But no one is certain that Israel’s current extremist government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will actually stop its aggression in which more than 3600 mostly civilian Lebanese were indiscriminately killed and nearly 16,000 injured.

While expectations were high that a deal was close between Lebanon’s Hizbullah and Israel following weeks of shuttle diplomacy led by US envoy, Amos Hochstein, the near consensus nonetheless was that Netanyahu and his extremist government can only survive if a permanent state of war drags on, whether in Lebanon, Gaza or elsewhere in the region. Maintaining an ongoing war for the longest period possible is clearly the only way for Netanyahu to avoid accountability, not just over the Hamas attack on 7 October, but also a series of alleged corruption and bribery charges he has been facing over the past five years.  

Netanyahu’s right wing coalition, which includes extremist ministers charged with being members of terrorist organisations, is also pressing hard to keep the war going without end; they believe that this is their golden opportunity to expel Palestinians from their land in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, replacing them with blood-thirsty settlers. In fact, they would love to expand their settlement project to Southern Lebanon as well.  

Moreover, judging by the painful experience of endless rounds of lengthy negotiations to stop the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza over the past 14 months, during which top US officials including President Joe Biden declared several times that a deal was “very close,” experts on the Israeli negotiation style could not exclude the possibility that Netanyahu will come up with a last-minute new demand leading to the collapse of the talks and resuming war.

After killing and injuring thousands of Hizbullah members using pagers and walkie-talkies as bombs in mid-September, and later assassinating the man who had been the leader and symbolic figure of the Shiite group for more than three decades, Hassan Nasrallah, along with nearly all first-tier leaders of the Iran-backed group, Netanyahu clearly chose to escalate the war in Lebanon and start a ground invasion in early October in order to lift worldwide and local pressure to end the war in Gaza and reach a deal with Hamas.

With the scenes of massive destruction and entire neighbourhoods wiped out in the capital Beirut as well as other key cities, towns and villages in the south and beyond, the same world leaders who were pressing for an end of the war in Gaza are now pleading with Netanyahu not to repeat the same nightmare scenario in Lebanon.

At the same time, the Israeli attacks and inhumane siege of Palestinians living in northern Gaza have become a relatively secondary story. The norm was that Israeli occupation troops would kill an average of 70 to 100 Palestinians a day without much world attention. The World Food Program, the World Health Organization, UNICEF and all manner of credible international organisations are now warning that famine is imminent in northern Gaza, but those appeals are unheeded as diplomatic effort was concentrated to end the war in Lebanon.

If a deal to stop the war in Lebanon is approved by Netanyahu and his extremist government, the Israeli premier is likely to brag about the deadly blows he has dealt to Hizbullah and its military capabilities, claiming that relentless, indiscriminate attacks by the Israeli Air Force against Lebanese targets have diminished nearly 80 per cent of the group’s reserve of missiles. However, what this line of thinking fails to recognise is that he has remained unable to enable Israelis to return to their homes along the border with Lebanon for nearly three months.

Moreover, the claims of diminishing Hizbullah’s military capabilities ring hollow when on Sunday alone, the armed group managed to fire more 340 missiles, short and medium range, hitting key Israeli towns, including the capital, Tel Aviv, in retaliation for the Israeli bombing of a residential area in the capital Beirut a day earlier, in which 30 civilians were killed.

Experts would differ on whether the change of administrations in Washington and the re-election of former Republican President Donald Trump is one reason why Netanyahu might agree to end the war in Lebanon. Yet, whatever the reasons, a similar effort should be exerted to bring Israel to stop the ongoing, bloody onslaught and deliberate starvation of more than 2.4 million Palestinians living in Gaza.

Certainly, the Biden administration’s veto at the UN Security Council last week to prevent the adoption of a resolution supported by the remaining 14 Council members to end the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza was outrageous and further confirmation that this administration was never serious about the desire to end the war.

However, one small ray of light flickered late last week when the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague approved a long-standing request by its prosecutor general to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity they ordered against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

The ICC decision provided a little hope for justice, stating the facts for what they are, even if Netanyahu and Gallant were unlikely to be arrested and put on trial as suspected war criminals. It was a rare moment in which a respected world court backed by 124 nations stated what the peoples of the entire world have acknowledged and denounced: The insane Israeli genocide of Palestinians must end immediately, and those who killed more than 44,000 Palestinians must be held accountable, if we are ever to claim that we live in a world subject to law.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 28 November, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly