Nearly a month has passed since the ceasefire in Gaza, yet Israel’s bombs and blockades persist. The intensity may have decreased, but not the intent. Air raids have slowed, but the siege has not loosened. Gaza remains deliberately starved as humanitarian aid is reduced to the bare minimum needed to sustain desperation.
The promised “second phase” of the truce lingers in political limbo, while Israel’s operations expand outward — escalating raids in the occupied West Bank, launching airstrikes in Lebanon, conducting incursions into Syria, and issuing open threats against Iran and Yemen.
This is no patchwork of isolated offensives. It is a unified doctrine — a regional war by design. The “unified battlefield”, a term that once belonged to the lexicon of resistance movements, now defines Israel’s military doctrine. From Gaza and Beirut to Tehran and Sanaa, Israel views the region as a single, continuous front. The unified battlefield doctrine is built on the belief that overwhelming force can secure permanent submission. But that logic is inherently unstable.
The goal is not security but supremacy: to normalise a regional order where Israel’s military reach is unchecked and Arab political will is systematically broken. It is not a defensive stance but a long-term project, the remaking of the Middle East into a landscape cleansed of opposition to Israeli hegemony.
With full US backing, Israel is advancing multiple regional tracks to secure its core objective: neutralising all resistance to its dominance and coercing its rivals into negotiations on its own terms. This strategy blends American pressure with selective incentives, culminating in normalisation with Tel Aviv and integration into the Abraham Accords without any preconditions tied to Palestinian statehood or Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Southern Lebanon, or southern Syria, where Israel’s footprint continues to expand.
Across the conflict’s many fronts, current political and security arrangements aim to eliminate Israel’s opponents without resorting to open war. In Gaza, for instance, US officials told Axios on Monday that the proposed international force there would serve as an “enforcement” mission rather than a peacekeeping one. Washington has already circulated a draft resolution to several UN Security Council members calling for the creation of such a force.
According to the proposal, this international force would secure Gaza’s borders, protect civilians, and ensure humanitarian access. It would also train a Palestinian police force to operate alongside it. Those elements are relatively uncontroversial. The contentious parts, however, lie in the mandate to “stabilise” Gaza through disarmament — destroying military infrastructure, preventing its reconstruction, and neutralising Palestinian factions. The proposal puts the cart before the horse; it assumes a level of stability that simply does not exist. The idea of inserting an international “enforcement force” to secure borders, protect civilians, and disarm factions presupposes a functioning political order and a sustainable ceasefire — neither of which are in place. Gaza remains an active battlefield, fragmented and leaderless. You cannot impose stability before establishing the foundations for it.
The plan also prioritises control over reconstruction and self-determination. Rather than focusing on alleviating the humanitarian catastrophe or laying the groundwork for legitimate governance, it jumps straight to external management — effectively placing Gaza’s future under foreign administration. That reverses the natural order of peace building: genuine stability results from local agency and reconstruction, not from a foreign-imposed security apparatus.
Even more fundamentally, the plan treats disarmament as a starting point rather than an outcome. Disarmament only succeeds when anchored in a credible political framework and mutual security guarantees; demanding it upfront is equivalent to demanding surrender without offering peace. That’s not conflict resolution, it’s an attempt to enforce a desired end state without doing the diplomatic work to reach it.
The most glaring flaw, however, is that the plan sidesteps the core issue entirely: Palestinian sovereignty. By envisioning an interim international administration under US oversight, the plan delays and dilutes any genuine path towards self-determination. It manages symptoms while avoiding the disease, attempting to control the situation without addressing its root cause.
Moreover, the plan relies on an authority that doesn’t exist and on participation that’s far from guaranteed. What countries would volunteer troops to police Gaza and disarm factions without a political roadmap towards Palestinian statehood? Without broad Palestinian and regional consent, such a force would lack legitimacy from the outset, risking becoming another actor in the conflict rather than a neutral stabiliser.
In essence, the US proposal imagines a postwar order before the war has ended, authority before consent, and disarmament before diplomacy. It is not a coherent roadmap to peace; it is a projection of control disguised as a solution.
On the parallel Lebanese front, the American-Israeli outlook is no less fraught. Washington and Tel Aviv are pressing Lebanon to disarm Hizbullah — even at the risk of igniting another Lebanese Civil War — arguing that internal strife would be less catastrophic than a full-scale Israeli assault. On Tuesday, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the Israeli army is closely monitoring Hizbullah’s efforts to rebuild its forces, especially north of the Litani River, and to retrain its cadres and local leadership. Haaretz claimed that the Lebanese army is deliberately avoiding confrontation with Hizbullah and has done little to prevent its resurgence.
As in Gaza, the US-Israeli plan again expects others to do the heavy lifting. In this case, Lebanon’s army is being pushed to confront and disarm Hizbullah — without any American assurances that Israel will withdraw from occupied Lebanese territories in the south. Worse still, Beirut is being urged to engage in direct negotiations with Israel as a prelude to joining the ranks of Arab states that have normalised ties through the Abraham Accords.
These demands were echoed this week by US Middle East Envoy Tom Barrack. Speaking on the sidelines of the Manama dialogue in Bahrain on Saturday, Barrack urged the Lebanese to “speak with Israel — only Israel,” adding, “Israel is ready… take this path, it won’t hurt.”
He described Lebanon as a failed state, noted that Hizbullah’s budget exceeds that of the national army, and suggested that “there will be no problem between Lebanon and Israel if Hizbullah is disarmed.” Barrack went further, saying Syria was “leading the way” after beginning talks on a security arrangement with Israel under US mediation.
Since the 2024 ceasefire between Hizbullah and Israel, the Lebanese group has not breached the truce which Israel has violated hundreds of times. Still, Israel threatens to resume hostilities unless the Lebanese army disarms Hizbullah according to a US-backed timetable. Barrack has repeatedly warned that Lebanon has little time to comply or face an Israeli offensive — statements widely viewed as both an ultimatum and political cover for potential Israeli aggression.
On Monday, Barrack renewed his call for direct talks between Beirut and Tel Aviv — a move prohibited under Lebanese law — asking sarcastically: “Why doesn’t the Lebanese government pick up the phone? The American president calls Putin and calls the Chinese President. Can’t President Aoun pick up the phone and speak to Netanyahu and say, ‘enough, let’s put an end to this absurdity and bring this chaos to a close?’”
In reality, American-Israeli pressure now extends far beyond disarming Hizbullah or preserving a ceasefire. The true objective is to compel Lebanon to normalise relations with Israel — even while Israeli forces continue to occupy Lebanese land. Washington’s goal is not mere calm on the frontier but a fundamental shift: to move Lebanon into what regional diplomats call “the post-resistance era” — an order defined by disarmament and “coexistence” under the promise of economic aid and Gulf investment.
Meanwhile, Washington is pushing Baghdad to disarm its militias, above all the Popular Mobilisation Forces, but the Iraqi government has tied this move to the withdrawal of US-led coalition troops by September 2026.
The Houthis and Iran are also confronting the prospect of a significant military confrontation. Anti-Houthi factions in Yemen are mobilising to launch an offensive, aiming to capitalise on vulnerabilities the group has incurred from successive US and Israeli strikes in recent months. Iran, for its part, perceives an elevated risk of a major Israeli military operation — a threat that will persist barring a fundamental reorientation of Iranian foreign policy. This sentiment was publicly echoed by US President Donald Trump, who repeatedly voiced his aspiration for Iran to join the regional trend of normalising ties with Israel.
The message from Tel Aviv and Washington is unmistakable: any entity hostile to Israeli hegemony, whether in rhetoric or in action, is a legitimate target.
For Israeli leaders, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Yemen form a single, connected network — and the mission is to dismantle it entirely as an entity hostile to Israel. To achieve this goal, America and Israel are using two methods: bombing until subjugation (which is what Israel threatens to do in the case of Iran and the Houthis in Yemen) or dangling the carrot of potential gains in exchange for normalisation (which is what Tel Aviv and Washington are currently doing in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq).
“This push on all fronts at the same time is not about peace or stability; it’s about creating a post-resistance equation in the Middle East. The US and Israel are betting that reconstruction funds from wealthy regional powers can buy political submission and that investment zones can substitute for sovereignty,” an Arab diplomat based in London told Al-Ahram Weekly.
“What Washington and Tel Aviv envision is a Middle East cleansed of organised opposition to Israeli hegemony. Their goal is to dismantle every link in what has become known as the Axis of Resistance until each becomes isolated and manageable,” he added.
Thus, every neutralised front weakens the others. Every normalisation agreement strips the Palestinians of another layer of regional support, and every US-brokered deal under the Abraham Accords framework reinforces the new regional order: peace without withdrawal, recognition without justice and normalisation under fire.
Israel calls it “peace for peace” — but it’s really peace on Israeli terms: no concessions, no accountability, no Palestinian state. Just military dominance repackaged as regional cooperation.
Short link: