The New Yorker:

Ceasefires usually don’t end wars, but truces can reveal much about the combatants.

By Steve Coll

Even a temporary ceasefire displays the moral power of peacemaking. Last week, as a shaky truce to allow prisoner and hostage swaps and aid deliveries quieted the ruinous war between Israel and Hamas, Israeli families welcomed back more than a hundred children and older adults whom Hamas and its allies had kidnapped on October 7th. They included Yaffa Adar, age eighty-five, who had been seized at the Nir Oz kibbutz; photographs of her being driven away by gunmen in a golf cart went viral. Reunited with relatives at a Tel Aviv hospital, she told them, “I’m O.K. I’m here. . . . I survived it.” In the West Bank, jubilant crowds waved the flags of Fatah and Hamas as Palestinian parents hugged their teen-age children released from Israeli jails.

On both sides, the celebrations were tempered by an awareness of those still in captivity. Hamas freed children and their mothers but not their fathers, and elderly women but not their husbands. The two hundred and forty prisoners whom Israel released were, according to the Jerusalem-based human-rights group B’ Tselem, a fraction of the nearly five thousand Palestinians held on security grounds as of September—a figure that rose sharply after October 7th. In Gaza, where Israeli bombing has killed more than fifteen thousand Palestinians—two-thirds of them, reportedly, women and children—the respite last week offered meagre solace after seven weeks of immeasurable suffering. Thousands of Gazans used the break to inspect homes they had evacuated; many found only rubble. “We are trying to collect bits of wood to build a tent to shelter us, but to no avail,” Tahani al-Najjar, a fifty-eight-year-old mother of five, told Reuters.

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