The Israel-Hamas peace agreement could be far-reaching, not just ending the war in Gaza, but also opening a pathway towards a long elusive settlement to the Middle East conflict.
However, that pathway is strewn with formidable obstacles and the deal, signed under pressure from the Trump administration and Arab leaders, does not spell out in detail how regional peace might be achieved.
The breakthrough is remarkable in itself: having inflicted massive damage on its enemies through military force - Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran, Hamas in Gaza - it looked like Israel's doctrine had changed from deterring its adversaries to defeating them.
In other words, Israel was bent on reordering the Middle East through force rather than negotiation.
Not only had Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expanded the ground operation into Gaza City in recent weeks, he had also seemingly destroyed any hope of a negotiated end to the war by launching an airstrike on Hamas’s political leadership in Doha.
He was also waxing about Israel becoming a "super Sparta" - self-sufficient militarily and indifferent to global isolation.
It now appears that attacking Qatar, a key US ally, was a grave mistake which decisively shifted the dynamics in Israel’s relationship with Washington.
President Donald Trump was known to have felt humiliated by the attack and he turned the humiliation on Mr Netanyahu by ordering him to apologise to his Qatari counterpart Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim al-Thani (the apology was reportedly penned by the White House and a senior Qatari official).
Mr Trump was clearly prepared to bully the Israeli prime minister into ending the war in a way that previous US presidents have been unable to do.
The 20-point peace plan itself is a concoction of pre-existing ideas on how to stop the conflict, but critically there is no mention of the outlandish plan to turn Gaza into a tourist riviera, emptied of its population, that President Trump floated after his inauguration.
In September 2024, former US president Joe Biden had presented a similar plan which resulted in the first ceasefire last January, but that proved to be short-lived.
Added to the pressure that Mr Trump was applying after the Doha attack was the French-Saudi initiative at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), which saw 142 countries sign up to the New York Declaration calling for a two-state solution.
Israel’s isolation was looking more and more complete.
When Mr Trump presented the new 20-point plan to Arab and Muslim leaders on the margins of UNGA on 24 September, their acceptance was conditional on no Israeli annexation of the West Bank and no Israeli settlements in Gaza.
While there is a prohibition on the latter, there is no reference in the plan to the West Bank; the US leader has said publicly he would not allow annexation.
The support of Arab leaders, and Turkey, has been key to the breakthrough. Hamas has been under pressure to accept the deal.
The global messages of hope and support have emphasised the need for a two-state solution, with the revival of a Palestinian state seen as the essential outworking of the immediate ceasefire plan.
That’s where the problems could lie.
The peace plan states that "conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognize as the aspiration of the Palestinian people", but only when the Palestinian Authority (PA), which has limited control over the West Bank, is reformed and when working on rebuilding Gaza is at "an advanced stage".
There is certainly plenty of scope for an Israeli government to frustrate progress towards a Palestinian state; it could take years for the reconstruction of Gaza to be "at an advanced stage", and who decides when the PA is reformed?
The slump in trust between Palestinians and Israelis is also an issue; 7 October 2023 remains a generational trauma for ordinary Israelis, while the loss of life in Gaza will imbue an undoubted hatred of Israel by Gazans for years to come.
In June, a Pew Research survey found that only 21% of Israelis agreed that "peaceful coexistence with a Palestinian state is possible," the lowest level since 2013, while a survey in May showed that 59% of Palestinians still believed Hamas was correct to launch the 7 October attacks.
Benjamin Netanyahu faces elections next year - March at the earliest - and a new coalition could be given a mandate to demonstrate more flexibility, should the terms of the peace plan hold.
"A Palestinian state isn’t going to happen any time soon," one Western diplomat told RTÉ News.
"Netanyahu has always been a bit of a pragmatist. He's said there’s not going to be Palestinian state, but if at the next election a different coalition comes in it might suddenly become possible."
Liberal politicians are starting to speak up on the issue ahead of next year’s elections.
"I entered politics to advance separation from the Palestinians in a regional agreement that would lead to two states for two peoples, two states living side by side in security and peace," Yair Golan, head of the newly formed Democrats party, wrote this week in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper.
"As someone who for years tackled the issue from the security angle, including as an officer at West Bank headquarters during implementation of the Oslo Accords in the '90s, and as commander of the Judea and Samaria Division from 2005 to 2007, I can say that the two-state solution is in Israel's strategic interest.
"And I know that the path is no less important than the goal."
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Yair Lapid, a former Israeli prime minister from the centrist Yesh Atid party, which won 24 seats in the 120 seat Knesset in 2022, recently took a more circumspect view in Foreign Affairs magazine.
Israelis, he wrote, will not support a Palestinian state "in the first instance" due to the trauma of 7 October.
However, "most Israelis recognize that the Palestinians exist and that we must one day separate from them".
The burden of proof, Mr Lapid said, was on the Palestinians to demonstrate that they can prevent an organisation like Hamas from seizing power again, to tackle corruption, and to ensure that there was no "failed terror state" on Israel’s borders.
"Israel, for its part, must take annexation off the table and fight far more effectively to end the scourge of violence inflicted on Palestinians by extremist Israeli settlers.
"The former risks sacrificing Israel’s regional integration with no strategic benefit; the latter is a moral stain on the country," he wrote.
The question is whether the Trump administration can keep leaning on the Netanyahu government to stop settlement expansion and attacks by Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
Rage felt by Palestinians there could crystalise into another hardline entity which regards the armed struggle as the only means of defence.
"It will not go by the name 'Hamas’," said Ami Ayalon, a former head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s security service, said in an interview this week.
"But just as Israeli society persists in a state of confusion, humiliation, hatred, revenge, and above all fear after October 7, so does Palestinian society."
A further imponderable is whether Hamas, having given away its only leverage - the hostages - will agree to the next phase of the peace plan ie laying down its weapons in return for amnesty (already Hamas has accused Israel of manipulating parts of the peace deal, including the timeline of prisoner releases).
A key player will be Saudi Arabia. Normalising relations with Riyadh had been a longstanding goal of Benjamin Netanyahu and had almost reached fruition right before the 7 October attacks (one reason for the attack was the Hamas view that the Abraham Accords, under which Saudi Arabia would normalise relations, had cut Palestinians out of the equation).
Last February, Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman said that Saudi Arabia would not establish ties with Israel without the creation of a Palestinian state.
That will require a big shift in Israeli politics, and within the so-called Arab Street.
On the one hand, a Palestinian state looks ever more untenable due to the ferocity of settler land grabs in the West Bank.
But the shift in international opinion, with more recognition of Palestinian statehood by significant world powers, cannot be discounted.
"What you're seeing now, for lots of different reasons, is that European states, Arab states, the United States, are all understanding that the status quo is not tenable, and the two state solution is the only viable solution," said John Lyndon, executive director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP).
"As difficult as it is, there's more propulsion towards actually trying to achieve it than ever before. That, diplomatically, can change attitudes and the realities on the ground."
What’s also true is that after two years, the Palestinian cause has become a burning domestic political issue in the West (Italy slid into a general strike after Israel seized the Gaza Sumud Flotilla and arrested the activists on board).
Polling by ALLMEP last month even found that 55% of MAGA (Make America Great Again) voters in the United States wanted the Trump administration to push back against Israeli annexation of the West Bank, compared to 14% who supported it.
The same poll found that 73% of Israelis would support normalisation with Saudi Arabia even if that entailed the creation of a Palestinian state.
For many reasons, therefore, the conditions for a lasting peace may be more favourable than they first appear.
It will take a tenacious effort by the international community, not least the United States, to turn the once in a generation opportunity into a reality.
