There could hardly be a more fragile ceasefire than that announced in Gaza, but diplomats across the Middle East, America and Europe will be working flat out to try and mould it into a longer peace.
On the surface there is little cause for optimism. The deal is shorn of the language of ideals, morals or hope. Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to continue Israel’s offensive by moving into south Gaza when the 4-5 day truce ends.
But realpolitik of the war in Gaza for both sides will provide diplomats with a chink from which they may be able to carve a more meaningful ceasefire.
“We are at war, and the war will continue until all our goals are achieved,” said prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of the Israeli cabinet meeting which approved the deal late on Tuesday night.
Hamas, for its part, has taken a brutal pummelling. Forty-six days of airstrikes, artillery bombardment and close quarters combat has left its northern divisions in tatters and much of its vital infrastructure and leadership decimated.
Israel, too, must face reality, military and political. At the start of the conflict, it estimated there were 30,000-40,000 Hamas fighters in Gaza.
It has since killed an estimated 14,000 people in its stated military objective of “ending” the organisation and its infrastructure in Gaza but, of those, just 4,300 were adult males, fewer still actual fighters.
The hard truth Israeli military strategists now face is this: for the most part, Hamas, like legions of terrorist insurgents before them, have stashed their grab-bags and vanished into the general population in the south of the Gaza strip.
Most will go unnoticed for what the vast majority of combatants the world over really are: poor and uneducated boys led by cultish thugs and grasping psychopaths.
Trying to kill them within a zone – that Israel itself has designated safer – risks collateral damage on a scale that even the cold legal logic of proportionality in war would struggle to justify; the projected military gains will be too slight to justify the likely civilian carnage.
Humanitarian crisis
Israel also has a unique humanitarian crisis on its hands, and one that could yet prove its undoing.
In most wars of the type being fought in Gaza, much of the potential humanitarian fallout is mitigated by people fleeing. But in Gaza, mass migration is not possible. Some 2.3 million people are sealed into a crowded hellhole into which only a trickle of food, water and power is flowing.
Israel’s hardmen like to say they don’t care what the world thinks when it comes to protecting the Jewish homeland. But if Gaza’s ragged millions start to starve or succumb to infectious diseases such as cholera and typhoid this winter it won’t be long before commentators like me start to recall the ghettos of Poland and Ukraine that our grandparents died in.