Cartoon by David Rowe

A ceasefire deal is here. For Gaza, the Middle East and the world, the future remains unknown

By Patrick Wintour, diplomatic editor

The Guardian: The ending of the 15-month conflict in Gaza may prove an exception. The sacrifice has been so great, the misery so complete, and the ultimate future for Gaza so uncertain that few can claim with certainty that this was all worthwhile, or likely to benefit Israel’s security in the long term. The damage to Israel’s reputation may last decades.

In their final interviews and speeches as they prepared to leave office, it was noticeable the key foreign policy figures in the Biden administration often looked beyond Gaza, as western diplomats have turned to what could be the momentous consequences of the war for the wider Middle East.

Even Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s outgoing national security adviser, was left uncertain. “What is the outcome of all of this? I think it is too early to predict. Even when good things happen, there are bad things around the corner. That’s true across foreign policy. It’s especially true in the Middle East,” he said.

Similarly, Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, argued that often in the Middle East, change is not what it appears. He saw at best “a historic window of opportunity”. In every country sucked into the Israel-Gaza war – Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Iraq – and in Israel itself, the balance of forces has been changed by the war, but not irreversibly transformed.

That is true of Gaza itself, where even if a full ceasefire holds, the future remains deliberately clouded. Blinken implicitly criticised this in his Atlantic Council speech this week, when he said he recognised the need for Israel’s war, but could not support what may be its plan for peace.

As long ago as May 2024, the Biden administration judged that Israel had secured its main objective in Gaza of “ensuring Hamas is incapable of committing another October 7 atrocity”, he said – challenging the need for the subsequent eight months of further conflict.

He underlined the futility of continuing the war by admitting “Hamas had been able to recruit almost as many new militants than it had lost, a recipe for an enduring insurgency and perpetual war”.

Security for Israel, he argued, had to include a credible political horizon for the Palestinians, or else Hamas “or something equally abhorrent” will “grow back”. He said the country “must abandon the myth they can carry out de facto annexation, without cost and consequence to Israel’s democracy, to its standing, to its security”. Yet, he complained, “Israel’s government has systematically undermined the capacity and legitimacy of the only viable alternative to Hamas: the Palestinian Authority”.

If Israel wanted the prize of greater security, he said, that lay through forging greater integration across the region, specifically through normalisation with Saudi Arabia. He said that was ready to go, but only if Palestinians were allowed to live in a state of their own, and not as “a non-people”.

Trump’s return to the White House may have helped pressure Benjamin Netanyahu into a ceasefire, but not to a particular peace. The incoming US president is unlikely to pick up Blinken’s plan for a reformed and UN-monitored Palestinian Authority (PA) to oversee governance of a unified Gaza and West Bank. Israel for its part will risk a bigger vacuum by acting on its commitment not to co-operate with Unrwa, the UN agency for the Palestinians, and other NGOs.

Nor is there any certainty that Palestine will have the quality of leadership required to take sole administrative charge of Gaza. The PA, led by the ageing Mahmoud Abbas, is increasingly reviled on the West Bank and has failed to bury its differences with Hamas in talks in Moscow, Beijing and Cairo.

It is only if the perspective is broadened away from Gaza that Netanyahu and the Israeli military can claim, by deciding to broaden the war with intensified attacks on Hezbollah and Iranian targets, that they changed its course and character. The chain of events that led to the annihilation of the Hezbollah leadership in Lebanon – and then to the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and so to Iran’s loss of its crown jewel – may be sketchy, but it is clearly discernible.

Indeed, the weakening of Iran is probably the biggest regional impact of the war in Gaza. Biden had a point this week in claiming that, all told, Iran “is weaker than it has been for decades”. He elaborated: “Iran’s air defences are in shambles. Their main proxy, Hezbollah, is badly wounded, and as we tested Iran’s willingness to revive the nuclear deal, we kept the pressure with sanctions. Now Iran’s economy is in desperate straits.” A 35-year tack to build a defence strategy around a proxy army had been eviscerated in a matter of months >>>