Is the truce in Gaza a success even if it does not extend further? The Council's Ivo Daalder weighs in on CNN with Kate Bolduan.

"Every day there’s no fighting allows two really important things to happen: hostages to be released, to be reunited with their families, and very much needed humanitarian aid to be coming in. And a lot of aid has been coming in of course not enough given the needs that exist in Gaza, but even if the fighting resumes and I assume actually it will even if you get one or two more days of extension, the fighting will resume – the gains that you had of hostages being released, much needed aid coming in are important. And we should never forget that ultimately people are the ones who suffer in war, and they are now being helped at least a little bit.

"I think the challenges continue to be very difficult. A glimmer of hope I think is that the original early fears back immediately after the events of oct. 7 and this would be to a regional conflagration that would not just involve Israel and Gaza but would bring in Hezbollah from the north, perhaps even Iran directly, I think fears of that kind of escalation have died down a little bit. But now there is the concern which has been there really from day 1 and President Biden has been expressing that privately in all kinds of ways and increasingly publicly that the strategy that Israel has embarked upon is not going to be able to succeed in eliminating the threat of Hamas without causing incredible and untold damage to the people in Gaza. And that ultimately the strategy doesn’t have a good sense of what comes after. And so the president, while supporting Israel, something he feels in his core, also given the events of October 7 inevitable for any American and any American president to support them, has used that support to try to convince Netanyahu to find new ways to alter his strategy.

"And he’s been successful to some extent. Israel did not attack Hezbollah, which some people wanted. Israel delayed the ground invasions, didn’t have as many troops in the ground invasion as possible. And of course now we see humanitarian aid coming in which Israel prevented, and hostages coming out. That is all due to President Biden using his private diplomacy to try to get the Israeli government to move in a direction that is more successful than it was initially engaged in.

"It’s sad that politics within and between parties are stopping something that is so obviously needed. We need to help Israel. We need to provide humanitarian aid to the people in Gaza. And we need absolutely to help Ukraine defend itself from the attacks it has been suffering from Russia. This is something that all Americans and frankly Republicans and Democrats ought to be agreeing on. And yet we have been waiting for weeks and weeks and weeks to even get a vote. And we know that if there is a vote in the House and in the Senate, there will be large bipartisan majorities in favor of aid to Ukraine, in favor of aid to Israel, in favor even of humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians and the people in Gaza. And it’s this strange congressional politics that has prevented that.

I remain optimistic, I think the administration remains optimistic. Luckily the Senate Majority Leader and the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are very much in favor of moving forward with the whole package of aid and let’s hope that we will get that vote done as soon as possible and stop the internal politics that is preventing the much-needed aid to reach the people who really need it. And those are the people who are on the ground, finding in these desperate places and in wars that they are facing."
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