A History of Ceasefire Talks between Israel and Hamas, 2008-Present
This is a brief history of ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas, from 2008 to the present
Palestinians displaced by Israel's war on Gaza make their way north
Israel and Hamas signed at least six ceasefire agreements in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2019 and 2021. Each case followed a similar trajectory. Hamas, by and large, observed the agreement. Israel, by and large, did not. Eventually, Israeli violence elicited Hamas rocket attacks, which elicited an Israeli campaign of aggression in Gaza, which resulted in another ceasefire, and then the pattern repeated itself. This is a brief history of ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas, from 2008 to the present.
2008
Israel and Hamas signed a ceasefire agreement on June 19, 2008. It came after a year of violence was set off by Israel’s suffocating land, air and sea blockade of the Gaza Strip, one that Israel tightened in 2006 and 2007 to punish the Palestinian people for having elected the wrong party — Hamas.
The goal of Israel’s blockade was to put Gaza “on brink of collapse,” as Israeli officials told the US State Department in 2008. Or, to quote Dov Weisglass, adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the goal was to put Palestinians “on a diet.”
The June 2008 ceasefire could not have come soon enough. After Hamas won free and fair elections in January 2006, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and the United States colluded to carry out a coup against them. Hamas learned of the plot, a civil war ensued in the Gaza Strip, and Hamas took control over it.
This exacerbated tensions, and the tit-for-tat exchanges between the Israeli military and Palestinian resistance groups in Gaza intensified. From 2006 to the signing of the June 2008 ceasefire agreement, Israeli forces killed 1,179 Palestinians in Gaza, including 218 children, while Palestinian forces in the Gaza Strip killed 10 Israeli soldiers and 0 civilians.
Then came the ceasefire. According to Amnesty, it was "the single most important factor in reducing civilian casualties and attacks on civilians to their lowest levels” in 8 years. From June 19, 2008 until November 4, 2008, Hamas fired 0 rockets and mortar shells at Israel and restrained other Palestinian groups, according to Israeli spokesman Mark Regev on 9 January 2009.
Immediately after the deal was signed, Israel announced it would not open the borders or ease the blockade until Hamas released Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held by Hamas. Israel had placed a new condition on the agreement.
To add insult to injury, on 4 Nov. 2008, Israel brazenly broke the other part of the ceasefire agreement, i.e., the cease firing part. Israel invaded the Gaza Strip with ground troops, killing six Palestinians on US Presidential Election day, hoping no one would notice. It was quickly followed by a barrage of dozens of rockets fired by Palestinian militant groups on towns in southern Israel.
The Israeli military concluded Hamas likely wanted to continue the ceasefire despite the raid, believing they could disrupt the ceasefire without disrupting the ceasefire. Israel wanted to have its cake and eat it too.
Less than two months later, Israel waged a full-blown war on Gaza’s 1.5 million people, killing 1,400 Palestinians, including 700-900 civilians and 288 children. A UN fact-finding mission, known as the Goldstone Report, concluded on page 408 Israel's wartime aim was to "punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population" in Gaza.
The 2008-9 War on Gaza never really ended. Israel declared a unilateral ceasefire on January 17, 2009, but did not immediately withdraw its troops from Gaza nor did it agree to lift the blockade. The result was another tit for tat continuation of hostilities. The question was not if but when Israel would wage another aggression.
2012
Meanwhile, in November 2011, the Israeli activist Gershon Baskin began to hold secret talks with both Israeli and Hamas officials to secure a “long-term” ceasefire after he played a key role as an interlocutor during the Gilad Shalit deal earlier that year.
Hamas officials spent months iterating on a draft. They shared it with Baskin, who met with Israel’s Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, to inform him Hamas was formulating a ceasefire offer. Baskin claimed Barak was skeptical but nevertheless convened high-level meetings with representatives of the Prime Minister's Office, the Shin Bet, the Israeli army, the Foreign Ministry and the Mossad. After a month and a half of deliberations, the Israelis “made a decision not to decide,” according to Baskin.
But, as Baskin insisted, Hamas wanted “to break the cycle of violence.” This is why, in March 2012, when the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) got into a shooting match with the Israeli military, Hamas stayed out of the fighting, and were even criticized by PIJ for it. Reportedly, Hamas was disinclined to let the clashes trigger all-out war. Ahmed Jabari, second-in-command of Hamas’s military wing and “the all powerful man in Gaza,” acted on multiple occasions to block rocket attacks on Israel. Baskin even claimed that, on a number of occasions, when Hamas got dragged into an unwanted escalation, Jabari directed his fighters to shoot into open spaces to avert further Israeli retaliation. Aluf Benn, Editor-in-Chief of Haaretz, agreed, describing Jabari as Israel's "subcontractor" in Gaza, “who enforced relative quiet there for more than five years.”
Baskin received word from Hamas the draft agreement would be ready the next day, information he shared with his Israeli and Egyptian counterparts.
After months of internal discussions, a draft was finalized on Wednesday morning, November 12, 2012. It was shared with Mousa Abu Marzook, Hamas’s Political Bureau Deputy Chairman, Khaled Mashal, Political Bureau Chairman and, Ahmed Jabari. They were expected to approve it that day. But, at 4 o'clock in the afternoon on November 12, Israeli leaders chose not to receive a ceasefire offer from Ahmed Jabari. Instead, they chose to assassinate him.
Israel transformed a ceasefire opportunity into a bloodbath, known as Operation “Pillar of Defense,” in which Israel killed 171 Palestinians, mostly civilians, while Hamas killed 6 Israelis, 4 of whom were civilians. It was another round of “mowing the lawn,” as the saying goes in Israel, in which Palestinian life is likened to overgrown weeds of grass.
Another ceasefire agreement was reached on November 21, 2012. Israeli police said 12 rockets landed in Israel “within hours” after the ceasefire went into effect, although Hamas denied that report. If correct, it’s unclear whether those rockets were fired before the agreement went into effect and landed in Israel minutes after or whether they were fired by PIJ, Hamas’s rival. What is clear is that, by the next day, both sides ceased hostilities.
Much like the June 2008 agreement, this one also called for “opening the crossings and facilitating the movements of people and transfer of goods; refraining from restricting residents' free movements or targeting residents in border areas.”
According to OCHA, within a week of the signing of ceasefire deal, Israel eased the restrictions it had imposed on access to the Mediterranean Sea and areas near the fence, but not “on the movement of people and goods to and from Gaza through the Israeli-controlled Erez and Kerem Shalom crossings.” Israel failed to ease its blockade.
It also failed to cease hostilities. Within a few months, the Israeli army continued to make regular incursions into Gaza, shooting at Palestinian farmers and those collecting scrap and rubble across the border, firing on boats and denying Gaza’s fishermen access to their coastal waters, yet another violation of the agreement. During the first three months, from November 22, 2012 until February 22, 2013, zero rockets and two mortar shells came out of Gaza, while Israel attacked Palestinians in Gaza dozens of times, killing four and injuring 91. The point was even conceded by Israel’s own consul general in Los Angeles: “for the last three months, there hasn’t been a rocket fired from Gaza.”
Over the course of the next two years, Israel violated the ceasefire agreement twice as often as Hamas. Out of Israel’s 191 violations, 10% resulted in death and 42% in injuries or detentions; out of the 75 Palestinian violations, 4% resulted in injuries and none in death. In other words, the same low-level violence persisted, with Israel doing most of the violence and all of the killing.
2014-2023
In June 2014, Fatah and Hamas agreed to a unity agreement, enraging Israel which had long sought to keep Palestine’s two dominant political parties divided.
A few weeks later, a dissident clan in Hebron, a nemesis of Hamas, was likely responsible for the brutal murder of three Israeli settler teens in the West Bank. Israel likely knew that Hamas’s leadership in Gaza was uninvolved, but the incident served as a perfect, if false, pretext to sabotage the Fatah-Hamas unity agreement. Over the following weeks, according to Israeli military sources, Israel arrested 419 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 335 affiliated with Hamas, and killed six, and carried out dozens of attacks in Gaza, killing five Hamas members on July 7, while Hamas fired rockets into Israel.
What followed was an Israeli campaign of indiscriminate slaughter, the July 2014 War. Israel killed 2,200 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, including 1,500 Gazan civilians and 550 children, injuring 10,000 and destroying 18,000 homes, while Hamas killed 67 Israeli soldiers and 6 Israeli civilians.
After 51 days of war, Israel and Hamas signed yet another ceasefire agreement. It was, as the Guardian put it, “almost identical” to what was agreed upon 21 months earlier and remarkably similar to the 2008 agreement.
In addition to a cessation of hostilities, Israel agreed to (1) open crossings on its border to allow humanitarian aid and construction materials to enter Gaza; (2) extend the permitted fishing zone to six miles off the coast of Gaza and (3) open the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt.
To Israel, none of these stipulations meant an end to the blockade, and so the erstwhile state of low-level, tit-for-tat violence persisted for years. Israel continued its occasional ground incursions into the Gaza Strip, while Hamas occasionally fired rockets into Israel (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Every few months, such as in November 2018 or May 2019, hostilities boiled over into clashes, and the clashes led to — wait for it — more ceasefire agreements.
Meanwhile, the blockade continued unabated, and so Israel’s war on Gaza continued unabated, and so the violence persisted.
The next major round of violence came in the May 2021 War, when Israel killed 261 Palestinians in Gaza, mostly civilians, while Palestinian militant groups killed 14 Israelis. Hamas and Israel signed yet another ceasefire agreement on May 20, 2021. Within a month, Israel had violated it twice: first, on June 16, 2021, Israel bombed Khan Younis, second, on June 18, 2021, Israel bombed north of Beit Lahia. No reports were found of Hamas violations.
2023-5
That brings us to the months leading up to October 7th, the period of time during which there was apparently a “ceasefire.” Throughout September 2023, Palestinians protested at the Gaza separation barrier, demanding an end to the blockade. It was reminiscent of the 2018-9 March of Return protests. During these clashes, the Israeli military killed one Palestinian protester with a shot in the head from behind, and injured dozens more, including four journalists wearing press gear.
Then came the October 7th attacks, in which Hamas militants and other armed groups in Gaza raided Israel. 695 Israeli civilians were killed, including 36 children, 373 members of the security forces and 71 foreigners, for a total of 1,139 people. Many dozens, perhaps even hundreds of them were killed by the Israeli military, not Hamas, when it invoked a “mass” Hanibal directive that applied throughout the entire region. It was a secret Israeli order issued on October 7th, directing Israeli forces to kill Israeli civilians or soldiers rather than letting them be taken hostage, or captive, respectively.
We know what happened next. Israel’s response was unprecedented force, killing hundreds of Palestinians every day for months on end. A week-long "humanitarian pause" in late November 2023 brought an exchange of hostages and prisoners, as well as a temporary respite to the people of Gaza. But even during this week-long break, Israel violated the agreement 3 times, according to OCHA, killing 2 Palestinians in northern Gaza city.
While ceasefire talks resumed, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu promised not a deal with Hamas but the total annihilation of Hamas. And, in case there was doubt, on January 2, 2024, Israel assassinated Hamas’s newly appointed spokesperson, Saleh Al-Arouri (1, 2). It was the first of three instances in which, rather than negotiating with members of Hamas’s team, Israel chose to kill them instead. As a result, Hamas froze the ceasefire talks.
In February 2024, reports surfaced of a draft ceasefire agreement (1, 2), but Israel’s posture remained the same: not an agreement with Hamas but "total victory" over Hamas.
On May 6, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said that his group had accepted a ceasefire proposal, even leading to short-lived celebrations in Gaza. Israel, however, said it had not agreed to the terms of the ceasefire, instead deciding to invade Rafah, hardly a sign that Netanyahu wanted to stop the fighting. Then in late May, US President Joe Biden said Israel had agreed to an “enduring ceasefire proposal.” That turned out to be false as well.
Over the following months, every time a deal came closer to fruition, Netanyahu sabotaged it by adding new conditions he knew Hamas could not accept. In late July 2024, Israel insisted it would maintain a permanent military presence along the Gaza-Egypt border and it would not allow for the unrestricted return of refugees to their homes in north Gaza. These new conditions were non-starters for Hamas, and everyone knew it. Even Israel’s pro-Netanyahu right-wing English daily the Jerusalem Post ran a headline, citing unnamed sources, that “Netanyahu [is] actively sabotaging [the] hostage deal.”
Then, on July 31, Israel assassinated Hamas’s political bureau chief, Ismail Haniyeh, a key interlocutor during the negotiations. It was the clearest sign yet that Israel had no interest in a ceasefire. Israel’s incidental killing of Yahya Sinwar in October 2024 made a deal even harder to reach, since “all of a sudden, there’s not a single decider, and it’s a lot harder to get a decision out of Hamas,” to quote US Secretary State Blinken.
All of this was recently confirmed by Israel’s (now former) Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, who boasted that "with our political power, we have managed to prevent the agreement so far."
By the fall of 2024, the ceasefire talks were effectively dead as Israel pressed on in Lebanon. Biden and Blinken preferred the destruction of Hezbollah to the reconstruction of Gaza, and so they greenlit Israel’s war on Lebanon as part of its strategy to remake the Middle East in Israel’s image.
Miraculously, ceasefire talks were revived in December 2024. All of a sudden, a deal seemed imminent and was suddenly reached on January 15, 2025. The text was exactly the same as the May 2024 agreement that Biden told us was an Israeli deal, accepted by the Israelis, more than 6 months ago.
So, what eventually forced Netanyahu’s hand in January 2025? Was it the Trump team's pressure, as most analysts say? That almost certainly played a key role. Was it Netanyahu’s desire to give Trump a “win”? Public pressure to bring home the hostages? A major shift in public opinion in Israel, indicating 60 and 70% of Israelis support an end to the war? Netanyahu’s realization that he has a green light from the Trump administration to resume the slaughter in 42 days? Pressure from the Israeli army’s leadership that the army was battered and exhausted? Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes.
For the first time in 15 and a half months, yesterday, January 19, 2025, was a truly joyous moment for the people of Gaza, indeed, for everyone in Israel and Palestine. Palestinian and Israeli hostages will start to return home, the starvation of North Gaza will come to an end, Gaza’s reconstruction will begin, Palestinians can bury their loved ones, reunite with their surviving family members and start to rebuild. A ceasefire deal will bring much respite to the Gaza’s genocide survivors, but, if history is any guide, many more dark days are yet to come.
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