamas. There will be scenes of jubilation and triumph from Gazans and Israelis, and efforts by both sides’ leadership to spin the Gaza war as a victory. But for Israel and Gaza, the past 15 months have been a miserable failure, and from the perspective of negotiation, the only good news is that both sides taste some of the bitterness.

No hostages have been freed yet, and the cease-fire doesn’t start until Sunday, so all reports so far remain speculative and optimistic. The terms resemble those leaked over the past week. Israel will release a large number of Palestinian prisoners. Hamas will release in tranches the remaining hostages, living and dead, whom it seized on October 7, 2023. Nearly 100 remain. The two sides will stop fighting for 42 days, with the aim (again, speculative) of making that cease-fire permanent and ending the war. The unaccounted-for Israeli hostages include civilians, among them the Bibas children, who were nine months old and 4 years old when they were kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz, after the slaughter of their grandparents.

Hamas’s failure even to acknowledge whether these children are alive, or to allow welfare checks by the Red Crescent, has done much to convince Israelis that negotiation with the group is pointless. Why talk with someone too sadistic to let you know whether they have shot a baby or fed him? Taking civilian hostages is a war crime, and negotiating with a group that brags about taking them is more like negotiating with the Joker than with Nelson Mandela. The act of kidnapping a child is particularly taxing on one’s moral imagination. It’s no surprise that negotiations have faltered so far. Negotiating demands trust, and it’s hard to trust someone who snatched a baby.

[Franklin Foer: How Netanyahu misread his relationship with Trump]

From the beginning of the war, Israel has struggled to define its goals—in part because it is, as a country, so divided about its nature and purpose that any real goal articulated would be unsatisfactory to a large portion of its population. It was left instead with reassuring but vague slogans. “Free the hostages” was a defensible one from the start—the objective was just, and within Israel’s rights—but it concealed many harder strategic questions. What if freeing the hostages involved freeing murderers and terrorists from Israeli prisons? Evidently it does. What if their freedom was conditional on letting Hamas survive and rule Gaza?

Evidently it is. Gaza is wrecked, and tens of thousands of its people are dead. But Hamas is still the only armed force likely to rule Gaza when Israel withdraws. If the intention is to end the war, then the war will end with Hamas bloodied but unbowed. Israel estimates that only two of Hamas’s battalions remain intact, but the analyst Seth Frantzman, a professional Bad News Bear on this topic, has listed the evidence that perhaps a dozen battalions’ worth of Hamas fighters have survived. Moreover, the plans for a post-Hamas Gaza amount to squat. For more than a year, Israel and its allies have been pondering a role for the Palestinian Authority, or the Gulf States, or Egypt in providing security forces in a post-Hamas Gaza. I wonder about the mental health of those proposing this option. Are these security forces in the room with us right now? So far there is no prospect that any such group will materialize, or that anyone will want to send soldiers into a rubble-strewn urban combat zone, to contend with Hamas fighters who are themselves reluctant to disarm.

Hamas will celebrate this deal, because it will survive, and by its survival it will demonstrate the failure of the other slogan Israel adopted, which was “Destroy Hamas.” That slogan, too, was easy and just. But like “Free the hostages,” it left all the big questions unanswered, and looming ahead of it like thunderclouds. The first question was whether Israel was willing to inflict collateral civilian casualties, and absorb military casualties, at a level that experts thought would be necessary to accomplish its goal. This question is partially answered: Israel has by its own account inflicted many civilian casualties, and taken remarkably few military casualties of its own. (Before the war, analysts predicted thousands of Israeli soldiers dead in tunnel-clearing operations.)

The second question about the slogan was whether Hamas’s “destruction” meant what it seemed to mean. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used it, it sounded a lot like eradication, so that Hamas would cease to exist in any form, the way ETA and the Red Army Faction have. It would lose and close up shop, without even maintaining a token website or leaving a masked dead-ender broadcasting from a basement somewhere. The other possible interpretation of destroy would be merely to destroy Hamas’s ability to perpetrate another attack like October 7. The latter, reduced version of the slogan offered a better chance of success. But it is also less satisfying, and no longer fits on a bumper sticker.

When I talked with Israeli national-security officials last year, the most realistic of them spoke of Gaza’s future as resembling the West Bank today. The Palestinian population would live unhappily, but under the day-to-day administration of a Palestinian government. Israel would go in regularly on missions to kill or capture Hamas members. This vision is consistent with the more limited version of Israel’s goal for Hamas: to reduce it to a permanent but manageable problem. A cease-fire in Gaza, as of right now, will leave Hamas in power at a level well beyond manageable for Israel. It will probably postpone large-scale fighting rather than end it for good.

There has always been one further Israeli goal—less often articulated publicly, but shared by most Israelis and certainly by their government. That is to establish regret among Gazans for the October 7 attacks, and deterrence for future ones. Deterrence means asking Hamas, Do you enjoy the fruits of your actions? It means asking Gazans, Are you willing to accept what Hamas has dragged you into? The most distressing thing about this hostage deal is that Gazans might regret the results of the October 7 attack, but Hamas is still celebrating it. Hamas is a military organization; militaries fight, and Hamas just fought a better-armed opponent to a draw.

[Yair Rosenberg: Trump made the Gaza cease-fire happen]

Tempering this enthusiasm is a downward trend in its allies’ fortunes. In the days after October 7, Israel was skittish and concerned, because it looked possible that Hezbollah would take advantage of the country’s post-raid shock to enter the war from the north. It was not obvious that Israel, having failed to defend itself against an attack in the south, could withstand a much more formidable one in the north. After Israel’s largely successful war with Hezbollah at the end of last year, and the downfall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Israel has removed, at least temporarily, two major potential distractions. Hamas now knows that it has Israel’s undivided attention—and that prospect may have motivated it to consider offers of negotiation that it rejected months ago.

In the end, the most promising aspect of the deal is that it breaks a streak of nearly a year, during which the war in Gaza went on and on, without any clearly articulated end point or plan. Israel fought Hamas and degraded it. But fighting is a tool rather than an objective; a cease-fire at least gives civilians on both sides a spell of relief, and a moment to pause and figure out what they want out of what comes next.

Netanyahu's office blames Hamas for causing 'last-minute crisis'; Palestinian group says it is committed to agreement.