Dr. Cherkaoui Roudani

This observation by Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations captures the profound metamorphosis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. War has not disappeared; it has evolved into a system of governance, where violence is converted into a tool of calibrated adjustment. The October 2025 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas therefore represents neither peace nor an end to hostilities. It establishes a temporary architecture of disorder in which each actor seeks not to terminate the war but to master its tempo, regulate its intensity, and extract political dividends from its persistence. On the ground, the war has not fallen silent; it has merely changed form.

To grasp this new reality, one must recognize how massive bombardments have yielded to a diffuse, multi-dimensional conflict defined by constant surveillance, precision strikes, cyber operations, and diplomacy under duress. The apparent calm conceals a reconfiguration of regional power in which humanitarian convoys become levers of coercion, hostage exchanges act as diplomatic signals, and negotiations evolve into arenas of veiled rivalry. The thunder of bombs has faded, replaced by the quieter murmur of calculations and cross-border antagonisms. Within this strategic silence, Israel, Hamas, Arab powers, and international patrons strive to maintain a fragile equilibrium, one where peace no longer ends the war but prolongs it by other means.

Fractured Rationalities: The Limits of Strategic Control

The notion of perfectly rational actors navigating a coherent long-term plan is deceptive. Each protagonist operates under domestic constraints, political survival instincts, and the fog of uncertainty. Israel’s “defensive empire” is as much about maintaining Netanyahu’s fragile coalition as about strategic design. Hamas, far from omniscient, balances ideology with day-to-day endurance, improvising within scarcity rather than executing a grand plan. Even mediators like Washington, Cairo, and Doha move within shifting sands of competing interests, limited leverage, and public fatigue. What emerges is not mastery, but an ongoing negotiation with chaos.

Israel: Deterrence Without Governance

For Israel, the truce is not a concession but a reorganization of the front. After a prolonged campaign of attrition, the Netanyahu government seeks to convert coercive power into diplomatic capital. The partial withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza’s urban centers follows a dual rationale: limiting the human and political cost of a visible occupation while preserving full strike capacity. By maintaining control over airspace, maritime routes, and border zones, Israel enforces an asymmetric peace, a coercive stability grounded in surveillance and deterrence rather than trust.

This posture embodies a hybrid doctrine aimed at securing without governing and controlling without becoming entrapped. Israel positions itself within a logic of defensive empire, where technological superiority replaces territorial presence and intelligence supremacy outweighs occupation. Yet this logic remains precarious, more reactive than calculated, more a posture of endurance than a strategy of control.

Hamas: Turning Survival into Legitimacy

On the other hand, for Hamas, the truce is a victorious paradox. Though deprived of major military initiative, the movement preserves its political legitimacy. The release of 1,900 Palestinian prisoners is celebrated as a symbolic triumph, proof that resistance can still compel Israel to negotiate. This lull grants Hamas space to rebuild networks, restore financial flows, and reinforce its local roots through a narrative of steadfast resistance amid devastation.

At a deeper level, Hamas capitalizes on collective trauma, transforming mere survival into a claim to legitimacy. In Palestinian memory, the truce is not a compromise but a strategic pause, a breathing space serving a long-term struggle. This deferred temporality, where waiting becomes action, exposes the fragility of a movement trapped between its ideological posture and its existential need to survive.

The Mediators: Stabilizing Without Transforming

Washington, Cairo, and Doha are not pursuing peace in its classical sense but seeking to prevent systemic collapse. The United States aims to contain a regional domino effect, wary that a wider conflagration involving Hezbollah or Iran could undermine alliance structures and destabilize the regional balance it still seeks to preserve. Egypt aspires to reclaim its status as a diplomatic pivot while securing its southern border and reaffirming its role as a credible interlocutor with Washington. Qatar seeks to translate crisis diplomacy into geopolitical leverage, blending mediation with soft-power projection to expand its influence beyond the Gulf.

Yet this risk-management diplomacy does not amount to stability. The so-called regulated disorder rests on theoretical rationality but remains vulnerable to human error, political fatigue, and miscalculation. Any system built on perpetual tension inevitably carries the seeds of its own implosion. The equilibrium of disorder is less a balance than a pause before the next shock.

The Missing Political Actor

No sustainable peace can emerge without reintegrating Palestinian society itself, divided, exhausted, yet still politically conscious. Between a discredited Palestinian Authority and a Hamas imprisoned by its own rhetoric, the true strategic void lies in the absence of a representative political center. The conflict is administered but no longer embodied, managed but no longer lived. The silent majority, disillusioned and detached, remains the great absentee of this equation.

Scenarios of a Managed Stalemate

The truce oscillates between three trajectories: relative consolidation, unstable freeze, and controlled rupture. In the most optimistic scenario, the truce evolves into relative stability. Prisoner exchanges continue, humanitarian corridors are reinforced, and a technocratic, Arab-led governance structure takes shape under international supervision. Egypt and Qatar act as regional guarantors; Israel retains a discreet yet decisive security role; and a weakened Hamas adapts to a monitored environment. This recalls the post-2000 South Lebanon model under UNIFIL supervision, a functional peace without reconciliation.

More plausibly, the region drifts into an unstable freeze. The truce endures without deepening; Israel ties economic recovery to Hamas’s demilitarization, while Hamas sustains latent resistance. Gaza becomes a humanitarian enclave under bureaucratic oversight, a “negative stability” reminiscent of Oslo or post-2008 Gaza, where reconstruction cycles endlessly collapse under renewed bombardment.

Finally, the controlled rupture remains the most cynical yet realistic path. A single rocket, a precision strike, or a border provocation can reignite confrontation. Israel retaliates to reaffirm deterrence; Hamas responds to prove vitality. War no longer erupts fully; it recycles itself within the truce, sustaining a level of tension “useful” to both. This pattern echoes the Israel-Hezbollah frontier since 2006 or the positional warfare in Ukraine between 2015 and 2022, where ceasefires functioned as mechanisms of calibrated exhaustion.

An Instrumental Peace and Its Fragile Foundations

Accordingly, across these trajectories, the ceasefire operates less as a project of reconciliation than as an instrument of governance. Peace becomes strategy, not conviction. The 2025 Israel-Hamas plan does not end the conflict; it codifies an unstable balance between opposing rationalities. Israel seeks to transform military dominance into political stability; Hamas turns endurance into symbolic survival; mediators aim to contain escalation while protecting influence.

Yet the plan remains fundamentally technical, devoid of political vision. Without a framework capable of defining long-term coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, it stands on fragile ground. Building such a system without a political foundation is like pouring concrete on shifting sands: one tremor, one misstep, and the structure collapses.

Put differently, no architecture of security, however sophisticated, can substitute for a political architecture, one that seeks to heal collective memory, transform mistrust into interdependence, and root coexistence within the depth of historical time. Peace without political perspective is merely an extended ceasefire; stability without shared vision is only balance under strain.

Whether through miscalculation, fatigue, or moral erosion, the region’s fragile equilibrium remains one step away from collapse. The real challenge, therefore, is not managing conflict but reinventing the politics of coexistence. Until that dimension lies at the core of the process, the Middle East will not emerge from conflict; it will merely learn to govern it, without yet knowing how to transform it. As long as peace remains a mechanism of containment rather than a framework of shared governance, the region will remain captive to its own unstable equilibrium.

Therefore, it is not war that must be managed; it is peace that must be invented.

Dr. Cherkaoui Roudani