Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump met over dinner on Monday, exchanging toasts to celebrate the coordinated, 12-day expanded military strike against Iran. While this was happening, news came in from Gaza that at least five Israeli soldiers were killed and more than a dozen wounded, many seriously, in yet another daring attack by Hamas fighters.
Significantly, the Hamas attack took place at the closest point possible to Gaza’s northern border with Israel at the town of Beit Hanoun, an area the Israeli occupation army has repeatedly claimed total control over since the early stages of the war 21 months ago. Barely a week before, the Israeli army suffered a major deadly blow at the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza when a lone Palestinian fighter dropped a bomb inside an armoured vehicle, killing six soldiers and one officer.
Both the Beit Hanoun and Khan Younis attacks confirmed the fallacy in Netanyahu’s justifications for prolonging Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza. The only horrifying truth is that nearly 58,000 Palestinians were killed, more than half of them children and women, due to Netanyahu’s own political calculations, not to any military or security ends.
The use of ultimate military force, control and occupation of nearly 70 per cent of Gaza’s territory, forcing starved Palestinians to encounter daily humiliation and death while they try to obtain limited amounts of food through a so-called “humanitarian” security company funded by the US and Israel, has not achieved any of Netanyahu’s declared targets. Neither was Hamas terminated nor were any of the remaining Israeli hostages held by the militant group released.
As a matter of fact, many Israeli commentators noted that since Netanyahu insisted on breaching the ceasefire mediated by US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, on 19 January, claiming that war alone would force Hamas to return the 20 remaining living hostages, the end result was the death of double that number as 40 Israeli troops were killed since the Israeli army resumed its daily massacres of Palestinians in Gaza on 18 March.
The two attacks that inflicted heavy losses on the Israeli Army came at a time Israel’s media reported that the Israeli Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, whom Netanyahu appointed, had personally confronted the Netanyahu government’s bloodthirsty, terrorist ministers who insist that total occupation of Gaza and the forced displacement of its people are the only acceptable outcomes for declaring victory.
Israel’s top military official reportedly admitted that the war had reached its limits, and that further intense military operations inside Gaza would simply mean ending the lives of the remaining living 20 hostages. Israel’s army leaders also reportedly oppose the total occupation of Gaza, confronting the most difficult task of providing the needs of over 2.4 million starved Palestinians in gutted territory without basic services.
Despite those realities on the ground, Netanyahu insists on continuing to negotiate in bad faith over reaching a new ceasefire agreement in Gaza. Indeed, there are many signs the US President Trump, and Netanyahu might be interested in a temporary, 60-day ceasefire but no guarantees that this would lead to a permanent ceasefire, an end to the war and the full withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces from Gaza.
Following the experience of the collapse of the US-mediated ceasefire deal in mid-March, and the facts on the ground that Israeli occupation army has established in Gaza by dividing the Strip into small zones in which Palestinians are concentrated, there is little trust that Netanyahu is interested in anything more than the release of another group of Israeli prisoners while maintaining the liberty to continue to occupy Gaza and impose tight control over its population.
When asked, ahead of what was supposed to be a celebratory dinner, about their readiness to accept a two-state solution, both Trump, and Netanyahu refused to commit to that goal. The furthest the Israeli premier was ready to go was conceding that Palestinians had “the right to govern themselves,” but that has to be in the same local municipality form that has been in effect since the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993, while Israel maintains total security control over all of Palestine.
More worrying for Palestinians and Arab states that have historically maintained close ties with Washington is that, in return for Trump putting pressure on Netanyahu to stop the daily killing of Palestinians in Gaza, he would approve Israeli plans to annex parts of both Gaza and the West Bank to allegedly protect its security, exactly as he did in 2017 during his first term when he unilaterally recognised Israel’s illegal occupation and annexation of East Jerusalem.
The Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz, has already been promoting proposals to establish a so-called “humanitarian zone” south of Khan Younis close to the border of Egypt where Palestinians would be forced to move to receive food and other basic needs in an Israeli administered process. The current extremist government in Tel Aviv has also approved unprecedented expansion plans for settlements in the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, with the backing of the US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee who being an Evangelical Christian believes Israel’s annexation of “Judea and Samaria” is a religious duty.
These are not proposals to bring peace to the region, or encourage other Arab countries, topped with Saudi Arabia, to expand the so-called “normalisation process” with Israel. The assumption that the day Israel stops the war in Gaza, Arab nations will rush to establish ties with a country whose premier and former defence minister are charged with committing horrific war crimes against Palestinians by the International Criminal Court is simply wrong.
The “day after” in Gaza is likely to be “years after” simply to carry out basic removal of rubble and restore basic services. Thus, if the Israeli and US policy continues to be based on denying the core of the conflict, which is the Palestinian right to independence and a sovereign state, we are likely to see yet another round of fighting in which Israel will be unable to declare victory.
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