Gaza’s ceasefire has stalled as both sides drag their feet, leaving few countries willing to step up and help

Both sides of the miserable war in Gaza are dragging their feet on moving on to the next crucial phase of the ceasefire, leaving Palestinians in the territory to deal with the muck and sometimes deadly cold of winter with few reasons to hope that meaningful progress will come soon.

“Isreal needs to let us live,” said Mohamed Hassouna, 44, who has moved all of his belongings into a tent amid the pulverized concrete of what was once his neighbourhood near Gaza City. 

“They can be a country and we can be a country,” he told a videographer working for CBC News.

The ceasefire's most contentious issue, the one at the heart of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for decades, is also the issue that gets the least emphasis in the Oct. 10 agreement — that’s the conditions for the creation of a Palestinian state at the end of the three-phase plan. 

Moving forward without clarity on that long-term goal has jeopardized progress on the other key planks of the agreement. 

“Prime Minister Bibi [Benjamin] Netanyahu doesn’t want to end the war for his own political considerations,” former top Israeli commander Major General Yitzhak Brik told a panel on Israel's Channel 12 recently. 

“And disarming Hamas will not happen because there is no one who can enforce it.”

That, in a nutshell, is why the 20-point plan agreed to by Israel and Hamas, brokered by U.S. President Donald Trump, backed by Qatar, Turkey and Egypt and endorsed by the UN Security Council, is now effectively on life support.

Like the donkey carts trudging along Gaza’s windy, rain-soaked dirt roads, it will take an immense effort by someone — likely only Trump — to get things moving again. 

At the top of the list of obstacles is the creation of an International Stabilization Force (ISF) for Gaza.

According to the ceasefire agreement, the ISF is to be a multinational military force tasked with doing most of the immediate heavy lifting in the territory — including providing security to the civilian population, monitoring the ceasefire and crucially, ensuring Hamas’s military capabilities and “infrastructure” are dismantled.

But thus far, Trump’s mediators have been unable to get a firm “yes” from any country that might want to take on this task, although at his year-end media briefing, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested such commitments will be forthcoming.

“I feel very confident that we have a number of nation-states acceptable to all sides in this,” said Rubio.

Turkey has, arguably, been the most amenable — but Israel has refused to let it play any kind of role in Gaza’s future, arguing its government is both too close to Hamas and too hostile to Israel.