US Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff met Qatari Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Sheikh Muhammad Al Thani in Spain last week in order to work out a deal that could ultimately lead to a cessation of military operations in Gaza.
It could hopefully and at long last enable the release of the Israeli hostages in Gaza in return for freeing an agreed numbers of Palestinian detainees and prisoners of war in parallel with a significant increase in humanitarian assistance to the Gaza Strip.
Questions are being asked about whether such a deal is possible, however, and whether it is feasible given the internal dynamics of Israeli politics.
The meeting came on the heels of an Israeli plan announced on 8 August to re-occupy the Gaza Strip, one that was prepared and presented to the Israeli Cabinet by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Cabinet meeting lasted ten hours during which heated exchanges took place, according to the Israeli media.
Before the meeting, the US TV channel Fox News aired an interview with Netanyahu on 7 August, during which he was asked whether Israel would seek to control the entire Gaza Strip, as was the case 20 years ago.
“Well, we don’t want to keep it,” Netanyahu said. “We want to have a security perimeter. We don’t want to govern it. We want to hand it over to Arab forces that will govern it properly without threatening us and giving Gazans a good life. That’s not possible with Hamas.”
He expanded on this position by saying that “we are going to free Gaza from Hamas,” and Gaza “will be demilitarised and a peaceful civilian administration will be established, one that is not the Palestinian Authority, not Hamas, and not any other terrorist organisation.”
He said that such a path would help free the Israeli hostages in Gaza and ensure that the Gaza Strip does not pose a threat to Israel in the future.
Many experts, Israeli and foreign alike, doubt that this plan is feasible.
Senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Aaron David Miller, a former US diplomat with experience in the now-defunct peace process, criticised the plan in an interview with the US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) for its programme News Hour on 8 August.
Miller said that the goals of the plan are “as elusive as the [Israeli prime minister’s] earlier conception of total victory.” Moreover, and more significantly, Netanyahu “does not have a strategy and he hasn’t been willing… to lay out the elements of what you and I would describe as a sort of rational approach to try to end the war.”
He said that the plan “won’t work” and that “we are going to find ourselves on October 7… in an even more fraught and tragic position for the hostages, their families, and the residents of Gaza.”
The Israeli media reported that all the heads of the security institutions in Israel were opposed to the re-occupation plan for Gaza during the Cabinet meeting on 7 August. They were afraid that it would put the lives of the hostages at risk. It should be noted in passing that Hamas has earlier warned that any attempt to free them by force will lead to their deaths.
But who said that the fate of the Israeli hostages is the top priority of the ruling coalition in Israel? On 9 August, there was a large demonstration in Tel Aviv opposing the re-occupation of Gaza and demanding a deal to free all the hostages and end the war. However, I doubt if Netanyahu is interested in ending the war in Gaza anytime soon.
There are reasons that could explain such a policy of an open-ended war on Gaza. Probably the most relevant one could be related to the threat of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who represents the messianic Israeli settlers’ movement, on 9 August to the effect that there could be early elections in Israel due to disagreements with Netanyahu on how to manage the war on Gaza. This is precisely what the latter wants to avoid.
In another interview with News Hour on 8 August, the well-known New York Times commentator David Brooks summed up the situation by saying that “there is a third on the right of [Netanyahu] and the governing coalition.” This is the “settler parties who really want manifest destiny to take over Gaza. They think it is written in the Bible.” Netanyahu needs their support in order “to stay in power,” he said.
This is in fact the true state of play in this horrific and unethical Israeli war on Gaza that is becoming a war without end.
A fitting conclusion here could come in the shape of a quotation from the latest edition of the UK Economist magazine, which said that “Israel’s war no longer has a strategy, and fighting on is no longer just. If it is to remain a liberal democracy, it must hold itself to account for the crimes committed in Gaza.”
I take exception to the description of Israel as a “liberal democracy,” however.
The writer is former assistant foreign minister.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 14 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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