The joy was great on Monday when 20 Israeli hostages were handed over and buses with Palestinian prisoners rolled into Gaza. But there are concerns about the future, says Anders Persson, associate professor and researcher at Linnaeus University.
When it comes to what should happen, what timelines apply, how Hamas will be disarmed and when it will happen, how Gaza will be governed in the future and who will finance it all. These are questions that seem to have been pushed into the future and people are not quite in agreement, he says.
The reason we are where we are today is that previous peace processes have failed.
Security vacuum
The agreement includes as much as possible to agree on at a given time, says Anders Persson, but the fact that it pushes important issues into the future is a weakness.
Right now, Gaza is in what is called a post-conflict phase.
Such societies are often very dangerous. With a security vacuum, anarchy, people running around with weapons. It's a very unstable phase that can lead to new conflicts, says Anders Persson.
What happens if a perpetrator commits a mass shooting, or triggers a suicide bomb, or some kind of terrorist act or politically motivated attack on either side? Does it derail the process?
"Everything can go wrong"
The UN's former Middle East envoy Tor Wennesland is on the same line. He sees the prisoner exchange as a step in the right direction, but sees several obstacles ahead.
Everything can go wrong, he tells Norwegian NRK.
Wennesland refers, among other things, to the fact that Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that the war will continue and significant resistance within the Israeli government to the release of prisoners.
Anders Persson says that US President Donald Trump has every reason to be proud of the ceasefire, but emphasizes that the future will show whether he will continue to hold on to his commitment in the coming years.
Even in the best scenario, if everything goes like clockwork, there are no long-term political solutions to the Israel-Palestine conflict that have been presented here. They are absent. Which will probably become a source of various types of instability in the future.
