It has been two years of ceasefire or no ceasefire in Gaza. Since Israel started its war on the narrow and highly populated and impoverished strip of Palestinian territories, which soon evolved into a genocidal war in the legal term of the word, there have been so many forecasts on the “military prognosis.”
In the early weeks of the war, the questions were: How far Israel would go with its war; how long could the Israeli public opinion tolerate a protracted ground war; and how would Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu use this war to serve his political agenda – essentially with regards to his wish to serve on at the head of the Israeli government and to avert a legal process on allegations of corruption that could effectively damage his long political career and maybe even sent him behind bars.
“Today, when I look back, I have to say that although I did expect Israel to give Palestinians in Gaza, and not just Hamas in Gaza, a very hard time and to actually inflict major damage on Gaza, I did not expect the war to last for two years – with no clear end,” said an Egyptian source with direct association with the Egyptian mediation to end the war.
Having been there for years with Egypt’s mediation of indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas on ceasefire and prisoners' swap, for over two decades, the source said that in the previous wars, since Hamas “took over Gaza in 2007," Israel never opted for such a long war.
He added that looking back, Israel never really opted to administer its war on Gaza with a broader regional context as the case has been with this war during which Israel launched military attacks on southern Lebanon, conducted heavy and repeated raids against the West Bank, conducted a missiles-war against Iran, eliminated top Hamas and Hezbollah leaders and ended up hitting at Hamas targets in the capital of Qatar, an Arab Gulf country that has for long been a mediator in the attempts to end this war or to at least have an extended ceasefire.
Above all, he said, the nature of ground operations that Israel’s occupation army conducted in Gaza is “unprecedented” in width and breadth. “It was incremental, in a way that indicates that the decision to go so far was not taken immediately, at least not from the military perspective, upon the start of the war,” he stated.
“Today, it is not hard at all to say that looking back, maybe Netanyahu had wanted this war to last for that long but he was not sure whether or not he would have the political ability and the military rigor to continue,” the source added.
File Photo: Palestinians jostle for position to get a hot meal, in front of a distribution point at the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip. AFP
From devastating to inhumane
According to Cairo-based foreign diplomats who have been following the war since the start, the internal dynamics in Israel did help Netanyahu to keep his war on against Palestinians in Gaza despite the public uproar over the cost endured by Palestinians. They had registered close to 70,000 deaths, mostly women and children, over 100,000 injuries, mostly crippling, and shocking damage in terms of infrastructure, housing, services and natural and other resources.
In the words of a senior international humanitarian worker, “Gaza, the Strip, not just the city, is no longer a place to be inhibited – not any time near; it is not a place where human beings can live; it is just a large space of wreck”.
Earlier this year, UN assessments had it that it would take years, around 15 years, to remove the rubble that had been caused by the intense military strikes of Israeli occupation and more years to rebuild the houses, health and education services and infrastructure that were destroyed.
“People look at pictures and get shocked, but on the ground, things are a lot more shocking than anything that words could ever describe,” he said.
He added that Gaza “got burned and practically erased under the eyes and ears of the world that has not even been able to get Israel to observe international law and international humanitarian law in terms of entering aid.”
Speaking less than two weeks before the second-year mark of the war, he added, “Let me say it in clear terms, during the past five or maybe even seven months, medical staff in most of Gaza had often no choice but amputate arms and legs of wounded civilians, mostly children, not because it was necessary to opt for this harsh medical procedure but because the doctors don’t have functioning operation rooms or even basic surgical consumables.”
He added that it is essential to recall the scene in which the war on 7 October 2023 began. The war started after close to two decades of economic siege that has been put on Gaza since Hamas took over the Strip. It came after four Israeli wars on Gaza: 2008-2009, 2012,2014 and 2021.
“No full reconstruction was ever possible after any of these wars,” he stated.
What Gazans have after two years of the Israeli genocidal war, he said, is “a highly traumatized population” with so many health ailments that include anything from severe malnutrition, to permanent physical impairments – including serious fertility issues.
“Israel did not just kill those who died – whether they have been counted for already or those who would still be counted for when the rubble is removed one day – Israel killed the present and the future for those who survived the strikes,” said an Egyptian aid worker who has been on site at the borders with Gaza since the early months of the war.
During these months, he said that he had seen people who were moved over to Egyptian medical facilities, on the eastern side of the Suez Canal, who were “simply devastated by the fact that they survived Israeli strikes that killed the rest of their families.” He said he saw people who were crying out loud: “Ya Allah! Why did you take [my family members] and leave me?”
“What we have been seeing has fast moved from the devastating to the inhumane,” he said. “How else could one describe the state of children who were wounded while trying to escape the scene of a strike that killed their parents?”
According to the international humanitarian worker, what aid teams get to see on the Egyptian side of the border with Gaza is only one small part of what is happening on the ground, especially during the past few days after Israel decided to cluster all Palestinians in a tiny part of the land that amounts to less than 20 percent of the entire Gaza Strip.
“We are talking about people who were forced to move from north to south Gaza and then back to the north and now they are being asked to move south again when they are just out of resources, out of energy and actually out of any desire to live,” he said.
He added that part of the “catastrophe” is evident in the pictures showing children and elderly people on a desperate, on-foot journey amidst the rubble and under the heat of the sun. “But there is another part that does not get captured in pictures; those who just decided to stay and face death out of a conviction that they would die anyway, anywhere,” he said.
“There are those who are cutting the furniture of their houses to have wood firewood; those are people who are actually cutting their own homes with their own hands because they know that there is no going back to these homes,” he stated.
File Photo: Palestinians perform funeral prayers over the bodies of victims killed in an Israeli airstrike on a school sheltering displaced people in Gaza AFP
Which Gaza?
On Monday, 6 October, when Egypt started to host diplomatic talks for a way out of the war upon a proposal that was put forward late in September by US President Donald Trump, the international humanitarian worker said that what has survived the Israeli genocidal war is not more than 10 to 15 percent of the entire 365square kilometres Strip. “This applies to everything; Gaza is something of the past – as a place where people can live or even try to live, it is surely something of the past”.
The Trump plan, according to Cairo-based diplomatic sources, discusses humanitarian aid and economic and development initiatives in very vague terms. As it was issued by the White House on 29 September, the diplomats said, the plan does not even refer to the prompt and sufficient entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and it does not specify the nature of reconstruction and economic revival that is included in the plan.
“So, what are we really talking about here; are we talking about a maximum of 500 trucks of Israeli-condoned trucks of humanitarian aid, or are we talking about something more meaningful?” said one of the diplomats who asked to be anonymous. He added, “Also, when we talk about reconstruction what is it exactly that should be in the works? Are we talking about rebuilding the houses, hospitals and schools that the Israeli army has been bombarding since 7 October [2023], or are we talking about the construction of the so-called ‘New Gaza’ that Israeli extremist cabinet members say should be confined to the southern part of the Strip?”
According to several diplomatic and security sources that Al-Ahram Weekly has spoken to since the Trump Plan came out, uncertainty is key. What the Trump Plan offered, they agreed, is just an outline of a plan that needs much work and highly intense talks to be turned into a plan that could be put on the ground in Gaza.
However, these same sources say that it is not even clear what the Gaza Strip in question is, and whether it refers to the entire Strip or only part of it. Nobody seems to have a clear answer or even understanding, and most sources would say that it is very hard to think that Netanyahu would actually walk out of the lands he had taken.
People walk outside the heavily-damaged Al-Farouq mosque in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip. AFP
International and regional
In the opinion of one diplomatic source with close insight in the mediation scheme that Egypt and Qatar are conducting along with Turkey and the US, Netanyahu might agree to order his troops to relocate in parts of Gaza to allow for the transfer of the 20 surviving Israeli hostages held in Gaza since the Toufan Al-Aqsa operation, which Hamas launched on the very early hours of 7 October 2023, on Gaza Batallion under the Israeli Army Southern Command in the Gaza Envelope.
“Once he gets the hostages, he will re-take the parts of the territories that his troops would have moved out of, with – there is no doubt about it,” he said. He added that the world and, for that matter, regional capitals, which “have failed to do what it takes” to get Netanyahu to end the war during the past two years, “will most probably continue to be unable to stop him if he decides to restart the war under an allegation of possible threats against Israel.”
European diplomats agree that when Israel started the war right after Toufan Al-Aqsa, their capitals were simply under the spell of the Israeli circulated images and videos of kids who were kidnapped and very poorly treated in the midst of a seaside party or of older women who were dragged out of their living rooms into captivity. This, they say, lasted for several months, despite attempts to end the war for the sake of regional stability.
Israel, they argued, received some “important” even if not particularly deliberate support for its argument that Hamas and other militant groups are a threat to regional stability and that they should be defeated.
In Washington, some of these sources said, it was not just the Israelis who were lobbying support for the war. Still, there were also some Arabs who were arguing the need for the region to get over the political Islam dynamic.
It was around the second half of 2024, they said, that the world started to see that what was happening went far beyond being an attempt to eradicate resistance movements in Gaza.
By that time, they said, Israel started to lose its ability to argue a case of self-defence that the European capitals, especially under the pressure of the public opinion across many parts of the continent, started to see that what Israel was doing in Gaza was not about self-defence against alleged terror threats.
This said, they agreed, except for some individual national decisions, such as those adopted by Madrid against Israel, that there was not much consensus in Europe on what needed to be done. They added that the joint Saudi-French initiative to acknowledge the right of Palestinian statehood and to restart the diplomatic talk at the UN about the two-state solution seemed to be the only available exit out of a tough diplomatic crisis that European governments were faced with as marches took over European cities with protestors carrying images of the atrocities that Israel has been committing against civilians in Gaza, including the elder, children and women.
However, in the assessments of these diplomats regarding Trump in the White House, there was little that anyone in Europe could do. Trump might get frustrated with Netanyahu at times, and he might show this frustration at times, but at the end of the day, the US commitment to protect Israel is unequivocal, they agreed.
According to one of these diplomats, the US has gone a long way to pressure South Africa not to start a legal motion with the ICJ against Israel in December 2023 about the application of the convention for the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide in Gaza. Actually, some of these diplomats stated that there was pressure coming from Europe as well on the matter.
It was the horrific images of killing and destruction inflicted by Israel on the civilians of Gaza that started a different attitude in Europe, they agreed.
This said, the international humanitarian worker who spoke to the Weekly noted that when it comes to offering to receive Palestinians who are in desperate need of medical help, the European capitals are very conservative. “We are talking about thousands who desperately need urgent help, while it is only tens who manage to find their way to Europe to get this medical treatment,” he said.
He explained that the limitations imposed on the exit of Palestinians for medical care in Europe are about Israeli restrictions to allow people to get out, just as it is about the apparent sensitivity of European capitals to receive large numbers of Palestinians.
Scenarios
“This is one reason why Europe is getting increasingly anxious about the Israeli criminal war on Gaza; European leaders are so afraid of any possible eventual influx of Palestinian refugees who would be taking off [somehow] to the south Mediterranean in an undocumented immigration journey to rich Europe,” said an Egyptian official who asked for his identity to be withheld.
He added that European capitals, especially southern ones, which had received large numbers of Syrian and other Arab refugees escaping brutal dictatorial regimes, are not willing to open up to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
The official confirmed that Israel has approached several countries, “and other countries who support emptying Gaza of its population or almost,” and that some of these countries have shown openness to accommodate Palestinians who wish to start a new life in return for some economic or political gains for the capitals in question. He also confirmed assessments shared by aid workers who have been in Gaza during the last months that “today, many are desperate enough just to want to get out."
However, according to the same official who spoke on Monday while Egypt was hosting the first phase of the negotiations on the implementation of a Trump-supported ceasefire, there is no plan for how to handle a possible influx of even half of the two million Gazans, much less a bigger number.
Meanwhile, he said that no Arab or Muslim majority country offered to receive a significant segment of the Gazan population – assuming that Israel would only allow Palestinians who do not wish to get out to remain in the southern part of the Strip, or as stipulated in the text of the Trump plan those who want to leave would be allowed to go and come back.
“The big question is how to leave and where to come back to,” he said. He added that there is also the question of what those who would go could come back to, if Israel, which is now in complete security control of Gaza, is unlikely to allow the reconstruction of the Strip, even partially, to make it inhabitable again.
The official underlined that the high-level statements made in Cairo against the displacement of Palestinians are not just political statements. “This is the position of state institutions who do not wish to see Israel diluting once and for all the Palestinian rights,” he said. He added that these institutions are equally opposed to all scenarios of forcing a displacement of Gazans into Egyptian territories.
The questions regarding the future of Gaza and Gazans, he said, start when the talks that Egypt has opened this week move from phase one, which is essentially about the hand-over of Israeli captives and the elementary entry of humanitarian aid into southern Gaza, to phase two that would discuss the subsequent matters related to “the aspired Israeli withdrawal from or at least relocation in” Gaza, the governance of Gaza and the plans for partial reconstruction “as a start.”
It is also a question, he stated, of whether these talks will actually manage to secure a real ceasefire that can hold. Since the beginning of the war, Israel has only observed two ceasefires: one for a week in November 2023 and the second for less than eight weeks, starting late January 2025 and ending in early March of the same year.
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