Those who have known Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu up close have said on numerous occasions that he thinks of himself as a leader like the British war-time leader Winston Churchill.
I remembered this when I came across a news story earlier this week that quoted Netanyahu as saying that he would keep waging war on Gaza, in its 112th day at the time of writing, “until complete victory.”
This grandiose uttering came ironically enough one day after the news broke that the Israeli army had suffered its heaviest toll since the outbreak of the war early last October. In a dramatic scene worthy of a Hollywood movie, two buildings collapsed on 21 Israeli soldiers on 22 January who were operating 600 yards west of Kibbutz Kissufim, according to the Israeli army.
Press reports indicated that the soldiers were mining the two buildings in an area that the Israelis had apparently been clearing in order to build a buffer zone on the border of the Gaza Strip to provide increased security to Israeli villages not far from the border.
An Israeli official quoted in the Wall Street Journal on 24 January said a “temporary security buffer zone can be part of the demilitarisation of Gaza.”
The previous day, Netanyahu vowed to continue fighting in Gaza “until complete victory” after the news of the loss of the 21 soldiers, plus another three in a different place, had shocked the Israeli people. In the meantime, Israel was involved in discussions with Egyptian, Qatari, and US mediators to reach an agreement with Hamas to release the Israeli hostages in Gaza and on a much longer humanitarian truce in the fighting.
Initially, the Hamas leaders insisted on a permanent truce. However, it seems that they later relented, and at the time of writing it seems that this truce will be for two months. If a final agreement along these lines is announced in the next few days, the US administration, Egypt, and Qatar hope that the truce can be extended at the end of 60 days and turned into what they hope will be a permanent ceasefire. The only hurdle is the Israeli prime minister and his far-right governing coalition.
Netanyahu’s insistence on continuing Israeli military operations in Gaza “until complete victory” has become a complicating factor in the regional and international pursuit for a permanent ceasefire. However, despite such intransigence, at least publicly, Netanyahu’s office still hailed the talks as “constructive,” while saying that there were still “great gaps” between the positions of Israel and Hamas.
On 26 January, a White House readout said that US President Joe Biden had called Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi the same day and that both leaders had “affirmed that all efforts must now be made to conclude a deal that would result in the release of all hostages together with a prolonged humanitarian pause in the fighting.”
To show his commitment to an extended humanitarian “pause,” Biden asked Director of the CIA William Burns to fly to Europe to meet senior Egyptian and Qatari officials, in addition to the director of the Israeli Mossad, on 28 January in Paris with the aim of facilitating mediation efforts to reach a plan that would be implemented in three phases, each seeing the release of a group of Israeli hostages.
The first phase would concern children, women, and the elderly. The second would witness the release of female Israeli soldiers, and in the third Hamas would release male soldiers and reservists. The number of Palestinian prisoners and detainees to be freed from Israeli prisons and detention centres would be determined as the mediation efforts progressed.
The US administration, the British and other Western governments, and the Arab governments, foremost among them Egypt, have been pushing hard over the last four weeks for an extended humanitarian truce in Gaza, believing, rightly or wrongly, that once this is in place the prospect of a major and uncontrollable military escalation in the Middle East and the Red Sea region will be averted.
There has been a growing realisation that if Netanyahu keeps on fighting in Gaza until his unreachable “complete victory,” the Middle East as a whole will face a serious risk of the regional war that nobody wants. Regrettably, the risks of escalation abound.
In a readout released on 28 January, Biden said that “America’s heart is heavy. Last night, three United States service members were killed and many wounded [30 troops were wounded] during an unmanned aerial drone attack on our forces stationed in northeast Jordan…While we are still gathering the facts of this attack, we know it was carried out by radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq.”
This was the first time since 7 October last year that US soldiers have died in a military attack. The US government said that it would retaliate in a time and manner of its choosing.
An immediate and durable ceasefire in Gaza has become more urgent than ever in the light of this attack on a US military post in Jordan. The risks today are no longer only limited to military escalation, and instead there is a risk that the US will find itself forced to take an active part in the proxy war raging in the region.
The writer is former assistant foreign minister.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 1 February, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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