If the current Israel-Hamas deal holds and the war is in fact over, a major key to ending the war was new concessions by both sides and the sequencing of the strategic military issues in dispute.
The final sequence to end the war was completely different from both Israeli and Hamas positions at other key points, such as in the summer of 2024 and early 2025, when the war might have ended.
Qatar, Turkey, and US President Donald Trump brought new levels of pressure to bear on both sides. A scorecard of concessions and “ties” between the sides shows that both sides are making concessions now that they did not make in prior rounds, though ultimately Israel has more of the upper hand in terms of leverage.
1. Israel conceded on holding its fire:
While little discussed, Israel stopped shooting and bombing on Saturday, having received nothing in return. In fact, this situation of Israel holding its fire for nothing concrete, and only a promise of a deal, lasted for five days until early Thursday morning.
Going even further, if the first hostages come home on Monday, Israel will have given Hamas nine days without being attacked before receiving the first hostage back. In all past hostage negotiations, Israel’s position was that it would not hold its fire until Hamas signed a deal to return hostages on a specific timetable, with the timetable usually starting almost immediately after fighting was halted.
Over and over again, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would never hold fire until Hamas made concrete concessions – that is, until he changed his mind this past Saturday under orders from Trump.
2. Hamas conceded on giving up all of the hostages and all at once:
Despite Israel’s lead concession, Hamas’s concession here is larger and more substantive. In the other rounds of negotiations, Hamas leaders either wanted to hold on to some hostages as an insurance policy to avoid being killed or to force a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
That was until Qatar, Turkey, and Egypt all ordered Hamas – also under threat from an endless onslaught by Israel, backed by Trump – to release all of the hostages and all at once for a mere partial Gaza withdrawal and general promises from Trump to guarantee that Israel would not restart the war.
Giving up all of the living hostages gives away Hamas’s top “ace in the hole” card, which has given it numerous advantages against Israel, which Iran, Hezbollah, and Syria all lacked.
3. Israel killed most of Hamas’s leaders over time and is not insisting on expelling the surviving leaders:
This issue is somewhat of a draw. A significant question throughout much of the war was what would happen to the masterminds behind the October 7 invasion. How could Israel let them remain ruling Gaza or even living in Gaza in hiding? The originally realistic answer was expulsion, but Gaza chiefs Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, along with replacement chief Mohammed Sinwar and other top deputies, refused to be expelled.
So the next answer eventually became that they were all killed. Deif in July 2024, Yahya Sinwar in October 2024, Mohammed Sinwar in May of this year, and many other top Hamas officials, like Marwan Issa, Ismail Haniyeh, four out of five Hamas brigade commanders, and almost all 24 battalion commanders were also killed over time.
The main survivors in Gaza are Gaza City Brigade commander Izz al-Din Haddad, who is now Hamas’s military chief, and senior Hamas official Raed Saad. Despite promises to expel all of Hamas’s leaders, it appears that the small number of senior Hamas commanders who have survived the war until now will be allowed to remain in Gaza, though it is still possible Israel may seek some symbolic expulsion of some officials.
Although this issue could be called a draw if no Hamas leaders get expelled, it could also be called in Israel’s favor, given that most of those whom it wanted to expel were eventually killed.
4. Israel conceded on ending the war without having fully disarmed Hamas:
This is Israel’s largest concession long-term. Netanyahu, early on in the war, said he would not end the war until Hamas was “annihilated,” and much later altered his goal to “completely disarmed.” No one believes that Hamas will be fully disarmed with the war ending at this point.
Hamas’s military numbers range from 2,000-2,500 hardcore fighters to 20,000 or so less well-trained potential fighters, to a support base within Gaza of around 700,000 Palestinians who associate themselves with the movement by tribe or ideology. That is the bad news.
The good news is that all 24 of Hamas’s battalions had already been militarily defeated by August 2024. There is no Hamas army now, and it has not existed for over a year. What remains are loosely aligned small guerrilla warfare cells.
The top achievements of these groups have been to penetrate two Israeli forward positions in Gaza in the last two months, leading to Israeli casualties, but only in those penetrated positions, and not beyond them, let alone anywhere near Israeli civilian areas.
They have also managed to keep up low-grade rocket fire at Gaza border villages, firing one to two rockets at a time, which have not been causing casualties. So what is left of Hamas cannot, for the near future, and probably not even the medium term, threaten another major invasion of Israel or large-scale rocket attacks. But there are still many dangerous people in Gaza, and they could grow and reconstitute themselves if not properly neutralized.
5. Hamas conceded on a partial Israeli withdrawal:
This is Hamas’s largest concession long-term. We have already noted that Hamas conceded giving back the hostages prior to a full Israeli withdrawal. But going beyond that, it seems that Hamas has conceded that Israel will get to remain in some kind of a security perimeter even after the war is fully over.
Giving up the hostages early helps Israel have leverage in this area, but also, whereas Trump is guaranteeing that Jerusalem will not go back to war once the hostages are returned, he is not guaranteeing at any point a full withdrawal. What will be the “final” Israeli withdrawal lines when the war is over and before the extremely amorphous post-war mechanisms start to run Gaza? That is far from clear.
Of the different withdrawal lines, some have Israel remaining in parts of Gaza at an average depth of three to three-and-a-half kilometers. This would mean Israeli control of around half of Gazan territory, even if it would not control areas where many Palestinians were residing.
The much more modest perimeter, but which most defense officials say could still be adequate, would be the 700-1,100 meter withdrawal line, which Israel obtained from Hamas in the January ceasefire. There are some secondary questions here, such as what will happen with the infamous Philadelphi Corridor on the border with Egypt, but the most important question is whether Israel keeps a long-term security perimeter even in the post-war era, and what kind of perimeter that would be.
This will protect Israelis from a future potential Hamas invasion, even in the medium term, and give the IDF an advantage over any attempt by Hamas to retake over Gaza from its new hybrid multinational managers.
6. Post-war IDF raids and targeted drone strikes on Hamas?
No one knows whether the IDF will be allowed to stage small-scale anti-terror raids in Gaza or carry out targeted, narrow drone strikes as it does against Hezbollah in Lebanon and against terrorists in the West Bank. If Trump and other involved powers allow this, what will be the standard: how far along will the IDF need to “let” a Hamas terror cell or rocket-firing cell get before they can strike them?
What kinds of slowly developing dangers will the IDF need to refer to the US or other international peacekeepers, maybe the new International Security Force (ISF), to deal with? How will the ISF perform when it has to fight directly with Hamas? There are advantages to Fatah-affiliated Palestinians being involved in this initiative, but Fatah was also routed by Hamas from Gaza in 2007.
Will there be a side deal allowing the IDF to intervene to save the ISF from Hamas, whereas in 2007, the US told Jerusalem not to intervene? Ultimately, this issue is a bit of a draw between Hamas and Israel, though Jerusalem has a bit of an edge because, so far, it has not promised not to conduct targeted raids post-war.
There is also a wide range of uncertain diplomatic issues: who will run Gaza politically, regardless of what the ceasefire deal says on paper about the expected Gaza International Transitional Authority (GITA)? How much will GITA, the US, the West, moderate Arab allies, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel really be able to talk the 700,000 Gazans associated with Hamas out of supporting the group politically?
How long will it take to make political progress against Hamas, and how will the fact that Gaza is utterly destroyed impact any efforts to achieve positive new outcomes as Gazans lose patience with what will be a long, grueling rebuilding process? Will Israel get any normalization achievements with the Saudis in exchange for ending the war, as was offered in 2024, or has that ship sailed?
The last question is: could a similar deal have been reached much earlier? Historians will analyze this question for years, if not decades to come. There is speculation that in summer 2024 or early 2025, Hamas might have agreed to the same deal that it is agreeing to now.
Critics of Netanyahu will say he kept the war alive simply to keep his government from being toppled. The prime minister would reply that in neither of those stages could Israel have kept a security perimeter and that in both cases, Hamas might have held onto some hostages even after the deal was concluded and the war declared over. We will probably never know for sure because the decision-makers for Hamas during those periods are all dead.