In a recent poll carried out by Israel’s Channel 12 TV, two-thirds of respondents said they believed internal rifts were the greatest threat to Israel’s security, compared to 28 per cent who believed the government propaganda on security threats and endless war on seven fronts.
In a serious threat to the integrity of Israel’s Army, thousands of reservists and former officers and soldiers have been signing petitions demanding an immediate end to the war on Gaza, mainly because it has not achieved any of the Israeli government’s declared goals and is unlikely to do so in either the short or longer terms.
In the nearly daily protests held by the families of the remaining 59 Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, and in a major embarrassment for Netanyahu, the participants have stopped appealing to the Israeli premier to exert efforts to release their loved ones, addressing US President Donald Trump instead.
Trump, who marked 100 days in office this week, fulfilled an election campaign pledge to try to stop the war and release the Israeli hostages as soon as he got into the White House. Unfortunately, however, he did not follow up on his pledge and gave Israel the green light to resume its genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza, believing that his close ally could get a better deal than the one mostly negotiated by former Democratic Party president Joe Biden.
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to the Middle East as well as to almost all other parts of the world, who played an influential role in concluding the ceasefire deal on 17 January, has stated that the resumption of the Israeli operations could be useful in putting pressure on Hamas to agree to a new deal placing tough conditions on the group that were not mentioned in the original agreement, such as disarming and ceasing to have any role in running Gaza.
The ceasefire agreement agreed by Israel after months of lengthy mediation efforts by Egypt, Qatar, and the United States clearly stated that the key aim was to gradually end the war, ensure the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, and allow the proceeding to a third and final stage of reconstruction of the devastated Strip without the forced displacement of its population.
Instead, Netanyahu showed early on that he had no intention of respecting the ceasefire agreement. No negotiations were held on the second stage of the deal when they were due to start 16 days after the fighting stopped. Israel did not redeploy its troops along the border between Egypt and Gaza or fully withdraw from the Rafah Crossing and the entire Salaheddine Corridor 50 days after the ceasefire came into effect.
Meanwhile, and instead of respecting a commitment to maintain the ceasefire and other measures on the free flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza as long as negotiations continued on the second stage of the deal, Israel resumed the arbitrary killing of Palestinians in huge numbers as soon as the first 42-day stage ended and 25 Israeli prisoners held by Hamas were released.
Shortly before resuming its military operations on 18 March, Israel renewed the use of much-needed humanitarian aid, fuel, and electricity as weapons of war in Gaza to force Hamas into submission and declared the total closure of all borders leading into Gaza on 2 March.
Former Israeli intelligence chiefs and senior army commanders have agreed that Netanyahu and his extremist ministers, who have previously been barred entry to the United States for being members of Zionist terrorist groups, do not want the war in Gaza to stop because that would lead to the downfall of their government and accountability for the massive failures that led to the success of the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas against Israeli military posts along the border with Gaza and in nearby settlements.
Unfortunately, the new US administration has, among many other measures, reversed a decision by the former Biden administration not to receive the extremist Israeli ministers who have a record of membership of racist and terrorist groups, such as Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was welcomed in Washington this week.
After nearly two months of silence, Trump has finally recognised that the Israeli siege of Gaza, and its depriving people there of food and medicine, should come to an end. However, it is not only food and medicine that the Palestinians need. First and foremost, they need an immediate end to this meaningless war in order to save Palestinian lives, mostly those of women and children that have been lost on a massive scale for over the past six weeks.
According to Director-General of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Pierre Krahenbuhl, a “new inferno” has been unleashed on Gaza following the restarting of the Israeli war.
“Gaza is experiencing and enduring... death, injury, multiple displacements, amputations, separation, disappearances, starvation, and the denial of aid and dignity on a massive scale, and just when the all-important ceasefire led people to believe they had survived the worst, a new inferno was unleashed,” Krahenbuhl said.
“This horror and dehumanisation will haunt us for decades to come,” he told the annual Global Security Forum in Doha. He noted that over 400 aid workers and 1,000 healthcare workers have been killed by Israel in Gaza, including 36 from the Red Cross and Red Crescent Organisation.
Egypt is not giving up on its efforts to reach a new ceasefire deal, and Hamas has already declared that it has agreed to an Egyptian plan, backed by the Arab Summit held in Cairo in March as well as the EU, the African Union, and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), that would hand over governance to a Palestinian non-partisan entity that would mainly handle the task of rehabilitation and reconstruction in Gaza.
What has been missing for many months in this brutal Israeli war is a recognition by Israel’s government that killing thousands more Palestinians will never bring peace, assure Israel’s security, or lead to the release of its remaining prisoners held by Hamas.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 1 May, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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