Daniel Byman
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to stop the war in Gaza, ending over a year of fighting that has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, devastated the region, and spread to Lebanon, Yemen, and other countries nearby. Even if Trump is serious about keeping his promise, the chances of ending Israel's war with Hamas in Gaza are low and fighting is likely to continue.
Israel believes it is riding high, and even if Hamas offered a hostages-for-withdrawal deal—the core of cease-fire proposals in the past year—on favorable terms to Israel, it is unlikely that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would agree. Israel has decimated Hamas’s leadership and disrupted much of its military capacity. Although it has not destroyed Hamas completely, as Netanyahu has vowed, the group is on its heels, and Netanyahu contends that a cease-fire would allow the group to recover. Israel appears to have settled for a grinding conflict in Gaza with the goal of keeping Hamas weak, even if it prevents any larger political deal in the strip that would end the suffering there.
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