After two years, will Israel and Hamas seize the opportunity to end the war?

After two years of war, there is a chance for an agreement that ends the killing and destruction in Gaza and returns Israeli hostages, living and dying, to their families.

It is an opportunity, but it is not certain that it will be seized by Hamas and Israel.

It is a grim coincidence that the talks are happening exactly two years after Hamas gave the still-sharp Israelis a shock.

The October 7 attacks killed about 1,200 people, most of them Israeli civilians, and 251 were taken hostage. The Israelis estimate 20 hostages are still alive and want the bodies of 28 more returned.

Israel’s devastating military response has destroyed most of Gaza and killed more than 66,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, including more than 18,000 children.

The figures come from the Ministry of Health, which is part of the remnants of the Hamas administration. Its statistics are usually considered reliable. A study in The Lancet, the medical journal based in London, suggested they were underestimated.

Israelis and Palestinians want the war to end. Israelis are wearing war and opinion polls show that a majority wants a deal that returns the hostages and ends the war. Hundreds of thousands of reservists in the armed forces, the Israel Defense Forces, want to return to their lives after several months in active service.

More than two million Palestinians in Gaza are in a humanitarian catastrophe, caught between the firepower of the Israeli army and hunger and, in some areas, man-made famine created by Israel’s restrictions on entry into the strip.

The version of Hamas that was capable of attacking Israel with devastating force two years ago has long been broken as a cohesive military organization. They have become an urban guerrilla force and an insurgency against the IDF is rising in the ruins.

Hamas wants to find a way to survive, even though it has agreed to cede power to Palestinian technocrats. He accepts that he will have to surrender or dismantle the rest of his heavy weapons, but wants to maintain enough firepower to defend itself against Palestinians who want revenge for the nearly two decades of brutal rule and the attacks Hamas brought down upon them.

He doesn’t say so publicly, but the organization that still has a following and a charter that seeks Israel’s destruction will also want to appear with enough left to rebuild its ability to live up to its name, which is short for the Islamic Resistance Movement.

Israel would like to dictate the terms of Hamas’ surrender. But the fact that Hamas has a chance to negotiate seriously opens up more possibilities than seemed just a month ago. That was when Israel tried and failed to kill Hamas leadership in a series of strikes in a building in Doha where they were discussing peace proposals from Donald Trump. Their main target, senior commander Khalil Al-Haya, is leading a Hamas delegation in talks at the red resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. Ibn al-Haya was among the dead, although the leaders escaped for their lives.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a different kind of survival in mind. He wants to maintain his power, continue to postpone his corruption trial, win elections scheduled for next year, and not go down in history as a leader responsible for security blunders that led to the bloodiest days for Jews since the Holocaust.

To achieve this, he needed a reliable way to declare “total victory,” a phrase he used repeatedly. He defined it as the return of hostages, the destruction of Hamas and the destruction of Gaza. If he cannot do that, it will not be enough for him to point out the real damage Israel has inflicted on its enemies in Lebanon and Iran in the past two years.

Hamas and Israeli negotiators will not meet face to face. Egyptian and Qatari officials will be the mediators, and the Americans will also have significant, and perhaps decisive, influence.

The basis of the talks is Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan. What it won’t do, despite extra social media posting about lasting peace, is end the long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians for control of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It does not mention the future of the West Bank, the other part of the territory recognized by the UK and others as the State of Palestine.

The risks are high in Sharm El Sheikh. There is a chance to reach a ceasefire that could lead to the end of the most destructive and bloody war in more than a century of conflict between Arabs and Jews.

The first challenge is to determine the conditions for the release of Israeli hostages as opposed to Palestinians serving life sentences in Israeli and Gazan prisons who have been detained without trial since the start of the war. This is not a simple task.

President Trump wants results, fast. He wants to revive his ambition to broker a great deal in the Middle East, at the center of which would be a rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. That cannot happen when Israel is killing large numbers of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and is imposing restrictions on humanitarian aid that are causing great suffering, and when Hamas is holding Israeli hostages. The Saudis have also made clear in a series of public statements that it also cannot happen without a clear and irreversible path to an independent Palestinian state.

Trump forced Netanyahu to sign up to a document that included a vague and unspecified reference to the possibility of Palestinian independence. In a statement afterward, Netanyahu chose to ignore this by repeating his pledge that the Palestinians would never get a state. There is a lot in the Trump document that Israel wants in terms of ending the power of Hamas and future governance in Gaza.

But Netanyahu is used to having his own way in the Oval Office. Instead, Trump forced him to read a formal apology to Qatar’s prime minister for the air strike that failed to clear the Hamas leadership. Trump needs Qatar on board to advance his ambitions to reshape the Middle East.

One question is why Hamas is preparing to give up the hostages without a strict timetable for Israel to leave Gaza and end the war. One possibility is that the Qataris convinced them that Trump would make sure it happened if they gave him the chance to claim victory by returning all of Israel’s hostages, living and dying.

However, Trump is still using language that Netanyahu needs the Israelis to do, such as his threat to Hamas if they reject the deal, and his promise of “full support” for Israel to move forward with the destruction of Hamas.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said it would only take a few days to act if Hamas was dangerous. It will take longer to get the nuts and bolts out that will need to support a complex agreement. So far all they have is Trump’s frame.

Two years later, the long and unresolved conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has exploded into the Gaza War. It represents a huge challenge to end the killing and secure the immediate future for Palestinians and Israelis. It will take skillful diplomacy and long engagement with details, of which there is little in Trump’s 20-point plan. Trying to find precise language that will fill in the gaps will provide a lot of potential blocks.

No one has a higher opinion of his ability to make deals than Trump himself. On foreign policy, the delivery has not yet matched Shamoh. He did not settle a large number of wars. The exact count of how many claim to be over varies depending on how you tell them. Mostly Trump did not get the Russia-Ukraine war over within a day of taking office, as he expected. But one skill Trump has, after a lifetime in real estate, is an innate instinct for how to apply pressure to get what he wants.

Indirect talks in Egypt are happening because Donald Trump has been able to pressure both sides. Threatening Hamas with extinction if they refused to go along with his plan was the easy part. US presidents have led international pressure on Hamas since the group won Palestinian elections in 2006 and used force to take over Gaza from Palestinian rivals Fateh the following year.

A big difference between Donald Trump and Presidents Clinton, Obama and Biden is that he returns with greater force and more decisiveness in Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempts to manipulate him than his Democratic predecessors were willing or able to do.

Trump took Hamas’s “yes but” qualification to his proposal as a strong yes to peace. It was enough for him to move forward. The news service Axios reported that when Netanyahu tried to convince him that Hamas was playing to Trump’s time response was “Why are you so negative.”

Israel depends on the United States. The United States was a full partner in the war. Without American help, Israel could not have attacked Gaza with such ruthless and prolonged force. Most of their weapons are provided by the United States, which also provides political and diplomatic protection, and they have passed multiple resolutions in the UN Security Council that were intended to stop Israel.

Joe Biden, a self-described Irish Zionist, has not used the leverage that comes from Israel’s dependence on the United States. Donald Trump is putting his plans for America first, and has used America’s latent power over Israel to get Netanyahu to bend to his will, at least when it comes to joining the talks. It remains to be seen whether this pressure continues. Trump changes his mind.

Both the Hamas and Israeli delegations have powerful critics at home who want the war to continue. Hamas sources told the BBC that military commanders still in Gaza are prepared to fight it to the end and take as many Israelis with them as possible. Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition relied on the support of ultra-nationalist extremists who believed they were close to their dream of expelling the Palestinians in Gaza and replacing them with Jewish settlers.

If talks in Egypt fail, both finals become possible.