The Hezbollah and Hamas ceasefires have collectively brought some relative quiet and normalcy for the last month from Gaza and the last nearly three months from Lebanon.
But neither of these ceasefires has crossed beyond the critical tipping point into the all-important 2.0 stage of the ceasefires so as to know whether or not they will hold and whether Israel will end up being safer years down the road than it was on October 7, 2023, or whether after all of the fighting, we will eventually end back in a similar position.
So far, Israel has received 19 out of 33 of the hostages due to be received back from Hamas in Phase I of the Gaza ceasefire.
However, the much bigger question has always been whether and how the ceasefire might ever be extended to Phase II.
Likewise, with Lebanon, Hezbollah has not fired into Israeli territory and, to date, has not succeeded in returning any sizable force into southern Lebanon.
But the much bigger question there has always been whether Israel could prevent Hezbollah from returning to southern Lebanon and rearming itself (like it did after the 2006 Second Lebanon War) once the IDF withdraws from southern Lebanon.
Most Israelis view the hostages as not only being important to return ethically, but as having strategic value in upholding the social contract that the military protects and never deserts its citizens.
Long term question with Hamas
Yet, the longer-term and more critical question with Hamas has never been whether all of the hostages would be returned.
We know not all of them will be returned alive. 40-50% of them were already murdered by Hamas, or in some tragic cases, accidentally killed by the IDF.
Also, we know that if Israel was willing to withdraw completely from Gaza and totally end the war, leaving Hamas in charge of Gaza, the Jewish state would get back the vast majority of the remaining 70 plus hostages, even if not necessarily all.
However, strategically speaking, a huge consideration has been whether Israel can get someone else to manage Gaza who will replace Hamas.
There are different views within Israel about how best to do this.
Many Israelis are hoping that Trump’s suggestion of getting all of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians to leave voluntarily will spur the Saudis into normalization with Israel along with working with Egypt and the UAE to manage and rebuild Gaza while ousting Hamas.
Some Israelis believe none of this will move forward unless the Palestinian Authority, officially or unofficially, has a role in managing Gaza – the way it already is handling aspects of the Rafah Crossing.
Hamas has signaled some readiness to cede at least formal control of aspects of managing Gaza, presumably as long as it gets to keep much of its hidden weaponry and behind-the-scenes political influence.
But what happens if the Israeli and Hamas views of post-war Gaza simply do not converge sufficiently?
In that case, the IDF, at minimum, will retain control of the Philadelphi Corridor and the 700-1,100 meter Gaza security perimeter.
At maximum, the IDF may invade Gaza again, potentially the entire territory at once, moving all Palestinians to the al-Muasi coastal area and restricting humanitarian aid to only arriving in that one area where it wants Palestinian civilians to move to.
The IDF would then bomb, shell, and fire on just about any Palestinians it finds in Gaza City, Khan Yunis, and Rafah, presuming they are terrorists.
This would doubtlessly lead to catching some more terrorists and to seizing some of their newly received weapons from the ceasefire period.
But what if most Hamas fighters hid their weapons again and once again fled with the civilian populace to the humanitarian area?
When some observers talk about opening the gates of hell on Gaza to finally physically oust Hamas, they forget that Gaza and Hamas have already taken a profound beating.
If Israel was ready to keep soldiers in Gaza for years to come to prevent Hamas from returning, it might very well be able to physically oust the terror group.
But Hamas knows that Israel is no longer ready for several months of war, given the exhaustion which has kicked in with the reservist units, and that it can wait for the IDF out in hiding.
At some point, whether before or after renewing the invasion of Gaza, Israel will need to negotiate with Hamas and with other third-party Palestinians and countries in the region to try to get someone else to run the Strip besides or at least with Hamas.
The coming days or next two weeks will reveal whether Israel can persuade Hamas to yield on these post-Gaza war issues, or if there will be various ongoing levels of conflict between Israel and Gaza, potentially undermining much of the stability achieved in the past month.
Hezbollah is an even more complex problem.
There is not and never was a foolproof plan to end the threat of Hezbollah to Israel.
Purposes of Israel’s invasion into Lebanon
The main two purposes of Israel’s invasion into Lebanon were to seize and destroy much of the Hezbollah weaponry on the border to make it much harder for the Lebanese terror group to mount an invasion of northern Israel as well as to pressure the group into a ceasefire in which it would agree to abandon southern Lebanon.
But Israel has already partially thrown in the towel on a Hezbollah return.
True, the IDF has been more aggressive than ever before in attacking Hezbollah efforts to rearm or move some of its hidden weapons away from IDF patrols, including the killing of Hezbollah’s latest drone chief.
Yet, the IDF has all but confirmed it will withdraw nearly all of its forces from southern Lebanon by this coming Tuesday.
The interesting IDF demand to maintain five lookout positions in Lebanese territory which the military says will help cut off a surprise land invasion from Lebanon into Israel, if the IDF succeeds at holding on to it, will be an unexpected win in terms of additional border security.
However, even these five positions are very limited to help prevent an invasion and will do very little to prevent Hezbollah from returning gradually to southern Lebanon under the guise of being local civilian villagers.
Also, Hezbollah has started to pressure the Lebanese government and its airport operators to allow Iranian flights to land even if Israel threatens to fire on them to prevent weapons smuggling.
The group is also trying new ways to smuggle Iranian weapons into Lebanon by land even as Syria is no longer as friendly a pass-through territory as it was under the Assad regime.
So, will the two ceasefires hold? And will the threats that Hamas and Hezbollah pose to Israel remain reduced as compared to October 7?
The contest over those fateful questions is just beginning as all of the parties try to position themselves to win points on the longer-term security trends emerging from the early ceasefire stages.