Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Featuring Kareem Shaheen
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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So much about the Gaza ceasefire deal pushed by Donald Trump and recently agreed by Israel and Hamas is unknown. Nevertheless, as New Lines’ Middle East Editor Kareem Shaheen tells The Lede host Faisal Al Yafai, it’s “an extraordinary moment.”
“The most important thing right now for Palestinians is that they’re not getting killed on a constant basis and in the most brutal, inhumane way possible, and that’s something to be celebrated,” Shaheen says.
“The most important thing right now for Palestinians is that they’re not getting killed on a constant basis.”
Beyond that, Shaheen notes, Gazans have been told little. “They don’t know anything about how much of Gaza will be accessible to them or when they’ll be able to go back to their homes,” Shaheen says.
Al Yafai cautions that he is “profoundly skeptical” the deal will hold out. “There is no peace deal,” he points out, noting that all that has been agreed is a limited ceasefire. “The idea of how Palestine is conceived of, how the securitization of Gaza is considered, means that any peace deal, whether it lasts a week, a month, even a year, will eventually break down. I expect this to break down very shortly.”
Shaheen agrees that whether the ceasefire holds is very much an open question but hopes that “Trump continues to use the bully pulpit that he has and the leverage that he has over Netanyahu to ensure that this deal holds, and that it’s the start of something bigger than what it seems to be right now.”
Despite his involvement in Israel’s war up to this point, Trump deserves credit for his role in the deal, Shaheen says. “Trump actually managed to bring a ceasefire to a genocide, a vastly destructive war that killed tens of thousands of Palestinians,” he says.
Al Yafai queries whether the Gaza war could mark a shift in the world order, to which Shaheen counters: “I think that this international order was simply a lie. This moral, rules-based order was a lie that the West told itself to pretend like it was better than the rest of the world, and that it should tell the rest of the world how to behave and how to act on the international stage. I do think that Gaza removed and lifted that curtain from the reality behind it.”