Qatar is engaging with the incoming Trump administration on Gaza after sensing a new momentum with the administration on ceasefire talks, Qatar’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said on Saturday.

Al Thani said during the Doha Forum that his country has seen encouragement from the Trump administration to reach a ceasefire in Gaza before Trump’s inauguration in January.

The latest humanitarian situation report on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank paints a brutal picture of increasing Israeli settler violence, forced displacement of local Palestinian communities, and ongoing killings by Israeli forces.

In the week between November 26 and December 2, Israeli forces killed five Palestinians and wounded 27 others — including seven children — across the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports.

During the latest reporting period, 14 people, including eight children, in three Palestinian Bedouin households were forcibly displaced by Israeli settler violence, OCHA said.

The death toll in the Israeli air strike targeting a house in the Nuseirat refugee camp has risen to 20, Arab media reported.

The Wafa news agency reported that the death toll has now reached 20 including six children and five women.

The report added that Israeli warplanes had targeted the house that had been evacuated before the attack. Several people in neighbouring homes were wounded by the strike.

At the same time, a young girl was killed when Israeli artillery shelled tents housing displaced families near the western part of Nuseirat.

At least five people, including children, were killed during an Israeli air strike on a house in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, Arab media reported.

The Wafa news agency reported that Israeli warplanes targeted a house that had been evacuated before the attack. The strike resulted in the deaths of five people and left several others wounded in neighbouring homes.

Three of those who lost their lives were transported to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah.

Since the war began in October 2023, Israeli attacks have killed at least 44,612 Palestinians and wounded 105,834 others.

The Israeli government approved a truce with Hezbollah in Lebanon on Tuesday and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked US President Joe Biden for his “involvement in securing the ceasefire agreement”.

Netanyahu’s office said 10 ministers voted in favour and one opposed the agreement. In the call, Netanyahu told Biden that he appreciated his “understanding that Israel will maintain its freedom of action in enforcing it”, his office said.

Biden said the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah will take effect at 4am local time (0200 GMT) on Wednesday after both sides accepted an agreement brokered by the United States and France.

The accord, clearing the way for an end to a conflict that has killed thousands of people since it was ignited by the Gaza war last year, was designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities, Biden said in remarks at the White House.

Biden said the United States would lead a fresh effort to secure a truce in Gaza. Now Hamas has a choice to make. Their only way out is to release the prisoners, including American citizens, and, in the process, bring an end to the fighting, which would make possible a surge of humanitarian relief, he added.

“Over the coming days, the United States will make another push with Turkiye, Egypt, Qatar, Israel and others to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza.”

The Lebanon ceasefire agreement requires Israeli troops to withdraw from south Lebanon and Lebanon’s army to deploy in the region, officials say. Hezbollah would end its armed presence along the border south of the Litani River.

Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib said the Lebanese army would be ready to have at least 5,000 troops deployed in southern Lebanon as Israeli troops withdraw, and that the United States could play a role in rebuilding infrastructure destroyed by Israeli strikes.

His surprise death will shake the region’s destiny again, leaving Hamas leaderless, Gaza without any semblance of governance and Israel able to claim that a key war aim has been met at last and at a huge cost in lives. All this raises the previously slim possibility of a ceasefire and hostage release in Gaza. And if that takes place there is a narrow pathway to a de-escalation across the region even as a war rages in Lebanon and the prospect of Israeli retaliation against Iranian missile strikes looms large.

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Mr Sinwar, aged 61, spent years planning the attack on October 7th 2023 in which thousands of Hamas fighters caught Israel by surprise, bursting through the Gaza border and killing nearly 1,200 and taking back 250 hostages. Since then he had been in hiding, lurking underground in a labyrinth of tunnels, communicating with his minions through hand-written notes and runners, and eschewing mobile-phones which could be tracked. Holed up in the filth and darkness for much of the past year he appeared to be just as in control of events as world leaders in their plush offices; inspecting the Israeli hostages; negotiating through proxies with the CIA; and directing military attacks.

He was top of the hit-list for the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) as its armoured divisions tore up the coastal strip and its aircraft pounded it. In the end it wasn’t massive force or high-tech intelligence that caught him, but a chance encounter. According to initial reports he was with two other men at night near Rafah. Spotted by an IDF foot patrol which was accompanied by tanks he was killed by the ensuing fire. The patrol had not been searching for him and his body was only identified the day after when a drone surveyed the half-ruined building where he had been sheltering.

Mr Sinwar believed that his attack on Israel would mark the beginning of the end of the Jewish state. A Hamas enforcer since the movement was founded in the 1980s, he spent 23 years in an Israeli prison, after being sentenced for murdering four Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel. Released in a prisoner exchange in 2011, he began planning what would become the October 7th attack when he returned to Gaza, according to Israeli intelligence. Documents captured by Israel suggest that he engaged with Hizbullah, another Iran-backed militia, based in Lebanon, in the hope of co-ordinating a multiple-front attack on Israel. But while Hamas achieved its immediate objective on October 7th, overwhelming IDF bases on Gaza’s borders and massacring Israelis, Hizbullah made do with firing short-range rockets. The IDF put reinforcements on the Lebanon border and evacuated civilians near it. Then it invaded Gaza.

There are two views of Mr Sinwar’s legacy within Israeli intelligence. Some believe he made a fatal mistake, thinking that the IDF would be too risk-averse to send its soldiers into Gaza city. “Sinwar thought he knew Israeli society and that it had gone soft,” says one analyst. Others think he was motivated by fanaticism. “Sinwar was fully prepared to sacrifice Gaza and its people,” says a senior IDF officer who has spent years studying the Sinwar file. Either way the consequences of his attack have been no triumph even by his brutal standards. Israel has reduced Hamas’s military wing to a husk, although in the process laid waste to Gaza, killed over 40,000 people and induced global outrage. The IDF has decapitated Hizbullah’s leadership too. And while Iran has launched missile attacks at Israel, most recently on October 1st, Israel has re-established military deterrence by striking at Iranian proxies across the region and, possibly, by retaliating directly against Iran with air strikes in the coming days.

Three giant questions now loom. One is what happens to Hamas. It has a leadership vacuum that could see its remaining grip on Gaza slip away. Israel has now eliminated the troika of hardliners that had control of the organisation, Mr Sinwar, Muhammad Deif and Marwan Issa, along with at least half of the movement’s senior leadership in Gaza. In addition to being the boss in Gaza since 2017, Mr Sinwar was the overall leader of the movement for the past three months, replacing Ismail Haniyeh, head of its political bureau who was assassinated by Israel in Tehran on July 31st.

Hamas still has thousands of fighters in Gaza, who are now in what the IDF calls “guerilla mode,” having lost most of their commanders. Mr Sinwar’s brother and right-hand man is mentioned as potential interim commander in Gaza, but is more of a local strongman, without leadership heft beyond Gaza. Some Israeli analysts anticipate a vacuum in which some Gazans oppose Hamas and local leaders come to the fore. Hamas has an “outside” leadership mainly based in Qatar, Turkey and Lebanon. The surviving senior figure of this wing, former politburo chief Khaled Meshal, a rival of Mr Sinwar, may take up the reins. He is a more pragmatic figure and has been opposed to the relationship with Iran, which under Messrs Haniyeh and Sinwar intensified.

That leads to the second question: whether the conditions may now be right for a ceasefire in Gaza. What remains of Hamas may try to do a deal using the remaining 101 Israeli hostages (around half of whom are presumed dead) in order to trigger a truce which allows it to try to keep control of the strip, or its leaders to secure safe passage from it. In a statement announcing Sinwar’s death, Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, offered this prospect to those holding hostages. “Those who lay down their arms, we will allow them to leave and live.” The Israeli government has already reached out to the mediators who had been handling ceasefire talks.

Mr Sinwar had demanded a full and permanent withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza as a condition for such a deal. Mr Netanyahu, despite the entreaties of his security chiefs, adamantly opposed such a step. Now he may have an incentive to accept a deal, which the Biden administration has also been urging upon him, if Hamas is indeed prepared to lower its demands. Mr Netanyahu, whose popularity collapsed after the October 7th attacks, may fancy he can stage yet another revival in his long career of improbable comebacks. Outside of a wing of religious extremists inside the cabinet, Israel has little interest in taking responsibility for Gaza let alone rebuilding it. If an alternative governing authority of some kind takes over notional responsibility following a ceasefire, it is at least possible that the strip’s future is something other than permanent destitution and anarchy or eventual annexation.

The final question is whether the prospect of a ceasefire and release of hostages in Gaza could lead to a broader de-escalation across the region. Iran’s leaders may now want this, at least temporarily. While they and their proxies including Hizbullah and the Houthis in Yemen claim to be fighting with Israel in sympathy towards the Palestinians, they are also participants in a parallel struggle between Israel and the Iranian regime. Still, after the devastation wrought on Hamas and Hizbullah their appetite to fight this struggle may be waning. Both Mr Sinwar and Hassan Nasrallah, the chief of Hizbullah, have been killed by Israel. There may be more pain to come. On October 17th America bombed Houthi sites in Yemen, while Iran is awaiting Israel’s retaliation against its missile attack: Israel is most likely to target military sites after America objected to it hitting Iran’s nuclear or oil facilities.

Does Israel believe it can safely stop fighting? Mr Sinwar succeeded in landing the most grievous blow on the Jewish state in its history. But Israel has now gone a long way to re-establishing military deterrence—albeit at huge reputational cost outside the Middle East and at enormous human cost in Gaza. The long-term war between Israel and Iran isn’t over, nor is the tragedy of the stateless Palestinians. Still it is possible to see a route out: a calibrated Israeli retaliation on Iran; a ceasefire negotiation in Gaza and a de-escalation in Lebanon. Mr Sinwar would hate to hear it but his death creates an opportunity for Israel to take an off-ramp that could, perhaps, lead to an end to this war.

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