While freed captives and silent guns are a good start for peace in West Asia, the hard part lies ahead

But no ceasefire could reach such ambitious goals alone. What it does achieve is halting a war that has already gone on for far too long. The remaining 20 Israeli hostages still thought to be alive will be released from a living hell.

More will come home in body bags, giving closure to their families. The killing of Palestinian civilians in a fight that long since lost the proportionality required for its continued justification can now stop. Adequate food and medical aid can begin to flow. None of this suffering was deserved or acceptable.

This breakthrough is, to use a Trumpian term, “huge” on its own merits. He deserves the credit that he’ll certainly demand for making it happen. But it is not yet peace and certainly not “unprecedented,” as Trump claimed in a Truth Social post. We’ve reached the ceasefire and hostage-for-prisoner exchange stage of such agreements twice before; both collapsed before the more lasting elements could kick in.

Still, without Trump applying intense pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister would not have agreed to any stage of a plan that in essence reverses the US administration’s previous acquiescence in Gaza’s occupation and de facto ethnic cleansing. Nor would Netanyahu have apologized to Qatar for bombing it, without which Doha and Ankara wouldn’t have helped make the deal possible by applying similar levels of persuasion on Hamas.

All of this was essential to achieving a ceasefire, but a steep road lies ahead. The fact that statements announcing the deal said nothing about the disarmament of Hamas or full withdrawal of the IDF does not inspire confidence. It makes clear that neither Hamas (a terrorist group devoted to the cause of destroying Israel), nor Netanyahu’s cabinet (dominated by extremists devoted to Israel’s expansion), want to end this war. They’re being forced into it.

Even so, there is reason for cautious optimism. Because, while a genuine peace may take much longer and Netanyahu may be tempted to restart hostilities as soon as all hostages are released, the cost of doing so would be high. What follows is likely to be messy and still marked by violence, but still immeasurably preferable to the wholesale bloodshed that has killed tens of thousands of civilians.

One key reason to think this could prove less of a blip in the fighting than previous ones is that Trump seems to have recognized his earlier policy of giving free rein to Netanyahu now threatens his own and US interests in the Arab Middle East.

Perceptions there have shifted dramatically since he brokered the Abraham Accords in his first term, in an attempt to unite regional allies with Israel against the challenge they all faced from Iran. Today, the Gulf states see Israel as the greater threat to regional stability, and US endorsement of Netanyahu’s actions was eroding confidence in Washington’s reliability as a guarantor of Gulf security. Qatar’s bombing proved a tipping point.

A second cause for at least a measure of hope is that both Hamas and Netanyahu rule over populations that are sick of them.

Israel’s long-serving leader has resisted any inquiry into the political and intelligence failures that allowed Hamas’s 7 October 2023 slaughter of innocent Israelis on his watch. With the fighting over, this will become increasingly difficult. Hamas also has yet to answer why it invited this inevitable punishment on its people. All of which is to say that while neither has a political interest in allowing a true and lasting peace, a ceasefire that lasts long enough can weaken their position to do more harm.

In fact, every day without shooting could make it harder to restart the war, especially if the US, Arab states and other international players act to use the ceasefire well. The more international aid workers, journalists and other independent parties are flooded into the zone, the greater the political costs of breaking the ceasefire. Exposure of what took place over the last 24 months will be ugly for both sets of leaders.

Hamas never represented the interests of ordinary Gazans. It ran a repressive Islamist domestic regime, diverted economic aid that could have improved lives to instead prepare for war, and opposed Palestinian statehood so long as Israel continued to exist.

Netanyahu’s record is more mixed, as he has had genuine military success against Israel’s enemies, including Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. But were he to depart today, he would leave his country polarized, dependent on permanent conflict for its security, diplomatically isolated and in the dock on charges of genocide.

There is a long road back to co-existence between Israel and its Palestinian neighbours, let alone peace.

But a ceasefire will save lives and could over time weaken the conflict’s extremist accelerants on both sides. That’s more than enough to celebrate. ©Bloomberg

The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East.