During the first phase of the deal, which will last for 42 days, Hamas will release 33 of the roughly 100 Israeli hostages it has held for more than 15 months, leaving roughly two-thirds of them behind. Israel will withdraw some of its forces from inside Gaza and release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. The pause will allow for desperately needed humanitarian aid to get to Gaza unimpeded by the realities of the war.

However, there’s no current finalized agreement for what happens once the first phase ends, which is projected to fall around the beginning of March, or whether either side breaks the terms of the deal before then.

The framework, according to the White House, calls for Hamas to release all of the remaining living Israeli hostages and for Israel to withdraw all of its troops from the enclave.

There is language in the deal that calls for a continuation of the six-week pause in fighting if a deal is close to getting accomplished but didn’t before the expiration of that time frame.

“President Trump is actually inheriting the most difficult part of this,” Alex Plitsas, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council, told the Washington Examiner. “Both Israel and Hamas have diametrically opposed end states that they’re seeking and that’s a large gap that they have to bridge to get a resolution.”

The two sides have irreconcilable viewpoints, raising questions about whether the mediators who brokered the agreement will be able to get both sides to positions that allow the pause to become permanent.

Hamas wants to “expel” Israel from the land, as one official said after the ceasefire was announced, and Israel has, up to this point, refused any effort to get them to agree to permanently end the war due to concerns that Hamas will reconstitute and continue to pose a threat to their national security. Israel does not want to return to the pre-Oct. 7 world, where Hamas runs the enclave.

Senior Hamas leader Khalil al Hayya gave a televised speech Wednesday from Qatar, not Gaza, where he said the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack that resulted in the killing of roughly 1,200 people and kidnapping of about 250 others will be “a source of pride for our people … to be passed down from generation to generation,” according to English-language news service of the German Press Agency (DPA).

“Hamas is about survival and what it wants at the end of day is for it to continue to exist as an organization and live to fight another day,” Plitsas added. “What can Israel live with that will be sufficient for Hamas to want to give up the remainder of the hostages, and that will be the conundrum that everyone will be facing six weeks from now, if all 33 of these hostages are released, and the deal is executed accordingly.”

Hamas, which governed Gaza for more than 15 years before the attack on Oct. 7, “hopes” that at the end of the six-week pause, the Israel Defense Forces will leave so “they will be able to move back in, back up, and govern and provide policing services and public services,” former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper told the Washington Examiner.

On the other side, two hard-right members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s governing coalition have threatened to pull out if Israel agrees that this will be the end of the war. One of them recently bragged about sabotaging previous iterations of the ceasefire proposals.

There will also be a new administration coming into power in Washington next week, which had not been involved in any of the negotiations until recently. The team of U.S. officials that were involved in the negotiations over the last 15 months included Brett McGurk, President Joe Biden’s longtime Mideast adviser, CIA Director Bill Burns, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan.

They worked together with members of President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming team, primarily his appointed Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, to get this deal across the finish line this week. Trump warned multiple times in recent weeks that there would be “hell to pay” for Hamas if they didn’t release the hostages by his inauguration, though he rarely provided additional details into what that could entail.

“I think Steve Witkoff has been a terrific partner in this, and also President-elect Trump in making clear that he wants to see this deal go forward, and go forward before January 20th,” Blinken said earlier this week. “And of course, everyone wants to know – and it’s very useful as well to have Steve a part of this – they want to make sure that the deal that the President’s put on the table and that we’ve negotiated, the Trump administration will continue to back.”

Witkoff’s participation demonstrated to both sides that any deal they agreed upon during the waning days of the Biden administration would be upheld by Trump’s team.

However, when they go back to the negotiating table for how to end the war, it will be with Trump’s team, which, by conventional wisdom, will be more pro-Israel than its predecessor.

Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Mike Waltz, said the incoming administration would support Israel if it decided to restart military operations in Gaza against Hamas once the ceasefire expires. This already happened once, with the weeklong ceasefire deal that occurred in November 2023, which was the last time Hamas released any hostages.

“We’ve made it very clear to the Israelis, and I want the people of Israel to hear me on this: If they need to go back in [to Gaza], we’re with them,” he said. “Hamas is not going to continue as a military entity and it’s certainly not going to govern Gaza.”

Israel’s military has decimated Gaza, pulverizing much of the enclave’s infrastructure over the last 15 months. A majority of the population has been displaced, in some cases several times. There are concerns about starvation and a lack of essential aid, especially as winter continues, and the death toll is believed to be around 45,000 people, civilians, and terrorists.

Despite the overwhelming destruction of Gaza, Hamas fighters have been able to sporadically carry out attacks against Israeli forces and continue to hold the hostages without their locations getting uncovered.

“We’ve seen over the course of the last year plus massive troop deployments inside the Gaza Strip, troops all over the place, and it still isn’t sufficient to get into every nook and cranny of Gaza, to the extent that Hamas has still been able to conceal over 100 hostages displaced or dispersed off the Gaza strip in a vast tunnel network,” Plitsas added.

Killing every Hamas fighter is “not really a plausible or possible objective,” according to the American Enterprise Institute’s Brian Carter, adding that any new recruits that the group has gained over the course of the war have not been trained and “don’t have the experience like the fighters that conducted Oct. 7, who fought the IDF in the days and weeks afterward had.”

Israel set out three objectives after the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, two of which it mostly accomplished, in Carter’s perspective: securing the release of the hostages and the destruction of Hamas’s military capabilities, but it has yet to achieve the third, which was the “destruction of Hamas as a government.”

“You cannot have an entity of any type, at least with any real capability right on your border who’s committed to killing your people and and and ending your state. And so that’s what needs to be addressed,” Esper added.

The Biden administration believed the long-term pathway to regional stability would include a revitalized Palestinian Authority that would govern both Gaza and the West Bank and Palestinian statehood, but Netanyahu never affirmed that strategy and actively denigrated the possibility of the two-state solution.