Then-U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shaking hands in Jerusalem, in 2017.Credit: Sebastian Scheiner/AP

If the 20^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – ratified on January 23, 1933 – had determined that presidential inaugurations would be on January 10 and not January 20, the five Israeli soldiers who were killed in Gaza on Monday likely would have been alive, their families not destroyed, a hostage deal might have already begun and scores of Gazan lives would have been spared.

It’s that simple, that appalling, that tragic and that cruel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may whine all he likes about how U.S. President-elect Donald Trump made him do it. He is already selling the “I had no choice, we managed to postpone this for months” message to his ultranationalist, messianic, warmongering ruling coalition partners. But the truth is very clear: he has agreed to a deal he could and should have signed many months ago. But ailing hostages rotting in oxygen-deprived tunnels for 15 months and over 120 Israeli soldiers killed since he declined a previous deal are the least of his concerns. This is who and what he is.

Does anyone actually believe that Trump’s new Mideast envoy, Steve Witkoff, a savvy real estate developer and investor from New York, “made Netanyahu do it”? Well, yes, if you know Netanyahu. He wanted to be pressured just ahead of Trump’s inauguration next Monday.

A tourist entering a makeshift tunnel symbolizing the Hamas tunnels, in Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square on Tuesday.Credit: Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters

The deal that may – and still may not – be agreed and signed on Tuesday or Wednesday was on the table last May, again in July and practically ever since. But Mr. Netanyahu, in the name of “an existential war” that will produce a “total victory,” waited for the U.S. election and then for the presidential inauguration before agreeing to a deal.

Explaining why he opposes the deal, far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir specifically recalled how he previously prevented a deal by threatening Netanyahu, validating the claim that the prime minister’s entire calculus was politically motivated. He never intended to end the war even when since-dismissed Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and the Israel Defense Forces stressed that all military goals had been achieved. The “strategic importance” of the Philadelphi corridor along the Gaza-Sinai border, meanwhile, was a bogus and cynical argument he had concocted.

There are two chronological fault lines. The first was October 2023-July 2024, when Netanyahu believed that the more the war was extended, the more Gaza was decimated, then the more removed he would become from the October 7 debacle – the worst day in Israel’s history.

The second was from July 2024, when Biden withdrew his candidacy for the presidency, to the November election, and from there to Trump’s inauguration next Monday.

Men sitting in front of tents sheltering displaced Palestinians, in Khan Yunis last month.Credit: Bashar Taleb/AFP

A war that has no political objectives, in which military goals are not derived from and are not aligned with clear political objectives, is a war that will inevitably end without political achievements. Military achievements, however significant, cannot in this case be converted into political gains.

A just war – and let there be no doubt that the Gaza war was justified by any criteria – does not justify diplomatic recklessness and cluelessness, unless there was an ulterior motive and political agenda underlining it.

Netanyahu first ignored, then stalled, then dismissed and finally refused to entertain any “postwar Gaza” framework that the Biden administration presented to him as far back as December 2023. The very idea of removing Hamas from power in Gaza and replacing it with an interim Arab coalition – a concept that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority all agreed to – was derisively rejected by Netanyahu, who declared “not until total victory and the eradication of Hamas.”

Notwithstanding the substantial military degrading of Hamas and decimation of most of Gaza, does this agreement signal “total victory” or the “obliteration of Hamas”? No. Was it ever attainable without a full and protracted occupation of the entire Gaza Strip? No.

IDF soldiers operating in Gaza last month.Credit: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit

Throughout the first half of 2024, Netanyahu was deliberately seeking an open confrontation with the White House. “The U.S. is trying to impose a Palestinian state on Israel,” he sanctimoniously and bogusly lamented without any basis. By May 2024, he had reneged on and disowned a plan he himself had presented to Biden. During those months, the hostage and cease-fire deal that may come to fruition in the coming days was already on the table.

For eight full months, such a deal was presented time and time again by Qatar and the United States. But Netanyahu only had politics and his own survival in mind, and then the U.S. election and Trump’s inauguration.

This level of callousness, cruelty, disregard for the hostages and indifference toward their traumatized families – who he even blamed for undermining him – and the sheer recklessness in prosecuting a war with no defined, tangible and attainable objectives is staggering even by Mr. Netanyahu’s standards. Even his harshest critics and most vehement detractors didn’t think a year ago that it would get to this.

As for the deal itself, it is a good deal given the alternative. Whatever the reservations or comments one may have, a deal is a deal and hostages will return home.

Palestinians inspecting the site of an Israeli strike in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza, on Tuesday.Credit: Abdel Kareem Hana/AP

Let’s assume there is a mutually agreed deal and that the text accurately corresponds to the general outline revealed on Monday evening: a 42-day phased process that begins with a cease-fire, or at least a conditional cessation of hostilities; 33 Israeli hostages to be released in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners (many of whom are convicted terrorists) within the first 16 days. Negotiations on the second phase will then begin and if this sequence is completed, Israel will begin a gradual withdrawal from Gaza but maintain a narrow security buffer. Gazans, meanwhile, will be allowed to return to the little that remains of northern Gaza. (Roughly a million fled the north into the southern part of the Strip after the war began.) And on Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to lay out a postwar political framework, very similar to the one Biden presented and Netanyahu rejected from December 2023 into mid-2024.

Now come the questions. Will the cease-fire hold? Can Hamas enforce it? What constitutes a flagrant violation of the cease-fire? Does the deal continue if there is sporadic local fighting between small, isolated splinter gangs who do not answer to Hamas? What happens if Hamas raises flags and declares victory?

This is an extraordinarily tenuous agreement given what Hamas is and Netanyahu’s track record. It would come as no surprise to anyone if he is telling his reluctant and sulking ministers, “Don’t worry, the cease-fire won’t hold.” As far as he is concerned, this might protect him from both political turmoil and Donald Trump.

Alon Pinkas