A time to recover: Israel's longest war ends in relief and more questions

For Israel, that time for war – the longest in its history – is finally giving way to what everyone hopes will be a time for peace.

If not a time for peace, at least a time for the absence of war.

The country’s mood reflects the moment: gratitude and exhaustion, relief and anxiety, celebration and unease. The images of freed hostages will stir national elation, but the knowledge that some of their captors may soon walk free reawakens old traumas. Hope, this time, comes mixed with a heavy dose of apprehension.

THE DEAL’S immediate contours are clear: the release of the remaining 48 hostages – both dead and alive – in exchange for 250 Palestinian terrorists sentenced to life terms, a ceasefire, and an IDF withdrawal to the “Yellow Line” – an area that includes roughly 47% of Gaza’s territory.

On paper, it marks the end of a war. In practice, it raises a long list of unanswered questions – foremost among them, how the new governing apparatus in Gaza will function and when it will begin operating. Who will ensure Hamas’s disarmament? Who will oversee the demilitarization of Gaza? Who will be in charge of security? Who will pay salaries? These details will determine whether the ceasefire endures or merely pauses the fighting.

Regardless, it is important to remember what brought this moment about. Without the soldiers’ sacrifice, there would have been no agreement whatsoever. Without their courage in the alleys of Khan Yunis, the tunnels of Rafah, and the skies over Tehran, Hamas would still be holding out – its leaders still boasting from their bunkers.

The soldiers’ bravery delivered what diplomacy alone could not: leverage. And it defied the widespread belief – voiced early and often – that Israel could not sustain a long war. It did. Through isolation, through economic strain, through domestic discord, Israel endured.

That endurance came at a staggering price: 913 soldiers killed, thousands wounded, hundreds of thousands of reservists serving multiple rotations, and countless families absorbing the burden of a nation at war.

Yet out of that hardship came strategic gain: the hostages are coming home; Hamas is a shell of what it was – its fighters depleted, its command decimated, its tunnels and arsenals largely destroyed; Iran’s “axis of resistance” has been largely dismantled.

The military campaign that many outside Israel condemned as “disproportionate” proved, in the end, indispensable. Without it, there would have been no negotiation table at all.

And, as always, timing was critical. This deal did not materialize in a vacuum. It came together through a confluence of exhaustion, pressure, and shifting calculations across the region.

Trump, who saw the conflict as a test of his own diplomatic prowess, leaned heavily on Israel – as well as on Qatar and Turkey – to deliver results. His role was decisive.

The US president gave Israel the green light to continue fighting in Gaza when much of the world demanded a ceasefire, and he also sent American planes to help Israel set back Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile program, thereby dramatically reducing the Islamic Republic’s influence in the region.

So when Trump told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to give up on ideas of reoccupying Gaza, annexing Judea and Samaria, and instead agree to some eventual Palestinian Authority role in Gaza – even hinting at a distant possibility of a Palestinian state – the prime minister could not say no.

Trump also delivered the diplomatic muscle to finally get Qatar and Turkey to use their considerable leverage over Hamas. In the end, they used their leverage not because they suddenly turned against Hamas, but because, in terms of their relations with Washington, it served their interests to do so.

Qatar understood – after Israel’s strike last month on Hamas’s leadership in Doha – the danger of its long association with the group, and that its duplicity could bring the war directly to its glittering capital.

That attack impressed upon Qatar that there were limits to the game it had been playing and that there was a price for its support of Hamas. Its message to the terrorist organization was simple: this war has to end, and quickly.

Turkey, facing economic turmoil and eager to mend ties with Washington, held other levers. Much of Hamas’s external financing is routed through Turkish businesses, charities, and cryptocurrency exchanges. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan knew he could squeeze – and apparently did – when the Americans asked.

Delivering Hamas served multiple Turkish goals: trying to get readmitted to the F-35 fighter jet program and ending a legal case against a Turkish state-owned bank implicated in violations of US sanctions on Iran. Furthermore, it gave Erdogan a chance to reposition himself as a regional power broker.

The alignment of these pressures – American diplomacy, Qatari exposure, Turkish calculation, and Hamas’s battlefield collapse – put the agreement within reach.

Deprived of money, allies, and morale, Hamas was left cornered. Its Iranian patron, meanwhile, was unable to offer meaningful support, preoccupied with its own troubles. Militarily shattered, diplomatically isolated, and financially strangled, Hamas faced an unpalatable truth: it could no longer continue.

How this new postwar framework will actually work remains unclear. The details are still murky, and even in Jerusalem, few pretend to know exactly how the “international mechanism” for Gaza will function in practice.

Trump’s plan calls ambitiously for Hamas’s disarmament and Gaza’s demilitarization and deradicalization. Still, hopes and outcomes are not the same.

Whether Gaza will indeed resemble that model – or slip back into chaos and rearmament – will depend on many factors: the resolve of international partners, the behavior of Hamas remnants, the willingness of Arab states to assume real responsibility, and – perhaps most importantly – how Israel responds if it sees Hamas trying to rebuild capabilities.

BUT WHILE diplomats and generals debate what comes next for Gaza, Israelis are already reckoning with what the war has left behind: an emotional landscape as complicated as its political one.

The return of the hostages will unleash waves of joy and gratitude – spontaneous celebrations, tearful reunions, and a collective exhale after two unbearable years. But those scenes will also be shadowed by grief. Not all hostages are coming home alive, and their release was made possible by the deaths of hundreds of soldiers.

Furthermore, the deal includes the release of hundreds of convicted terrorists – something excruciatingly painful for the families of their victims. Many of those being freed were behind the worst attacks of the Second Intifada — Sbarro, Café Moment, the Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv.

Israelis remember those attacks. The thought of their perpetrators being freed is sickening. Furthermore, there is deep concern that releasing these terrorists will, as it has so often in the past, only lead to more terrorism.

That knowledge tempers the national mood. There is tremendous joy that the hostages are returning home and relief that the burden of waging the war will be lifted. But there is little euphoria, no illusion of peace just over the horizon.

The feeling is closer to weary relief – the understanding that the war’s end, while welcome, does not resolve the deeper conflict that gave rise to it, despite Trump’s claims of Middle East peace for the first time in 3,000 years.

STILL, AMID the ambivalence, there is also perspective. The hostages’ homecoming will bring a measure of closure – a sense that, however long it took, Israel kept faith with one of its core values: bringing its people home. That will matter in terms of national healing in ways statistics cannot capture.

Israel’s war with Hamas began with unspeakable horror and now ends in uneasy quiet – with the terrorist organization on its last legs, unable, after the devastating beating it took, to carry out anything similar for generations. Not because it doesn’t want to, but because it no longer has the capability to do so.

Between the horror of October 7 and the uneasy quiet to be ushered in by this agreement lies the story of a nation tested to its limits and still standing – scarred, weary, but unbroken.

For Israel, this is not yet a time for peace. That will take years, perhaps generations. But it may, at last, be a time to rebuild – to tend to the wounded, to restore what was broken, to reclaim a measure of normal life, and to breathe again.

If Ecclesiastes teaches that every season has its purpose, then the season now being ushered in by the signing of this agreement at Sharm el-Sheikh has one as well: a time to recover. For a people that has known too many seasons of war, that – right now – is exceedingly welcome.