With the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza approaching the end of its second year next month, there seems to be almost no hope left for the Palestinians of Gaza to regain normalcy.
Judging by the accounts of the diplomatic and security sources who spoke to Al-Ahram Weekly this week, the worst is yet to come, even if there could be a brief moment of détente in the wake of reactivated US diplomacy, which many found unlikely.
“Gaza is bracing for the worst nightmare possible; it is coming, and it is no longer a matter of if – actually, it is not even a matter of when because the orders are already out,” said a UN source who asked to be anonymous.
He spoke on Tuesday morning, just as Israel announced an order for the residents of Gaza City to evacuate ahead of a planned military take-over of the city by Israel.
The announcement came less than 24 hours after US President Donald Trump spoke of high chances for an agreed end to the Israeli war on Gaza in the wake of a proposal that was put forward to Hamas and Israel.
The proposal, which most informed diplomats qualified as basically a rehash of diplomatic offers that have been put forward by Washington since the end of last year, had earlier failed to bring an end to the war.
It demands that Hamas hand over all the surviving Israeli hostages taken in the early hours of 7 October 2023 during the Al-Aqsa Flood resistance attack on southern Israel. It also demands that Hamas simultaneously hand over the bodies of all the hostages who have died during captivity.
In return, it promises negotiations between Hamas and Israel to last for 60 days or longer to allow for a settlement. Nothing in the proposal that the US is offering makes a clear commitment to end the Israeli war, the Israeli occupation of Gaza, or the Israeli plan to forcibly displace the Gazan population.
There is nothing that promises safety, or even a safe exit, for Hamas leaders. Equally, there is no clear commitment about the future of Gaza under an anticipated future government, whose nature and mandate are unknown.
The proposal, as it has been circulated, is not even committed or coherent about the quantity of humanitarian aid that would be allowed into Gaza to reach a largely starving population with hardly any access to adequate medical care.
“It is hard to say whether the US proposal [circulated on Monday] was written with good intentions or in utter ignorance of the struggle, its nature, and its parties,” said Ayman Zaineldine, an Egyptian diplomat with a long experience of regional affairs.
“I am not sure whether this offer was drafted with the intention of offering Hamas a deal knowing that it would [have to] decline it and thus justify the [Israeli war],” he said. “In any case, it seems that the end objective is to force the displacement of the Gazans and to liquidate the Palestinian cause – either by [forced Palestinian] consent or by [the Israeli war].”
This analysis is certainly compatible with the accounts shared by diplomatic and security sources who this week spoke to both a Hamas delegation in Cairo and Israeli officials in Tel Aviv.
The narrative shared by these sources indicates that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has no intention of ending the war and allowing Gaza to regain normalcy even if under non-Hamas rule.
Netanyahu, according to the same sources, is also not willing to work on a plan that would allow the Palestinian Authority (PA) to take over the management of Gaza even with some Arab and international help or actual presence on the ground.
Netanyahu, they say, has reached a point where he is “just unstoppable.” This, they add, is not just about Gaza but also about the West Bank, where his government is actively regaining control despite the full security cooperation of the PA.
On Monday, following a shootout near Jerusalem that killed and wounded a dozen Israelis, sources said that with or without this operation Netanyahu and his extremist government would have followed a plan to reverse all Palestinian gains.
They argued that the shootout might give more weight to the extremist members of the Netanyahu coalition to push for more radical moves on the ground in the West Bank that are designed to force the Palestinians out.
It also gives Netanyahu an argument, fake as it might be, to throw in the face of world capitals, like Madrid which has endorsed a set of punitive actions against the continued Israeli genocidal war on Gaza, or Paris that is leading the momentum in Europe to grant the Palestinians international acknowledgement of their right to statehood during the upcoming UN General Assembly meeting later this month in New York.
Netanyahu has been fighting an intense battle to prevent or dissuade as many countries as possible from joining the growing international movement to recognise Palestinian statehood. Sources say that the Israeli pressure has been tough despite the fact that Netanyahu knows that the planned recognition of Palestinian statehood is mostly symbolic, or at best a protest move against policies that many world capitals consider destabilising for the region’s frail stability.
According to Hesham Youssef, an Egyptian diplomat with long experience of the Arab-Israeli struggle, “the announcement by a number of countries that they intend to recognise a Palestinian state is only an attempt to cover for their political inability to take effective steps against Israel, and therefore they are resorting instead to recognition.”
“It is a coverup for the failure to act to stop the Israeli war crimes, starvation policy, and what the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has called ‘plausible genocide’ in Gaza,” he added.
Still, like other diplomats, Youssef is not willing to overlook the fact that consequential or not such a move has to be seen within the context of growing international pressure on the Israeli government.
Several diplomats qualified the current international reaction to the Israeli war, including governmental positions and public initiatives, as “unprecedented” and a “shift” that promises an end to the impunity that Israel has long enjoyed.
They referred to South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court, the decision of Spain to withhold all military exports to Israel, the hunger protest of Swiss medics over the Gaza genocide, and the threat of dockworkers in Genoa, one of Europe’s largest ports, to block all cargo to Israel if communication with a flotilla set for Gaza from their harbour is lost even for 20 minutes.
Israel, they note, is becoming more worried about its image and has pledged a multi-million dollar budget for an intense PR campaign.
In the final analysis, they conclude, while Israel is likely to get its way on the ground, in Gaza as in the West Bank, it will not do so without paying a price.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 11 September, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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