The female IDF soldiers returned to Israel in the second ceasefire hostage and prisoner swap.

An IDF attack on a Lebanese apartment block targeting Hezbollah killed mostly civilians, BBC finds.

Hamas and Israel each abandoned long-standing demands in order to secure the cease-fire that takes effect today. Both parties were responding to internal and external pressures when Israel agreed to pull its forces back from almost all of Gaza, and Hamas accepted a temporary cessation of hostilities, but not the end to war it had sought.

In Israel’s case, one source of external pressure was President-Elect Donald Trump, who pushed Benjamin Netanyahu to accept conditions he’d long rejected. The Israeli prime minister was also swayed by intense public demands to retrieve the hostages. Netanyahu’s priorities and incentives are relatively visible and easy to apprehend. Hamas’s strategy is, in this instance, more opaque.

A major concession for Hamas was to accept that many of its key cadres will now stay indefinitely in Israeli prisons. In any case, the militant Islamist group is no longer the same organization that launched the October 7, 2023, massacre. Its battalions have been smashed; all that is left is a ragtag insurgency capable only of hit-and-run tactics. The group’s arsenal is greatly depleted; its fighters have fallen back on improvised explosive devices assembled from unexploded Israeli ordnance. The top tier of Hamas’s military leadership has been eliminated, leaving two relatively inexperienced and junior commanders—Ezz al-Din Hadad in the north and Mohamed Sinwar, younger brother of the October 7 attack’s mastermind, Yahya Sinwar, in the south.

As they planned the original 2023 assault, Sinwar and his lieutenants no doubt anticipated a devastating military response from Israel. They accepted the bargain of sacrificing all of the infrastructure and quasi-state apparatus that Hamas had built in Gaza since seizing power in 2007, in return for a “permanent” guerrilla war against Israel. According to the military wing’s theory of insurgency, after drawing the Israel Defense Forces into Gaza, Hamas fighters would inflict grinding attritional losses on Israeli troops. In a marginal way, that scenario seemed slightly plausible when Israel recently lost 15 soldiers in the northern town of Beit Hanoun within a week. After 15 months of fighting, the IDF’s losses are incommensurable with Hamas’s. But Israel’s generals need clarity from its civilian government about the political goals of the war and what they can call victory.

[Read: Israel never defined its goals]

Hamas, too, may finally have had a moment of clarity. Sinwar used to mock the Hamas politburo as “the hotel guys” because few of the political leaders ensconced in comfortable digs abroad had personal experience of armed struggle. For more than a decade, the Gaza gunmen became ascendant, while these formerly commanding, civilian Hamas figures in foreign capitals were reduced to soft-power roles as diplomats and TV talking heads. They had their uses as conduits for money and arms, but as Sinwar saw it, they had no hard-power value to the movement.

All of that has changed. Sinwar is dead; in Lebanon, the great ally Hezbollah has collapsed; in Syria, Israel’s longtime adversary Bashar al-Assad is gone; a humbled Iran has been kept at bay. So Hamas has had to change course. With the reemergence of Turkey and Qatar as regional power brokers, the deal-making diplomacy of the hotel guys is now the only game in town. If Hamas is to have any way of rebuilding power inside Gaza, the politburo must get its way.

Plenty of evidence suggests that the Sinwar-directed version of Hamas has not fared well in public opinion in Gaza, where 2.2 million Palestinians suffered serial displacement, hellish misery, and mass death. The military wing calculated that its adoption of a frontal position in the so-called Axis of Resistance of Iran-backed regional militias would shift Palestinian public opinion in its favor. But the backlash potential among Gaza’s civilian population, in what was surely imagined as a years-long insurgency, must have been obvious. Even the most implacable and belligerent Hamas leaders must operate within a Palestinian political context that demands significant support for a “people’s war.”

But the decisive factor in shifting Hamas at the negotiating table is the dramatic change in the wider geopolitical landscape. The Sinwar strategy of October 7 was to provoke a multifront war against Israel, in hopes of dragging into a regional conflict the ultimate adversaries, the United States and Iran. That call went unanswered. When Hezbollah made clear that it would intensify its long-standing border conflict with Israel but essentially sit out the war in Gaza, Hamas leaders complained at first, but eventually had to accept that the Lebanese cavalry was not on its way.

Even so, Hamas assumed broader backing from its regional sponsors. Yet the devastation that Israel inflicted on Hezbollah last year, the general degradation of Iran’s militia network, and the failure of Tehran’s strategy of using Arab fighters as a forward defense against Israel and the U.S. were decisive. The collapse of the resistance proved central to Hamas’s change of course.

With the end of the Assad regime in Syria, Iran now has no overland route to resupply Hezbollah in Lebanon, let alone Hamas in Gaza. The fall of Assad has helped shift power inside Hamas away from the Qassam Brigades, which advocated “permanent war” against Israel, and toward the civilian politicians who recently relocated from Qatar to Turkey. Many of those operatives were never really on board with the strategy of ditching governance in Gaza and turning to guerrilla combat. Hamas was careful to avoid open dissension, but signs of unease among politburo members were evident.

The victory in Syria of the Turkish-backed rebels fundamentally altered Hamas’s calculations. Turkey and its close ally Qatar are now emerging as key players in the Levant. For Hamas, whatever political links to Ankara and Doha it can leverage suddenly matter far more than any ties to Tehran. Unlike Iran’s leaders, the rulers of Turkey and Qatar have no interest in prolonging an open-ended conflict in Gaza. Both countries are largely aligned with the U.S. They have an overriding interest in regional stability, not in support for an endless insurgency on Israel’s doorstep.

If Hamas is to have any hope of getting back in the business of governing Gaza, and restoring a social contract with its more than 2 million Palestinian residents, Turkey and Qatar are most likely to supply the means. That would involve, first, political and diplomatic cover, and then financing for the territory’s reconstruction, especially its shattered health and education systems.

Trump’s threats of “hell to pay” if a hostage deal did not materialize before his inauguration probably meant little to Hamas. But even if the president-elect’s principal influence was on Netanyahu, Ankara and Doha certainly felt the Trump factor enough to lean on the politburo. The Qassam Brigade fighters surviving in Gaza’s tunnels still have their guns, and at some point they may decide they’ve had enough of the cease-fire; equally, Israel will show no hesitation in playing militant whack-a-mole, and Netanyahu might judge that resuming the conflict would advance his interests. But for the moment, the politburo members who want to pull back from endless warfare and try to rebuild political power in Gaza have the momentum and the leverage. That’s why there’s a cease-fire—and why it might just last.

The IDF has shared a clip of the family of 24-year-old Romi Gonen as they watched footage of her release.

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.

The IDF had earlier told a local NGO it was unaware of his case, sparking concern.