In the context of yet another attempt to restart negotiations to reach a truce agreement in Gauzean Israeli mission is leaving for Doha today, but it differs from the previous ones in terms of its composition.

So this time, its members will not be top officials, but experts from the Mossad, the Internal Security Service and the military. This change is part of the decision by the negotiators of Egypt, Qatar and the United States to follow a different tactic.

Different tactics

As leaked earlier this week, the goal of the mediators is to get Israel and Hamas to agree on purely practical issues of secondary strategic importance, such as increasing the flow of humanitarian aid or even implementing the proposal of G.G. of the UN, Antonio Guterres, for a cessation of hostilities lasting a few days, in order to complete the vaccination of the children of Gaza against poliomyelitis, which has been on the rise in recent months. As for the more serious issues concerning the sovereignty regime in the “Philadelphia Axis” and the operation of the Rafah outpost – these are planned to be left for later resolution.

The lessons of the past

This negotiating tactic is not new. It had been successfully tested in the early 1980s, when Israel and Egypt were called upon to implement the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Sinai Peninsula, as stipulated in the 1978 Camp David peace treaty.

Recalling the period when she was appointed as a member of the legal service of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, speaking in a television interview, the 94-year-old professor of the Law School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ruth Lapidot, the exact definition of the border line between the Israeli resort of Eilat and Egyptian town of Taba on the shores of the Red Sea had become extremely difficult because there were differences in the maps that the two sides had attached to the accompanying protocols of the previous negotiations. Recalling the difficulties that had arisen in the one-on-one meetings with her Egyptian counterparts, she pointed out that “every time the word ‘sovereignty’ came up in the discussion, deadlock followed. But when the individual ‘small’ issues were regulated one after the other, the solution to the difficult issues of sovereignty and security appeared before our eyes almost by itself.”

It is therefore possible that Egyptian and American diplomacy did not forget the manner in which those long-ago Israeli-Egyptian bilateral negotiations were conducted, which resolved an issue undoubtedly easier than what is pending in Gaza today. However, this may explain the persistent optimism of State Department officials, who do not rule out the possibility of restarting negotiations for a ceasefire and the release of hostages, even within the next few days.