Last year, Ramadan began in the Gaza Strip under a hail of bullets. Israel and Hamas, unable to reach a truce agreement for the Holy Month, carried on fighting a war that up to that point had killed more than 31,000 people in just four months. This Ramadan threatens to be no different.
In the six weeks that have passed since the two sides signed onto “phase one” of a broader ceasefire agreement that came into effect on January 19, the violence subsided (in relative terms, of course) even as they regularly accused each other of breaches. Israeli forces pulled back from several positions in Gaza and Hamas released tranches of hostages.
But the spectre of a relapse into full-blown conflict has remained ever-present, and on Sunday the risk level was raised again. Mere hours after it agreed to a US plan to extend phase one to cover Ramadan and Passover, Israel announced it had changed its mind and would instead suspend the entry of all aid into Gaza. The cause of the U-turn, it says, is that Hamas refused to agree to the American plan.
Phase one was supposed to be about trust-building. Instead, much has been done to erode trust. Some Hamas hostage releases were botched or turned into grotesque spectacles. Israel continued several bombing campaigns in civilian areas and publicly reneged on key promises, such as withdrawing from the Gaza-Egypt border and allowing the smooth flow of aid. US President Donald Trump, meanwhile, floated ideas of expelling Gazans en masse to neighbouring states and released a wildly inappropriate, AI-generated video of himself laying poolside with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a redeveloped Gaza.
The result is a highly combustible situation, in which a blame game can easily slide into atrocities against civilians. Israel’s decision to suspend aid, if carried out, would be a war crime – as Hamas quickly pointed out. But Hamas continues to illegally hold captive several Israeli civilians, and it made veiled threats against their lives on Sunday afternoon.
In truth, trust-building in partial ceasefires, such as ones with phased approaches, is almost always a difficult business. Part of Hamas’s objection to the extension of phase one is that it is keen to move on to phase two, in which both sides would negotiate the withdrawal of Israeli forces. Rumours have swirled in the Israeli press over the past fortnight that Mr Netanyahu has no intention of letting the peace process get that far; he would rather secure a few more hostage releases without additional commitments and then pursue his stated goal of “the total destruction of Hamas” through continued war.
But Hamas seems to have no intention of giving up power. A banner strung up for the cameras during one of the hostage releases last month said, in Arabic and Hebrew, “We are the day after”. It is difficult to see how, without an extraordinary feat of diplomacy from the US or other regional and global powers, this will not become an insurmountable problem in efforts to bring the war to a halt.
A breakthrough remains possible – there are enough voices in Israel’s electorate who want to see a comprehensive deal that ends the war and returns all the hostages, even if that entails compromise on issues like Palestinian statehood. And Arab states are unified in advocating such a solution, even if at the moment it receives little serious attention from Washington. The obstacles are the narrow interests of the belligerents themselves: Mr Netanyahu’s Cabinet and Hamas. If they cannot be pushed to see the real avenues to peace, then for their people another devastating and bloody Ramadan and Passover lie ahead.
