Perry World House Q&A: The Middle East Ceasefire Agreement Between Israel and Hamas
At 12:00 p.m. local time—or 5:00 a.m. ET—a U.S.-drafted ceasefire agreement went into effect between Israel and Hamas. The agreement is intended to stop the ongoing bloodshed in Gaza and give Israel and Hamas the space to try to arrive at a peace agreement that would permanently end the more than two-years-long war. It would also see the Israeli military begin to withdraw from Gaza and release all Palestinian prisoners, while Hamas would release their remaining Israeli hostages. This agreement will also allow aid to begin filtering back into a war-ravaged Gaza.
Perry World House asked Penn experts to provide their thoughts of the ceasefire plan, if they thought the plan was likely to last, and what the next steps are to achieving peace between Israel and Hamas.
Guy Grossman is the David M. Knott Professor of Global Politics and International Relations and the Co-Director of the Penn Development Research Initiative (PDRI-DevLab) at the University of Pennsylvania.
The announcement that Hamas and the Israeli government have accepted Trump’s ceasefire proposal marks a cautious step toward de-escalation. For Israel, it promises the return of the remaining hostages, a gradual drawdown of reserve forces, and perhaps a political reset ahead of elections scheduled for November 2026. For Palestinians, it pauses a devastating two-year conflict that has killed more than 67,000 people, injured 169,000, and destroyed most of Gaza’s built environment. Since the announcement, displaced Gazans have begun returning home and anticipating the release of prisoners under the deal’s first phase.
Whether this truce endures will depend on details still to be defined. The agreement’s initial provisions—hostage and prisoner exchanges and expanded humanitarian access—are relatively clear, and I expect to be implemented next week. But later phases are ambiguous. The timelines for Israeli withdrawals from Gaza, the mechanisms for verifying Hamas’s demilitarization, the mandate of the technocratic transition governing committee, and the conditions under which the Palestinian Authority would assume administrative control all remain (deliberately) unspecified.
These gaps underscore the political challenges ahead. Implementation will require sustained U.S. engagement and international coordination to ensure compliance and deter defection, and unilateral action. Within Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu faces competing pressures from far-right coalition partners resistant to concessions and a public exhausted by prolonged conflict. In Gaza, Hamas’s willingness to relinquish authority and weapons remains uncertain.
The ceasefire’s durability will ultimately hinge on whether both sides view continued restraint as serving their political interests—and whether external actors can help transform a temporary pause into a framework for governance and reconstruction. Without clear sequencing, credible verification, and sustained diplomacy, the agreement risks becoming yet another fragile pause in an unresolved cycle of confrontation.
One factor that could improve the ceasefire’s prospects is Trump’s unusually personal investment in the agreement. Having tied his political credibility to its success, he has strong incentives to remain directly involved and to pressure both sides to adhere to its terms. Domestically, Netanyahu’s coalition may not survive the political strain of implementation, making early elections increasingly likely. Early elections could constrain Netanyahu’s ability to remobilize the IDF and, paradoxically, give the ceasefire the political breathing space it needs to solidify.
Marie Harf is the Executive Director of Perry World House, the University of Pennsylvania’s home for global policy engagement. She previously served as a senior advisor for strategic communications for U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and deputy spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State, as well as a Middle East analyst and spokesperson at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
In a conflict as long-standing and complex as the one between Israelis and Palestinians, first step agreements such as this ceasefire deal are important. If the Israeli hostages come home, and if significant aid gets into Gaza and the guns fall silent there (even if only temporarily), these will be developments to celebrate.
We do, though, have to be humble in recognition of the well-trodden history in this conflict of agreements falling apart when one side refuses to continue implementing it after initial positive steps. It’s clear President Trump was uniquely able to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu—and Turkey and Qatar—to get to this point. But it is much less clear whether the Israeli political far right, enormously empowered in the Netanyahu government and vehemently opposed to not only Palestinian statehood but seemingly the existence of Palestinians at all, will play spoiler. And, of course, it is difficult to imagine Hamas completely disarming, not to mention the lack of specifics or real plan about how to bring an ultimate resolution to this conflict that allows for two peoples living side by side in peace and security.
As we reflect on over two years of war, a few things stand out: 1) the devastating human toll that exceeded any military necessity to defeat Hamas, 2) the resulting cratering of world-wide empathy for Israel in the aftermath of the October 7th terrorist attacks and its loss of moral authority, and 3) the decimation of the Iranian regime’s instruments of regional power (Hamas, Hezbollah, the Assad regime) by Israel, whose military and intelligence attacks succeeded far beyond what anyone would have predicted on October 8, 2023. So while the Israelis have fewer enemies in the region today because of their actions, they also have fewer friends around the world.
Dahlia Scheindlin is the inaugural Penn Global Middle East Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and an American-Israeli political consultant, pollster, and journalist.
Based on precedents of phased deals of the past, such as the Oslo process, and based on the fate of ceasefires in this war, there is every reason for this latest ceasefire to break down. Only the first phase has been agreed so far; and what happens next is completely unknown. However, there are certain specific conditions that could converge to place the current ceasefire on a different path.
U.S. President Trump appears at least as committed to Gulf Arab allies as to Benjamin Netanyahu—and perhaps more committed to the Israeli people than Netanyahu himself, since the latter regularly and consistently express their readiness to end the war in surveys. Next, Israeli elections are scheduled for late 2026—meaning that Netanyahu will have an interest in campaigning on his record of getting hostages released and ending the war.
Nevertheless, future cycles of violence cannot be avoided unless there is progress towards comprehensive conflict resolution based on an end of occupation and Palestinian self-determination via a two-state solution.
Ilana Shpaizman is a Visiting Scholar in the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Bar Ilan University.
When examining the ceasefire plan, it is worth looking at it from an Israeli domestic perspective. For many months now, public opinion surveys have repeatedly shown that the Israeli public supports the end of the war. This was true even for the supporters of the current coalition government.
Despite that, Netanyahu did not push to the end of the war. On the contrary, he has tried to expand it by occupying Gaza City or striking Qatar. Netanyahu knew that once the war in Gaza was over, the pressure for early elections and the establishment of an inquiry committee for October 7th would increase. Correspondingly, he has tried to prolong the war. President Trump’s plan is not that different from the one introduced by President Biden more than a year ago. Therefore, Netanyahu’s agreement to the ceasefire has probably little to do with the content of the plan and more with the context. Netanyahu agreed to the plan because President Trump had pressured him to agree, and therefore, he felt (probably rightly so) that he had no choice.
Therefore, to make the ceasefire last, Trump’s administration has to keep pressuring Netanyahu to move from phase one of the deal (the release of the hostages) to the next stages. Looking forward, given the reluctance of Netanyahu to end the war and the objection of his right-wing coalition partners, the only way to achieve a peaceful resolution that will be publicly supported is for Israel to have elections, which, as projected by all the surveys made since the beginning of the war, will bring a new government to power.