Almost two years to the day. Since October seven, Israel and Tamas have agreed to the first phase of Donald Trump's peace plan for Gaza. The agreement involves the release of Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, with Israel pulling back its troops to an agreed uponline and allowing aid into Gaza. The first hostages are expected to be released as soon as this weekend. I'm Ruby Jones, and you're listening to seven.
AM today Middle East correspondent for The Economist, Greg Carlstrom on the negotiations that got us here and what the future of Gaza looks like.
It's Friday, October ten.
Evening. We are coming on the air with breaking news. President Trump has just announced that Israel and Hamas have agreed to the first phase of a peace plan that eventually could end the war in Gaza.
So Greg, let's start with what both sides have just agreed to tell me about the deal and when it takes effect.
So the deal is meant to be signed at noon in Egypt on Thursday. So once it's signed, the fighting in Gaza is meant to immediately stop.
President Trump, writing on Truth Social I am very proud to announce that Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first phase of our peace plan. This means that all of the hostages will be released very soon, and then after that.
According to the text of the deal, Hamas is supposed to release all of the remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza. There are twenty who are thought to be alive, and then another twenty eight who have died in captivity. They are meant to be freed within seventy two hours, and it's likely that Hamas will more or less hit that deadline. The Israelis are thinking by Saturday the hostages will be out. Donald Trump is saying it might not happen until Monday,
but within a few days they will be released. And then in parallel to that, Israel will release one nine hundred and fifty Palestinian prisoners from its jails. Once that happens, the Israeli army will pull back somewhat from its current positions in Gaza. It will continue to occupy about half of Gaza's territory, but it will pull back from the big cities, and it is meant to allow a flood of humanitarian eid to come in Via five border crossings.
And there have been celebrations in Tel Aviv as the families of hostages celebrate the return of their loved ones. The return of hostages has always been one of Benjaminett now who's stated aims. So how is he talking about this moment?
He is calling it a great day for Israel. Yes, this is from Netna whose office. They set this out on Twitter.
They say Prime Minister Benjamin Natnall, who just spoke with US President Donald Trump. The two held a very emotional and warm conversation, congratulating each other on the historic achievement of signing the agreement for the release of all the hostages.
More broadly, Nathaniell is trying to portray this as a victory for him politically. He's trying to craft a narrative and he's been doing this for a number of days now.
I think we can advance piece not only between Israel and Gaza, but between Israel and many other partners in the Middle East and a Muslim countries beyond the Middle East.
Nathaniel is insisting that this deal is you know, exactly what Israel wants. Never mind that Nathaniel for months now has been resisting deals quite similar. For this, I think he knows now that the chances of early elections are rising in Israel, and so he's trying to portray this as a political victory for himself.
And as you mentioned, Israel has agreed to withdraw troops to a specific line. So tell me a bit about that line and what the frontline I suppose is going to look like now.
So it's the first of three lines spelled out in the Trump proposal. This one basically involves just pulling back by a kilometer or two in all directions from where Israeli troops are currently deployed. But what that means is they're going to be further away from the big cities we've seen this month's long campaign now to try and conquer Gaza City. Israeli troops who have been positioned quite close to Gaza City are going to move a bit
further away. But again, they're still going to control most of Gaza's territory. They're not going to relinquish more of it until some interterminate point later in this agreement.
Can you tell me a little more about what Gaza looks like now and what's going to change there?
Well, I mean on the ground, Gaza is in ruins. You know, there are assessments by the US and by independent researchers looking at satellite imagery that suggests, you know, seventy or eighty percent of the buildings have either been destroyed or so badly damaged that they're uninhabitable. At this point, hundreds of thousands of people have lost their homes. Basic
infrastructure is in shambles. Much of the agricultural land in Gaza has been destroyed by fighting, and Israeli troops are going to remain on some of that land for the foreseeable future. So the immediate challenge is going to be just getting humanitarian aid into Gaza, dealing with the ongoing famine in Gaza City, dealing with the quite severe hunger in other parts of the territory. And then at some point, if all goes well, people will turn to the task
of reconstruction. But that's a monumental task. The World Bank thinks it will cost fifty three billion dollars to rebuild Gaza. There's an estimate from the UN that it might take at least a decade just to clear the rubble that has accumulated during two years of war. So the scale of what lies ahead in terms of both providing aid and eventually trying to rebuild, it's really unimaginable.
Coming up inside the negotiations that led to this moment. Let's talk more about the pressure that has come from the US, because this agreement comes just over a weeke after Trump released his twenty point pace plan. So what's been happening since then to get both sides to agree.
I think the real shift in terms of the US Israeli relationship came after that Israeli airstrike in Kuta a month ago, which was a failed attempt to assassinate leaders of Hamas who were based in Kutla, including Khalil Haya, who was head of the negotiating team in Egypt this week, who will sign this agreement on behalf of Hanas tomorrow.
I think that Israeli airstrike on a country that is a close American ally, a country where America has a large military base, also a country that just gifted Donald Trump a four hundred million dollar airplane when he visited a few months ago. I think that strike convinced Trump that he really needed to start trying to restrain ben You mean Nataniel, the Israeli Prime Minister, that Israel was sort of a force for chaos in the region, if you will, then that America needed to rein it in.
And so I think since then you have seen Trump working closely with Arab countries and Muslim countries, who he met at the United Nations about two weeks ago to draft the initial version of this twenty point plan. He's deferred to them a lot on ideas for ending the Galsa War, which is a sharp contrast with February when Trump stood up at the White House and announced the plan to ethnically cleans and turned it into a beach resort.
He's moved a long way from that, and he's now embraced what is seen as a serious, if vague plan for not just ending the war, but trying to bring about something better in Gauza.
And so, why has Hamas agreed to this plan at this particular moment in time.
I think it also has to do with pressure, but pressure from other countries. I think it's pressure from Egypt, from Cutler, from Turkey, the Cutteries. I was there a couple of weeks ago, and the sense I got from speaking to people there was that the cutteries have really pushed Hamas to accept the deal. They have warned the leaders of Hamas that if they didn't accept this, you know, this is your last chance to reach a ceasefire, and if you reject it, you might be expelled from Kutter.
And it's not clear at that point where they would go because there aren't many other countries in the world willing to accept them. So they have leaned on Hamas. I think the Turkish government, which has long standing ties with Hamas, has done the same. You had the Arab League a few months ago voting unanimously in favor of a resolution that called on Hamas to disarm. It's the
first time the Arab League has ever done that. So we've seen the region really united behind trying to get Hamas to make a deal.
And so what happens if either Hamas or Israel don't do what they have said that they will.
Well, you know, in the short term, I'm not particularly concerned about that. I think they will in the days and weeks to come do what they said. I think the issue is when you look at the longer term. The Trump plan has two halves or two phases. There's one part of it that is focused on what's going to happen in these next few days, the hostage release,
the partial Israeli withdrawal, et cetera. And then there's a longer term part of it that has these much more ambitious schemes for a transitional authority to governed Gaza and international peace keeping force to provide security there. The negotiators in Egypt this week ignored that second half of the plan.
They focused only on the first half. They reached an agreement on the first half, but the details of the second half have not been worked out at all, and so I think the concern now is if everything goes well over the next few days, they are meant to start talking about Phase two, But that is going to be very difficult and very complicated to reach agreement on what happens if they don't, what happens if Hanas does not agree to relinquish its weapons, for example, as the
Trunk Plan calls on it to do. If they don't, Israel is not going to withdraw further from Gaza. I think it's unlikely that donor countries are going to contribute much for reconstruction, so that's going to proceed quite slowly, you wind up creating a whole bunch of other problems.
And as you mentioned, part of the agreement is that aid will now enter Gaza. Talk to me a bit about the scale of aid that is now needed to address the humanitarian situation.
What's spelled out in the Trump plan is that the quantities of aid that have to enter Gaza in the ceasefire should be at least equivalent to what was entering back in January during the previous ceasefire. At that point you had consistently five hundred, six hundred trucks a day entering Gaza carrying not only food, but medicine, temporary shelters, mechanical equipment to try and repair desalination plants, all kinds
of things that were needed. And back then the UN and other aid agencies said there was enough aid entering Gaza. There was so much, in fact, that not only were people getting enough food, but they were able to stockpile aid in warehouses, which is one reason why once Israel resumed the war in March and completely shut off the flow of aid, famine didn't immediately set in because there was aid stockpiled from the period of the ceasefire. So
that is what's meant to happen again. We're meant to go from the you know, one hundred trucks on a good day that have been entering recently to something five or six times that.
And this agreement comes almost exactly two years after October seven, twenty twenty three, And in that two years, at least sixty seven thousand Palestinians have been killed, at least twenty thousand of them have been children. In that time, there have been many attempts at negotiations that have ultimately all failed. So how different is this time.
We'll see. You know, everyone is optimistic for now, but then everyone was optimistic back in January when the previous ceasefire was reached and that only lasted for six weeks. The two things that are going to be key here. One is Donald Trump needs to keep pressure on Begnamin N'atanielle to abide by the ceasefire, not to resume the war. It's always a concern with Trump something that requires sustained focus and sustained attention, which is not something he's known for.
He is going to have to maintain pressure on the Israeli government and not do what he did back in January, where he ended up giving the Israelis a free pass to resume the war. And then the second thing that will tell us if this is going to be any different is if there's any progress on these face two negotiations. If Hamas, for example, is willing to be even somewhat flexible on the question of relinquishing its arms, that's something
it has always refused to do before. If it takes a different position now, if it's amenable to doing that, then there is a possibility of change in Gaza, of a new political entity to govern the territory, of a different sort of relationship with Israel, of a serious process of reconstruction. But we just don't know yet if any of these things are going to happen.
Well, Greg, thank you so much for speaking with me.
Thanks for having me.
Also in the news today, the New South Wales Court of Appeal has issued a prohibition order against a pro Palestine protest outside the Sydney Opera House. Organizers argued the protest could have proceeded peacefully this Sunday with appropriate crowd control, but the court agreed with arguments from New South Wales police that the estimated attendance numbers posed a public safety risk.
The protest will now march from Hyde Park to Town Hall, with police stationed at the Opera House fore court to ensure protesters don't gather there. And an Australian is among three scientists that have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for helping develop metal organic frameworks chemical structures with large cavities that enable them to trap and stare other compounds. Professor Richard Robson from the University of Melbourne says their
structures could potentially capture carbon dioxide. Seven Am is a daily show from Solstice Media. It's made by Atticus Basto, Chris Daniel James, Sarah mcvee, Travis Evans, Sultan Fetcho and me Ruby Jones. A theme music is by Ned Beckley and Josh Hogan of Envelope Audio. Tomorrow, Daniel James will bring you a special Saturday edition of seven Am, wrapping the week's biggest moments in politics, with contributing editor of The New Daily, Amy Ramikus