The Architecture of a Temporary Peace
When Qatar, Egypt, and the United States brokered the January 2025 ceasefire agreement for Gaza, the structure they created was elegant in theory but fragile in execution. Phase I, spanning 42 days, established a straightforward hostage-prisoner exchange: 33 Israeli hostages would be released in staggered increments in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian detainees held in Israeli facilities. The mechanics were transactional, the incentives were aligned, and for six weeks the framework held. Both sides had concrete reasons to maintain compliance. Israel wanted hostages back. Palestinian factions and the broader Palestinian population wanted imprisoned relatives returned. The math was simple.
But Phase I was never designed to be permanent. It was a ceasefire, not a peace agreement. The harder questions were deferred to Phase II, which was supposed to address what actually happens to Gaza after the guns fall silent. How would the territory be governed? Who would provide security? What would reconstruction look like, and more critically, who would control the resources flowing into it? These were not technical questions. They were political economy questions, which means they were questions about power and money and whose interests would be served by particular institutional arrangements.
By March 2025, Phase II negotiations had stalled. The immediate cause appeared to be disagreement over Israeli troop withdrawal timelines. Israel insisted on maintaining a security presence in Gaza. Palestinian negotiators and mediating states wanted a clear Israeli exit timeline. That disagreement was real, but it was also a symptom of a deeper problem: no actor in the negotiation had aligned incentives around the governance structure that Phase II was supposed to create.
The Numbers That Drive the Problem
To understand why Phase II collapsed, you need to understand the scale of what happens next. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs documented that over 46,000 Palestinians were killed from October 2023 through the ceasefire. Infrastructure across Gaza was devastated. The World Bank estimated that reconstruction would cost $50 billion or more. That figure is not abstract. It represents contracts, reconstruction firms, employment, international aid flows, currency movements, and leverage. It is money that will flow through institutions, and whoever controls those institutions controls significant political power in postwar Gaza.
Consider the basic incentive structure. If you are Israel, you want to maintain enough military and security presence in Gaza to prevent a return to the status quo ante. But every Israeli soldier in Gaza is a political cost domestically. The longer troops remain, the greater the pressure. You also want someone in Gaza who will maintain stability and prevent attacks. You prefer a governance structure weak enough not to pose a security threat but strong enough to maintain order. You do not necessarily want a governance structure accountable to the Palestinian population, because accountability might mean demands that conflict with Israeli interests.
If you are the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas, now entering his 20th year leading an entity with a four-year electoral mandate that expired in 2009, your interests are more complicated. You want to expand your authority and resources, because that is how you maintain power. But you are also internationally recognized as the legitimate Palestinian authority. The United States and European Union prefer to work with you over Hamas. That preference gives you leverage. However, if you push too hard for immediate Israeli withdrawal or for governance arrangements that seem to prioritize Palestinian interests over security concerns, you lose that international backing. You are caught between two masters, and neither is paying enough to make it worth the political cost at home.
The Hamas Problem That Phase II Could Not Solve
Then there is Hamas. This is where the ceasefire architecture encountered a genuine deadlock. According to a 2025 Arab Barometer survey, Hamas’s approval rating in Gaza had dropped significantly during the conflict. That is noteworthy. War, even unsuccessful war, usually strengthens resistance movements in the eyes of the affected population. For Hamas’s popularity to decline suggests that the population experienced the conflict as a Hamas failure. Yet that same survey found something counterintuitive: support for a two-state solution had also declined among Palestinian respondents compared to 2023 baselines.
This is the core problem for Phase II. Hamas was weakened by the war but not eliminated. It retained organizational capacity and a constituency. But including Hamas in postwar governance created a problem for international actors funding reconstruction. The United States and European Union could not channel $50 billion through institutions controlled by an organization they designated as a terrorist group. That is not a judgment about whether the designation is accurate or fair. It is a description of a legal and political constraint.
Excluding Hamas from governance was theoretically possible but politically costly. Hamas would have incentives to oppose any governance framework that excluded it, and it still possessed military capacity to disrupt. The Palestinian Authority was reluctant to forcibly disarm Hamas or exclude it, partly because doing so would be extraordinarily difficult and partly because it would deepen internal Palestinian division. You had a situation where the organization with the most incentive to block Phase II implementation was Hamas, but the primary actors negotiating Phase II had no reliable mechanism to prevent that obstruction without either including Hamas or investing massive resources in suppressing it.
The Governance Legitimacy Trap
Underlying all of this was a legitimacy problem that Phase II was supposed to solve but probably could not. For details on the humanitarian dimensions, UN OCHA Gaza Humanitarian Situation Reports document the scale of ongoing need. But governance legitimacy is different from humanitarian capacity. It is the question of who has the right to make decisions, and whether the Palestinian population will accept those decisions as legitimate.
The Palestinian Authority was the negotiating partner because it was internationally recognized. But it was also deeply unpopular in Gaza, where it had not held elections in 16 years and was associated with economic mismanagement and corruption. Hamas was popular as a resistance movement but had just led Gaza through a catastrophic war. Neither organization held a fresh democratic mandate. Neither could credibly claim to represent the current will of the Palestinian population. And yet Phase II required choosing one or both as the governance authority for postwar Gaza.
This is not a problem that can be solved through negotiation, because negotiation assumes that the parties can trade something for something else. But legitimacy is not fungible. You cannot trade money or security guarantees for legitimacy. You either have it or you do not. And neither the Palestinian Authority nor Hamas had it in abundance after January 2025.
Why These Frameworks Keep Failing
The Gaza ceasefire’s Phase II collapse is not unique. Similar governance architecture failures have occurred in Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Somalia. Each time, the pattern is similar. Phase I succeeds because the immediate incentives are aligned. Hostilities stop. Prisoners are exchanged. The first wave of humanitarian relief arrives. But Phase II requires building institutions, and institutions require choices about who holds power and who does not. Once those choices become visible, the coalitions that supported Phase I fragment.
In Gaza’s case, that fragmentation occurred because the actors involved had genuinely incompatible preferences about postwar governance, and because the population whose governance was being negotiated had expressed declining support for all the available options. International Crisis Group Middle East Briefings have repeatedly documented how external pressure for particular governance solutions often fails when local actors lack either incentives or capacity to implement them.
The deeper lesson is that ceasefire architecture cannot substitute for political settlements. A ceasefire can create time for a political settlement to develop, but it cannot impose one. Phase II required not just negotiated agreement among the immediate parties but some form of buy-in from the Palestinian population. That buy-in was never secured. When Phase II stalled, there was no mechanism to restart it, because the immediate incentives that held Phase I together had evaporated. What remains is an armed truce that could dissolve at any moment, not because of a sudden escalation but because the parties have no reason to maintain restraint once the immediate exchange of Phase I is complete.
What aspects of this analysis do you find most compelling or most questionable? The governance legitimacy problem, the Hamas inclusion dilemma, or the basic incompatibility of actor preferences? I would welcome engagement with readers who have studied similar transitions in other contexts.