Cairo hosted a sequence of meetings with a Palestinian-Hamas delegation and a delegation from Israel on Tuesday and Wednesday, in what official sources qualified as a very last-ditch attempt to avert an upcoming Israeli military reoccupation of Gaza.
The Cairo meetings come in the wake of consultations that have been unfolding during the past few weeks involving Cairo, Doha, Washington, and other players to find a possible exit from the ongoing impasse in the talks that aim to launch a ceasefire in Gaza.
A source close to the Hamas delegation said that the talks were not coming with great expectations. Despite the pressure, the losses, and the “awareness of the size of the disaster that has befallen the people of Gaza,” Hamas is clear about a set of red lines that “it has no intention of crossing,” he said.
“It is very basic really — Hamas is determined not to hand over the remaining Israeli hostages unless there is a suspension of the Israeli strikes against Gaza, entry of adequate humanitarian aid, and a process of withdrawal,” the source said.
According to sources informed on the positions of the Israeli government, this is not something that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will work with. What Netanyahu wants is to obtain the hostages and the bodies of the dead ones, force Hamas to hand over its arms to a third party, for Hamas leaders to leave Gaza, and to enforce a security scheme for Gaza that will ultimately be decided and monitored by Israel.
According to an informed source, “Netanyahu is negotiating to get a deal. He is going in circles, and his plans are elsewhere. He has a plan for Gaza, a plan for the West Bank, and a plan for the entire surrounding of Israel. This is what he is working on.”
In the assessment of several sources, by 7 October 2025, on the second anniversary of Al-Aqsa Flood conducted by Hamas against targets in southern Israel, Netanyahu will want to declare his success in eradicating Hamas and expelling the Gazans out of the immediate surroundings of southern Israel.
The sources say it would be unrealistic to think that Netanyahu will not move on with his plan to occupy Gaza as soon as the necessary military mobilisation and planning is secured.
The same sources say that Israel is already sharing ideas about the day-after and not just for Gaza but also for the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria. At the core of the many narratives that have been shared with Al-Ahram Weekly, Netanyahu is working to get the Middle East he has repeatedly said he wants to get.
The elements of this Middle East are clear: no Palestinian state, full integration of Israel in the region, and an end of all scenarios for war.
“He has already gone very far in achieving his objectives,” said one Cairo-based European diplomat, who said that Netanyahu had already secured the near elimination of the regional hegemony of Iran, the significant weakness of Hizbullah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, and security and economic cooperation deals with many Arab countries.
Today, the same source argued, Netanyahu is going to move ahead with more military aggression on Gaza to allow for a reshuffling of the reality on the ground around Israel.
He said that as far as he knows from Israeli officials and diplomats, it is not just the Palestinians in Gaza who will be pushed into a limited strip of their land and be forced to live under miserable conditions or leave. Palestinians in the West Bank, too, he explained, are set to face more harassment in order to lump them into less than one third of the West Bank.
“Netanyahu wants Egypt and other Arab states to take responsibility for Gaza, or rather what he is not going to fully occupy in Gaza, which is essentially Rafah on the Palestinian side,” said a regional diplomatic source.
He added that “likewise” Netanyahu wants Jordan “to take over the responsibility” of the segment of the West Bank where he wants the Palestinians to be located.
After the 1948 War, Egypt and Jordan took administrative responsibility for both Gaza and the West Bank. This continued until the June 1967 War, when Israel completed its occupation of historic Palestine along with Sinai, parts of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.
The entire process of Arab-Israeli peace was based on the return of Arab territories occupied in 1967 in return for the normalisation of relations with Israel. However, this concept of “land-for-peace” has been sidelined by Israel, especially after the signing of the so-called Abraham Accords with some Arab states in the autumn of 2020.
Commentators in the Israeli press claim that many Arab countries are no longer committed to associate their current and future relations with Israel with the Palestinian cause. In the words of one recently published piece, Netanyahu is currently building “his own kingdom”.
Informed sources say that this means three things: no Palestinian state, now or in the future; the total elimination of the resistance movements and of the capacity of Iran to relaunch these movements anywhere in the region; and normalisation plans for both Syria and Lebanon.
More than two regional diplomatic sources who make frequent visits to Israel have been saying for the past few weeks that Israel, through direct talks in the case of Syria and indirect talks in the case of Lebanon, has been examining the chances for normalisation schemes with both of its immediate neighbours.
The same sources say that there is an appetite in Beirut and Damascus for this, though for different reasons.
They said that while the temporary political regime in Damascus under Interim President Ahmed Al-Sharaa wants to gain international recognition through “the gate of possible peace with Israel,” the Lebanese government wants to move forward “beyond the Hizbullah moment,” work on a demarcation deal with Syria and a peace deal with Israel, and secure mega regional and international investments.
With the elimination of the capacities of all resistance and radical movements in both countries being currently executed, several sources argue that the path towards Israeli normalisation with both Syria and Lebanon is being launched this year.
There are different assessments about when these deals could be concluded. However, there is no disagreement that the process is already beginning, perhaps at greater speed on the Syrian front.
Sources agree that it is hard to predict how things will unfold on the ground, however, given the anticipated carnage that will inevitably hit Gaza when Netanyahu orders Israel’s further military aggression against the Strip and the anticipated “failure and possibly fall” of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
Then, there is the question of the fate of the Netanyahu government itself, which seems to be at high risk of collapse if the Israeli prime minister fails to secure the cohesion of his radical coalition.
Far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir have long warned that they will take the coalition down if Netanyahu succumbs to the growing international warnings not to go all the way to reoccupy Gaza.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 14 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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