WSJ What’s News - The War in Gaza, One Year On: Your Questions Answered

Episode Date: September 29, 2024

The first anniversary of the Israel-Hamas war is days away, but how close is the conflict to coming to an end? WSJ Middle East editor Andrew Dowell and Tel Aviv-based reporter Anat Peled answer your questions on the ceasefire talks and what’s likely to happen if a deal remains elusive. Luke Vargas hosts. Sign up for the WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter.  Further Reading U.S. and Allies Call for Three-Week Pause to Head Off Israel-Hezbollah Ground War  An Isolated Netanyahu Resists Pressure to End Conflicts  Netanyahu Allies Make the Case for Firing Israel’s Defense Minister  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's a new day. How can you make the most of it with your membership rewards points? Earn points on everyday purchases. Use them for that long-awaited vacation. Points never expire, so use them how you want. That's the powerful backing of American Express. On eligible cards, terms apply. Learn more at mx.ca. Hey What's News listeners, it's Sunday, September 29th. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal and this is What's News listeners, it's Sunday, September 29th. I'm Luke Vargas for the Wall Street Journal and this is What's News Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news by reaching out

to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world. And there haven't been many, if any, bigger stories over the last year than the Israel-Gaza War. With the one-year anniversary of the conflict just days away, this week we'll hear from WSJ reporters and editors who've been covering the war about the status of efforts to bring it to an end and what's likely to happen if a ceasefire remains elusive. Let's get right to it. Andrew Dowell is The Wall Street Journal's Middle East editor and Anant Pellet is a WSJ reporter based in Tel Aviv.

We heard a lot from listeners when we put out a call for questions about the status of ceasefire talks and other dynamics about this war one year on. So let's jump right in. One listener, Maya Blumovitz from Seattle, was speaking for a lot of us with this question. Let's take a listen. I've been having a hard time keeping track of the different ceasefire deals that have come up throughout this past almost year and who or which side decided to reject each deal. It would be great to get kind of a rundown of all the different deals that were put forward, why they didn't go through, which side wanted what and where we stand today. All right, Andrew, a big one there. I'm volunteering you for it. Thank you.

Could you try to take a stab at that? Actually, you know what, I might just avoid the question a little bit in that there've been a million different twists and turns over the last bunch of months. The kind of constant underlying theme is there's been zero progress. The issue is that there's a fundamental disagreement at the root of the discussions. Israel is looking for a temporary ceasefire that allows it to go back in and fight and continue its project of trying to destroy Hamas after getting some of the hostages out. Whereas Hamas, maybe considering that it has only one card to play here, is looking for a permanent end to the fighting

And so that fundamental disagreement means that all sorts of little disagreements become fodder for keeping a deal for making progress There have been a lot of different iterations and a lot of progress around the edges on things There's never actually been any real meeting of the minds or real Movement toward a deal since the agreement in November and yet I, we've heard, especially from the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, repeated comments, you know, we're weeks away from another proposal and you're not giving up, though we've also reported just in the last few weeks that there is a growing dawning admission that this is likely not going to happen before the election or before inauguration day even.

I mean, is that fair to say that that sort of is feeling a bit out of reach, even if officially no one's given up per se? The humanitarian need for a deal and the desire to have an optimistic approach to it is sort of understandable and the political considerations at work, particularly for the administration, are also understandable. But if you talk to diplomats who have been involved in the talks, people have been closely faring messages between the two sides. It's been a long, long time since there's been any sense of optimism, honestly, I would say since the early spring, for sure, and probably before that. I can see you nodding along as Drew was saying that. It sounds like that's the consensus

view in Israel as well. Definitely. There's a lot of frustration from hostage families. There's about 100 hostages who remain in Gaza. Some of them or many of them dead. We've seen the US be very optimistic, almost try to speak a deal into existence, kind of telling the both sides we're almost there. But behind the scenes, the picture that we're getting is that it's not that close. On the issue of hostages, this is something a listener wanted to ask about. So let's hear from her. This was Pearl Corey in Los Angeles. Do you think that public pressure and public society

have done enough to put enough pressure on our leaders and our government to be able to put pressure on Hamas to release the hostages. Anat, what do you make of that? Israel and the hostage families would say that there's not enough public outcry about the hostages, that they've sort of been forgotten by their own government, by the world. Hostage families have flown across the world meeting with the Pope, with different prime ministers to try to keep this issue on the public agenda. So hostage families in Israel have kind of become the main opposition to Netanyahu in

effect. They're deeply frustrated with him. They continue to protest on a weekly basis. And they and critics say that Netanyahu is basically stymieing a deal. And we've heard this idea also from his own negotiators, from the security establishment, from people from his own government. So we have two hardliners at the head of these talks. We have Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar and we have Netanyahu and both of them are putting up difficulties. If I can just add, the hostage release is the incentive for Israel, right? But it sort of

speaks to a disconnect between the thinking and the focus inside Israel and the focus in the world at large. When you think of a ceasefire deal for Gaza in the world, you're thinking about the humanitarian conditions of people in Gaza, the deaths, the need to stop the destruction, and the need to stop the fighting. When you're talking about it in Israel, where, I mean, I was in New York City after 9-11 and remember all the posters up of people missing the handmade things memorials and mementos and that's exactly what Tel Aviv looks like and a lot of Israel looks like and it's it's really the hostages that are on everybody's mind so there's a distinction between how the need for a

deal is viewed inside and outside of Israel. All right, we've got to take a short break, but coming up we'll look at Hamas's stance on a potential end to the war and other factors that could make a settlement to end it more or less likely. Stick around. At Pennzoil, we have one job. Pioneering a motor oil so advanced, you don't have to think about your motor oil. Instead, you can think about how your engine sounds, how your stomach feels as the RPMs build, how your wheels hug the curves, and how with the Pennzoil Platinum up to 15-year 800,000 kilometer protection guarantee, your adventures will be many. Pennzoil,

long may we drive. Available at your local Canadian tire. Enrollment required. Keep your receipts. Other conditions apply. See penzoil.ca slash warranty for full details. All right, before the break, we were touching on the spectrum of political opinions within Israel that puts varying types of pressure on their leadership to either make a deal or not. I want to turn now to Hamas. What do we know about any sort of corresponding pressure on them that might be coming from Palestinians? Andrew? We do pick up signs of frustration with Hamas, obviously with displeasure with the war and there's a feeling among a lot of people that they've been abandoned and left to suffer

in Gaza by themselves. It's not a society where political pressure is going to work. Hamas has the monopoly on force, even in its diminished state within Gaza. And it's complicated by the fact that Israel is also in there doing a lot of the destruction and activity that is causing the suffering. So I think opinions are mixed. I think polling is bad and I think options are few. But yeah, there's certainly some frustration

with Hamas that we're hearing. Just a practical question on this. Who are the intermediaries in these talks and does having to negotiate with a group designated by some countries as a terrorist organization complicate the diplomatic process? It's not so simple as the Israelis and Hamas just talking directly to each other, right? Yeah, they don't talk directly to each other. They talk through mediators. So that's Egypt, Qatar, the US.

And so basically, we have messages being passed from each side to the other. So in terms of the Israeli side, we have the delegation being led by the head of the Mossad, Israel's spy agency, the Shin Betz, which is the internal security agency and a representative of the army. In the US, we have CIA Chief William Burns. On the Egyptian side, we have the Egyptian intel chief and on the Qatari side, we have the Qatari prime minister. So we have messages being conveyed back and forth the whole time and that's how it's going. A number of senior figures involved in these talks.

And yet with each passing week, it seems like there's something else, be it pager attacks in Lebanon, the role of Iran, attacks by the Houthis, all of these things, and more interfering right at moments when maybe it seems like the parties are inching closer to a deal. Part of what we're seeing in Lebanon

is when you mentioned the pager attacks, and obviously the walkie talkies, and then the bombings. Some of what we're seeing in Lebanon is when you mentioned the pager attacks and obviously the walkie-talkies and then the bombings. Some of what we're seeing in Lebanon is a result of a conclusion that the talks are not going to go anywhere and that there's not a diplomatic off-ramp to the situation in the north, which I think some people had hoped the ceasefire deal in Gaza would provide. There have been a lot of obstacles thrown up along the way and behaviors by various leaders, by Netanyahu, untimely attacks by Hamas that have disrupted talks. We spoke to one person who said a lot of the issues that are left to be resolved are big

issues if you don't want to deal, but small issues if you do want to deal. So there's an element there of like, again, this lack of meeting of the minds, which makes every other single development a large problem rather than a resolvable one. Finally, as we try to assess whether an end to this war is at all within reach, is there anything else we should be keeping our eye on? Yeah, I think definitely a US election. President Trump could have a very different approach to this. In terms of Israel, I guess there's two things that could perhaps change something.

One is more or mass public pressure from the streets that would really bring to a tipping point, maybe even for elections that would bring Netanyahu down, that he would be replaced by someone else who would have maybe a less hardline approach or a different approach to this. I will say that now we're looking like we're on the brink of a war between Israel and Hezbollah and Lebanon. And that's going to probably lower chances for a deal. The hostage families really feel like their loved ones have been left behind. And they say that quite publicly, that they feel like Israel's moving on to a new

war without securing the release of their loved ones. And government officials have told the families that right now the prospects for a deal are not high. So it's, it's looking a little pessimistic right now. I think what Anat said is super important. The conflict is now rotating to Lebanon. It feels like Gaza is going to be in a bit of a stasis now and kind of a secondary consideration. The sort of bigger issue there is there is,

and there has never been really a conception for what the end of that war is, what is to be done in Gaza after the war. The most important thing that would actually lead to a breakthrough to ending the war would be if Israel's ever successful at killing Sinwar, which would give them a moment that they could seize to try and move

on to a different phase. But short of that, I'm afraid I'm not really seeing an easy way to end the fighting definitively there. That's a concrete war aim for Israel, Drew. Would there be an equivalent one for Hamas? We've written about this. I think the goal for Hamas is simply to survive. So for them, a win is if there's a ceasefire, if Sinwar or others can then walk in the street and declare victory, then that's a win. And honestly, I think that's something

that probably Israel can't live with. So yeah, no, I don't think there's anything that they can militarily accomplish in order to end the war at this point. They're hoping to get a commitment to end the war, and their lever is the hostages and so far that's not working. I have been speaking to Wall Street Journal editor Andrew Dowell and reporter Anant Pellad. Andrew and Anant, thank you both so much. Thank you. Great to be here.

Thanks for having us. Andrew and Anant, thank you both so much. Thank you. Great to be here. Thanks for having us. And that's it for What's New Sunday for September 29th. Today's show was produced by Charlotte Gartenberg with supervising producer Christina Rocca. We got help from Deputy Editors Scott Salloway and Chris Sinsley. I'm Luke Vargas.

We will be back Monday morning with a brand new show. Until then, thanks for listening.