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The Gaza cease-fire is over. What’s next from Israel, Hamas, and the US?

“Tonight, we returned to fighting in Gaza.” That’s what Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said after Israel launched air strikes in the early hours of Tuesday, effectively breaking a two-month cease-fire. Israeli officials said the strikes against Hamas targets were intended to pre-empt terrorist attacks the group was planning against Israeli civilians and were a response to Hamas’s refusal to return more hostages taken on October 7, 2023. The Trump administration publicly backed Israel’s action, which comes as negotiations stalled on advancing to a more permanent cease-fire and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. We turned to our experts to answer the burning questions about this renewal of hostilities.

Why is Israel striking now, and what is it trying to achieve?

Israel’s government has persistently espoused two primary aims of its campaign against Hamas: the total dismantling of Hamas’s military and governance infrastructure and the repatriation of the hostages in its custody. The expiration of the cease-fire between the parties—and the inability of negotiations to generate an extension of that hiatus—together with the active encouragement of hawkish elements within Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition provided the main impetus for a resumption of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) operations in the Gaza Strip to achieve those declared objectives.

—Shalom Lipner is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative who previously worked in foreign policy and public diplomacy during his time at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem, where he served in the administration of seven consecutive Israeli premiers.

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The Israeli airstrikes on Gaza in the early hours of Tuesday morning were not entirely surprising. After all, they followed multiple missed deadlines set by US President Donald Trump and his envoy Steve Witkoff, who have repeatedly tried to get Hamas to extend phase one of the ceasefire agreement. It seems that the terror group realized the impossibility of its political survival in Gaza if it gave up its last remaining leverage in the negotiations, insisting instead on heading into the second phase of the deal. While Israel did indeed violate some of the terms of its agreement by restricting the entry of supplies and materials into the Strip and refusing to proceed to phase two, so did Hamas with its naïveté after its despicable hostage handover parades, which were not supposed to take place as part of the agreement.

It was always understood that neither Israel nor the United States would ever accept the continued presence of Hamas in Gaza, with its arsenal, capabilities, and fighters, as part of a post-war arrangement. There is a resignation to the fact that Israel will try to retrieve as many living hostages as possible before eventually and ultimately returning to kinetic operations against the Islamist group.

—Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib is a resident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs, and founder and director of theRealign For Palestine project.

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Netanyahu made a deliberate choice to return to aggression. War is combat between at least two parties, and Hamas has largely pursued a diplomatic end to the attacks. Netanyahu’s decision definitively ends the hope that the well-being and return of the hostages had become the priority of the government—and would remain so. But the resumption of hostilities does shore up political support from the prime minister’s right flank. There’s no more question that the prime minister values remaining in power over the long-term well-being of his nation or peace and stability in the region. This move gives him the political stability to contain resistance to his domestic moves, whether firing his domestic intelligence chief or his ongoing battles with the judiciary.

—Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley is a nonresident senior fellow at the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative of the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs and at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Abercrombie-Winstanley served as the US ambassador to the Republic of Malta and as special assistant for the Middle East and Africa to the secretary of state. Her Middle East assignments included election monitoring in the Gaza Strip and an assignment where she supported gender equality in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as the first woman to lead a diplomatic mission there.

How is Hamas likely to react?

Hamas, although downgraded significantly as a result of Israel’s assault on Gaza, will likely mobilize the guerrilla forces that it has since reorganized to face off against IDF soldiers, if—and more likely, when—it dispatches them to the battlefield. Thus far, Israel has restricted its initial deployment to air and sea assets, limiting the exposure of its land-based units and leaving an opening for Hamas to engage through dialogue. But precedent suggests that Hamas will now seek to draw Israeli ground troops into Gaza, where it will try to inflict casualties and instigate pressure on Israel’s government to withdraw. Hamas will also redouble its efforts to enlist international support toward achieving that outcome.

—Shalom Lipner

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Hamas has little leverage. The military conflict was never one it could win, and the world has proved to have a high tolerance for dead Palestinian civilians. Hamas leaders’ choice is to succumb now by releasing hostages—possibly buying the lives of civilian leaders and likely being expelled from the Strip—or to be killed along with more civilians. There would be little reason to keep the hostages alive as the government of Israel has now clarified their value is less than Hamas expected. They are truly between a rock and a hard place.

—Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley

What does this mean for the people of Gaza and Israel?

The fundamental problems remain for both Israeli and Gazan societies; Hamas is a menace that is playing with the fate of the remaining hostages, particularly those who are still believed to be alive, while Israeli bombardment and military action will result in the slaughter of hundreds of uninvolved civilians and young ones who have no escape route to leave the fighting zone. Furthermore, Arab diplomacy is likely to continue with half-baked statements that do not explicitly call on Hamas to step down and leave Gaza as has been credibly offered multiple times. Until and unless there is a willingness to state that clear fact and clarify that there will not be a post-conflict period in Gaza unless Hamas is removed, virtually nothing will change for either Palestinians or Israelis.

—Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib

What will Washington do next?

Washington’s decision to greenlight resumed attacks reminds the world that Trump has little interest in or patience for diplomacy. Now Washington’s role is to resist pressure from allies in the region and beyond to bring the killing to a halt. This positioning will further strengthen Trump’s reputation as a “strongman,” the United States’ new role in the world, and Israel’s unique (if temporary) position as having the United States as a dependable ally and supporter.

—Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley

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Judging from the public statements of Trump administration officials, the White House has apparently determined that Hamas sabotaged Witkoff’s mediation, and it has thus bestowed Washington’s blessing upon this renewed Gaza offensive. Taken together with other recent US moves—including this week’s attacks on Houthi positions in Yemen and the president’s tough rhetoric against Iran—it appears that the IDF’s designs for Gaza might constitute an integral part of Trump’s threat of “hell to pay” in the Middle East.

—Shalom Lipner

How does this end?

Any prediction on how this will end is likely to be wrong. What we know is that neither much-needed humanitarian aid nor long-term reconstruction is possible without real security for Israel and for Gazans. The challenge with the Egyptian-led Arab plan is not that it doesn’t outline a useful potential roadmap for reconstruction, but that it skips over the entire question of Hamas and security in the Gaza Strip. At the same time, the chances for Israel to completely destroy Hamas are nil; its ideology will always be attractive to some in Gaza, even as many also blame the group, alongside Israel, for the unfathomable destruction and losses they’re now living through.

The notion that Hamas’s remaining leadership in Gaza would agree to go into exile is problematic, not only because right-wing Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich won’t support ending the war under such conditions (which, if implemented, could bring down Netanyahu’s coalition), but because it’s also unlikely that Hamas leadership in Gaza would agree to such a demand—even if the group’s Doha-based political leadership might prefer that outcome. That means the most likely trajectory of the war is long-term Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip, with no other actors prepared to provide security.

The better alternative remains an Arab force, perhaps commanded by an Arab general under an expanded and revamped US Office of the Security Coordinator (with its mission extended to Gaza), or a model that resembles the Multinational Force & Observers, with an American director general. It is possible that one of those structures might be enough to convince Arab states that the US commitment is there, even if US troops are not. It is unclear whether Israel would accept either model, but it would at least provide a meaningful alternative to a long-term occupation—though for many ultranationalists in the Israeli government coalition, that possibility is a feature, not a bug.

But “likely trajectories” are often overcome by black swan events. And the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program, a complete collapse of the current Syrian regime under Ahmed al-Sharaa, a decision by Egypt to open the Rafah border crossing and allow in Gazans, and the recovery of all living hostages in Gaza through Israeli military operations are all examples of such unlikely events that could change the course of Gaza’s future. All we know for sure is that the continuation of the war puts at risk the lives of the remaining living Israeli hostages, Gazans, IDF soldiers, and humanitarian workers. There is no good answer; there’s simply bad and worse. We will soon find out which one this resumption of the war is.

—Jonathan Panikoff is the director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative and a former deputy national intelligence officer for the Near East at the US National Intelligence Council.